Too Lucrative to Resist

I'm nothing if not open-minded. The "free market" may have done unspeakable violence to virtually everything I hold dear, but if experts insist that market forces now have the ability to undo these catastrophes, I'm willing to listen. Whatever skepticism I may have about the viability of a Paracelsian economics, in which like magically cures like, I'm willing to put it aside in order to consider the pros and cons of relatively new concepts like mitigation banking.

So far, the gap between theory and practice in mitigation banking seems to be pretty much what you'd expect from an erratically regulated arrangement between government and developers. Elsewhere, I discussed how Wal-Mart had exploited mitigation banking in order to ruin two pieces of land for the price of one. Now, it looks like a mitigation banking scheme in Michigan is headed for a similarly bleak outcome.

The owners of a landfill in Wayne County have an option to buy 445 acres of stunning Lake St. Clair marsh. But there's a hitch: They're offering to purchase and protect the privately owned coastal marsh along Anchor Bay if the state compensates them by allowing them to fill 31 acres of wetlands at Woodland Meadows Landfill in Van Buren Township.

If approved, the traded acreage would add to the state-owned St. John's Marsh along the coast of northern Lake St. Clair. It's a rich habitat of prairie and wetlands that is a haven for wildlife, birdwatchers, hikers and hunters. It also acts as a massive sponge-like filter that cleanses pollutants from water flowing into the lake and controls flooding in nearby communities.

The deal might be too lucrative for the state to resist, even though it would void a conservation agreement made years ago by Waste Management Inc. to protect the Woodland Meadows wetlands. It would also skirt an informal policy that such trade-offs be made within the same watershed so that there is no net loss of wetlands to any one ecosystem.

"Too lucrative to resist," indeed. This is little better than extortion, and it reflects poorly on us that we've conducted our national affairs in such a way that a garbage company can hold any portion of our vanishing wetlands hostage. The basic standard for mitigation banking is that it should prevent a net loss of wetlands. A conscious decision by government not to meet that standard calls the entire concept into question, to say the very least.

The Woodland Meadows wetlands were placed into a conservation easement as part of the deal that allowed the landfill to open; apparently, that deal also allowed the easement to be terminated at Wayne County's whim. And oddly enough, the easement "was put in place despite the fact that the acreage was in the landfill's long-range plan for expansion."

So if I understand this correctly - and I really hope I don't - Waste Management puts 31 acres of wetlands into an easement, in return for permission to open a landfill; it gets a stipulation that the acreage can be used for waste disposal if "necessary," which happens to dovetail nicely with its stated plans for expansion. Having decided expansion is indeed necessary, it's now offering to trade Lake St. Clair marsh for Woodland Meadows.

Fair enough. One can only hope that the agreement protecting Lake St. Clair marsh turns out to be a bit more legally binding than the one protecting Woodland Meadows was.

Obligatory information on Republican malfeasance can be found here.

The West Wind

Effect Measure describes Europe's response to the westward march of bird flu, which reminds me of Charles Dickens' working title for Bleak House: "The West Wind."

The title refers to the wind that carried disease - according to the theories of Dickens' time - from a fictionalized East End slum called Tom-All-Alone's to the mansions of the West End.

Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere....There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his commiting, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.

In a report published, like Bleak House, in 1853, Dr. John Simon echoes this passage with talk of "the vapours of a retributive poison....spreading over miles of land." Simon described open sewers as

[C]hambers for an immense faecal evaporation; at every breeze which strikes against their open mouths, at every tide which encroaches on their inward space, their gases are breathed into the open air - wherever outlet exists, into houses, foot-paths, and carriage-way....

In other words, bacteria and poisons don't stay where you put them. Among other things, Bleak House is about the impossibility both of isolating oneself from society, and of confining moral and physical sickness to an area conveniently reserved for it by economic theory. The book's heroine catches smallpox from a homeless child; she describes a stage of her delirium in one of those striking images that seem to go off like flashbulbs throughout the book:

Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?

The "dreadful thing," of course, is humanity itself. In Dickens' era, as in ours, a great many people felt that they could buy their way off this necklace. What happens to the poor, the logic goes, is their own problem; the diseases they catch, and the accidents that befall them, are simply their punishment for failing to be sufficiently prosperous.

Bleak House is an extended assault upon this viewpoint. First, the population of London is consistently de-individualized; the city is presented as an object - or even as a body with "ganglions of roads" - and the boundaries between its citizens are blurred or eliminated:

[E]very noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.

Dickens' London is like a smoke-filled glass, with humanity puddled at the bottom. Throughout the book, he explores the various miseries of human proximity, from queasy distate (the minister Chadband exudes a hideous "train-oil" that his flabby hands smear over other characters) to smallpox.

The threat of contamination is everywhere. The death of Krook by spontaneous combustion is presaged by a pair of characters complaining about a certain greasiness in the air, and the stench of spoiled meat cooking, which they assume is coming from a nearby kitchen. But what they mistake for the stench of a lower-class meal is actually carbonized human flesh. When they go to visit Krook, they blunder into a "little thick nauseous pool" of his molten fat:

A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder....“This is a horrible house,” says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. “Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off.”

This passage is symptomatic of the fascination with contamination and decay that so often led Dickens to visit the morgue on his midnight walks. On one such visit, he saw "a large dark man whose disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic, and whose expression was that of a prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids under a heavy blow." Later, while swimming in the river, Dickens is panicked at the thought of sharing the water with this corpse:

I was seized with an unreasonable idea that the large dark body was floating straight at me. I was out of the river, and dressing instantly. In the shock I had taken some water into my mouth, and it turned me sick, for I fancied that the contamination of the creature was in it.

But despite his horror of contamination, Dickens needed crowds pressing in on him; isolation from crowds robbed him of his power to work. Perhaps it was this symbiosis that led him to see through a central lie of his era, which was that one could exist as something entirely separate from one's society...that one could escape basic human relationships and responsibilities through religion, or money, or aestheticism, or some appalling confluence of the three.

At any rate, we have a new disease drifting westward from the slums of the East. We have medical resources that Dickens' era lacked, of course; unfortunately, the persistence of laissez-faire's most nonsensical dictates has left us unable to use them to our best advantage. We exist at the mercy of an "invisible hand," of all absurd superstitions, and if it forbids us a functional public health system, that's just too bad for us.

As I argued elsewhere:

[S]ociety must put out my burning house not because I'm part of some "meritocracy"...but because a conflagration at my house may well burn down everyone else's.

But even this modest concession to self-interest apparently requires too much acknowledgement of vulnerability and culpability from the idiot children of laissez-faire. Where they have control, they pretend to be helpless slaves to market forces. Where they have no control, they imagine that they're omnipotent, and immune to all "retributive poisons."

Our globalized world is more thronged and claustrophobic than Dickens' London; the "telescopic philanthropy" he complained about - because it led Londoners to pay more attention to the woes of far-flung "savages" than to those of their own neighbors - is hardly an issue; third-world slums are no less threatening to us than the slums of the East End were to the mansions of the West End. And it's very possible that our failure to recognize the problems of global poverty and ignorance as our responsibility "shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high."

Pretty Innocent

A microbiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston has resigned, after acknowledging that he misrepresented the findings of his research into the prophylactic properties of an anti-anthrax lotion.

Dr. John Heggers faced scrutiny for claiming that the Bio-Germ Protection lotion – made of grapefruit seeds and the oil of an Australian tree – would protect the public from an anthrax attack. He also said it would probably work against other bioterrorism threats, such as smallpox or the plague.

The owner of Bio-Germ is named Allan Lord. His father, Doug Lord, is a close friend of Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), who is a high-ranking member of the House Science Committee.

U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall and McKinney Police Chief Doug Kowalski, who holds homeland security seminars around the country and led the Dallas police SWAT team for a decade, support the product on its promotional videos.

"This certainly appears to be a breakthrough and the answer to the anthrax problem," says Hall, R-Rockwall, who's been friends with Lord's father, Doug Lord, for decades.

Kowalski, in uniform and holding the Bio-Germ kit, says it is "the type of product that will be very beneficial to first responders." He had worked with Doug Lord for years on police charity rodeos.

Hall, needless to say, displays the GOP politician's usual inability to grasp the concept of personal responsibility:

"I'm pretty innocent in this thing," said Mr. Hall, the No. 2 Republican on the House Science Committee. "I was trying to help a friend and the American people."

Dr. Heggers' misconduct doesn't seem to be a matter of debate. He used a very weak strain of anthrax for his tests, and tested the lotion's effectiveness only in petri dishes. He published his "findings" in an online journal run by two of his former medical residents, and he listed two other scientists as co-authors, despite the fact that they hadn't read the paper.

All the same, Bio-Germ's developer, Robert Heiman, feels that Heggers hasn't been treated with quite the proper respect by UTMB (which is, incidentally, one of the largest recipients of federal biodefense dollars):

"I think that a man who has a lifetime of proven experience with a résumé that's basically almost an inch thick, that has contributed in every way in the field that he's in ... they should have really treated him royally," he said.

None of the articles on Bio-Germ identify Robert Heiman, but I strongly suspect that he also runs a company called Epicuren; it makes an anti-aging cream that works according to these indisputable scientific principles:

All cells have memory specific to their type and function. Cells copy each other, which is why the memory of each cell must be changed to a healthier state. IF this change does not take place, cell memory continues to digress [sic].

There's no doubt that a seal of approval from a "Developmental Scientist" like Heiman would be a valuable commodity indeed; this is, after all, the man who invented the silver ion cloth. But whether or not Bio-Germ's Robert Heiman is also the CEO of Epicuren, it would be interesting to know just what credentials he has.

As of this writing, the Bio-Germ Kit is still available online; the site informs prospective buyers that

Bio-Germ Protection Products may be eligible for FY 2005 Homeland Security Grant Programs (HSGP) as Authorized Equipment under AEL item number 9.2.8, "Supplies, Disinfectant."

Sound and Fury

An article on Bill Frist's cynical support for the Intelligent Design "theory" makes an important point:

The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation. Nearly all scientists dismiss it as a scientific theory, and critics say it's nothing more than religion masquerading as science.

It's always nice when such articles emphasize that scientists dismiss ID as science; too many articles imply that the opposition to ID is based primarily on an atheistic worldview, rather than on the fact that ID is essentially devoid of content. The main problem with ID is that if it were a demonstrable fact, it would affect neither the goals of science, nor its methodology.

Nor, I suspect, would it affect ethics. If all evidence for evolution can be ignored, based on emotional prejudice, so can all evidence for a creator. And even if people believe in a creator, they remain intellectually free not to worship that creator. And even if they do worship the creator, they remain intellectually free to choose their own form of worship, whether it be liberation theology, polygamy, or racial separatism.

The existence of deity has been accepted as a given for centuries by a majority of human beings; I have boundless admiration for certain acts and monuments of faith, but I see no reason to believe that religion's enormous capacity to inspire and justify evil actions would vanish, were ID accepted as fact. The basic argument behind ID was accepted during the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the conquest of the New World. By the scientific standards of those times, all nature revealed God's handiwork. Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher is a learned and beautifully written explication of intelligent design, the arguments of which were virtually unassailable in his day, but Mather nonetheless presided over the horrific injustice of the Salem Witch Trials.

ID can't answer the fundamental question, "How then shall we live?" It can't put an end to sectarian squabbling, douse the fires of fundamentalist extremism, or contradict religious and racial bigotry.

ID solves no scientific problems, and no moral problems. A world in which ID were "true" would be a world very much like our own.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Ceratosoma trilobatum. Now you know!

The Freshwater Shells of Quebec

Quebec's Lac St-Pierre comprises the largest heron habitat in North America, and is a vital migratory bird sanctuary. It's also full of unexploded shells, thanks to the fifty years it spent as a test site for artillery. Some shells are on the shore, where they can be gathered up by the curious. Others lie on the lake floor. And a few, remarkably, are ambulatory:

Over the years, shells have been carried by springtime ice to as far as Île d'Orléans, past Quebec City, some 150 kilometres downriver from where they were fired.

Artillery test ranges are always problematic, and their siting tends to be short-sighted at best. But testing munitions over a body of fresh water ringed by towns is an act of truly elemental stupidity. I have no doubt that the people who dreamed up and implemented this scheme were, in some strange sense, the best and brightest of their generation, but to quote Marilynne Robinson, "their presence in roles that are ideally filled by competent people does not make them competent."

Now, a number of thoughtful people are pondering how to remove the shells from the lake. Apparently, it's easier said than done.

Captain Matt Braid, project director for the Defence Department's unexploded-ordnance program, said the pilot project would proceed next year, but he warned that removing artillery from water is complex, and coming by the technology isn't easy.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate this sober warning about the difficulties of dealing with submerged artillery...made by a representative of the very agency that saw fit to create this absurd problem in the first place, and was blithely shelling the lake until five years ago. One wishes that a person of Captain Braid's uncanny sapience had emerged at some point between the late 1950s and 2000, though one suspects that he would've been dismissed as a simpleton and a worrywart.

Paul Szabo, a liberal from Mississauga, is as puzzled by all this as I am:

Mr. Hunter, there are 300,000 projectiles remaining in the lake today, of which 8,000 are potentially dangerous. This is absolutely astounding, it really is, when I think of all of the rules and regulations we have at all levels of government, that this situation could have been allowed to be created in the first place....I know that when the minister was here, one of the points that came out was that there was not enough money in the entire defence budget to clean up all the sites that were contaminated. Do we in fact still live in an environment with a federal government that can permit this stuff to happen in the first place? Are those things closed now? Can this ever happen again? Can you promise, can you attest to this committee, that this will never, ever happen again?

Mr. Gordon Hunter: Actually, I'm going to be 55 next month, so it's pretty hard for me to make promises for the people who will be following me. I was four years old when people starting shooting into Lac Saint-Pierre in 1952. We can't really offer any explanation for the first 40 or 50 years of this....

You have to wonder how many things we're doing today that our experts will be at a loss to explain in fifty years' time.

Avoiding Confusion

Early this year, the U.S. Geological Survey found that environmental levels of mercury in the Great Salt Lake were among the highest ever recorded by federal scientists. Previously, the fanciful-yet-conventional wisdom had been that the GSL was a "natural disposal system" for contamination of this sort. In reality, it appears that the unique conditions in the GSL actually speed the conversion of inorganic mercury to more readily absorbed and bioaccumulated organic mercury.

An environmental group called the Great Salt Lakekeeper wants to perform an independent analysis of mercury levels in fish from streams that feed the Great Salt Lake. The analysis would be performed by a federally certified lab in North Carolina. However, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, in conjunction with the Division of Water Quality, has refused to give the group a permit to catch fish for the survey, largely on the grounds that conflicting results might "confuse" the public.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps the results of independent testing would be unwelcome in some quarters? Hard to say. Local point sources for mercury are many and varied, but a fair amount of people are blaming gold-mining operations in Nevada.

Mercury is floating out of smokestacks into the atmosphere from a cluster of gold mines near Elko that account for as much as 11 percent of the nation's total mercury emissions. Utah's mountain high country, its urban heart and the irreplaceable ecology of the Great Salt Lake are directly downwind.

I'll note, in passing, that Congressman Jim Gibbons (R-NV) - an anti-environmental zealot who was a co-author of the ludicrous Mercury in Perspective report - seems to have a amicable relationship with gold-mining concerns...including the Newmont Mining Corp, which owns about 3,000 square miles of Nevada land along the Interstate 80 corridor, and is one of the country's worst emitters of mercury.

Recently, the Idaho Conservation League performed independent tests that suggested that air coming from the direction of Nevada's mines had significantly elevated levels of mercury.

Glenn Miller, a University of Nevada mining expert, praised the environmental group's work, despite its limitations. He was briefed on it and called the data the first of its kind. "It was important data," he said, "and the question ought to be asked why hasn't anybody else been doing that."

Maybe no one else did it because, like Utah's Division of Water Quality, they had neither the inclination nor the equipment. A fairly staggering article from The Salt Lake Tribune, dated July 6, 2005, says:

The state Department of Environmental Quality hopes soon to buy mercury analysis equipment for the state lab....After that, the Water Quality division can begin the rule-making process for mercury testing, which will involve public hearings and a formal request to the state Water Quality Board. The testing program could be in place by next spring. The main reason the state hasn't already set up protocols is because officials haven't seen evidence it was necessary.

Fair enough. If memory serves, Utah and Wyoming are the only Western states without protocols in place for issuing public advisories on mercury in fish. Given the nature of the threat - which includes unpredictable patterns of contamination from global sources, in addition to contamination from neighboring states - their worldview is a wee bit too insouciant for my taste.

All things considered, it's hard to see why allowing independent testing would be more productive of public confusion - or panic, or suspicion, or anger - than forbidding it.

An Abject Apology

Some readers may recall my exceedingly peevish post about Dr. Elisabeth Lloyd's theory on the female orgasm.

I recently got a polite but firm reply from Dr. Lloyd, who took issue with my characterization of her as a pseudoscientific charlatan...a characterization that irked her all the more given that she's in basic agreement with the concerns I raised in my post, and had apparently taken great pains to address them in The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, a book that she correctly surmised I hadn't bothered to read.

Quite honestly, I'm utterly without excuse. One of my regular themes here is the misrepresentation of science in the popular press. That being the case, it's rather ludicrous that I relied on a popularized article about Dr. Lloyd in order to attack her.

Another thing I often discuss here is ethics. Thus, I look even more foolish for launching an attack that was clearly unethical, given my lazy unwillingness to acquaint myself with the facts of the matter.

I can take a stab at an explanation, so long as no one sees it as an attempt - on any level - to weasel out of taking full responsibility for what I write here. In the first place, there's a constant temptation on political blogs to foment cheap outrage, especially when it's simply a matter of expanding on something someone else said. Posts like those are very easy to write...too easy, I'm afraid. Despite being aware of this mechanism, and often trying consciously to avoid it, I failed to consider whether I was falling prey to it before writing my post on Dr. Lloyd.

Most readers are aware that there are certain people who interpret evolutionary theory in a way that tends to validate sexual or racial oppression. This is an area of science - and ours is a political climate - in which it's extremely easy to assume the worst, and that's precisely what I did here. The media representation of Dr. Lloyd's views fit a stereotype I already had of evolutionary psychology at its most irresponsible.

However, as Dr. Lloyd points out, I was under no compulsion to accept that representation. If anything, I was obliged to take greater care with my response, given my first-hand knowledge of my own prejudices. Dr. Lloyd says:

[I]t's very alarming that anything I said could be misused. In fact, I'm quite shocked that it has been misused and misinterpreted. But all that misuse relies on MISREPRESENTATION. My real views are not in any way damaging to women, which you would know, if you looked at the book. You actively contributed to the problem, by not finding out more about my work before you wrote about
it. It would have been easy to do.

[snip]

Still, I do see now why so many women and feminists have been alarmed-- through the media treatment of the book. The media have emphasized the one conclusion: that female orgasm is an evolutionary byproduct -- while downplaying my other findings. In particular, my findings that the evolutionists, through their sexism, have distorted and ignored real women's sexuality, and through assuming that orgasm is an adaptation, have forced women's sexuality into a reproductive functional model that doesn't reflect women's range of sexual experience and pleasure. Just as with Freud, an evolutionary adaptive or "usefulness" approach to female orgasm has never been an ally of women's sexual expression.

Just to make it clear how off-base I was, I'd like to reproduce a couple of my original points, with Dr. Lloyd's rebuttals. My remarks are in italics.

In any case, there's a huge difference between describing how the parts of our body should function, and ordaining how we should function, socially and sexually.

You make an excellent point, and it's actually a point I make quite firmly in my book. Since you make the point, though, why didn't you follow your own advice? That is, if I'm saying that women's orgasm has no evolutionary function, this has no consequence whatsoever on how we should value it socially and sexually. We take the general point for granted: reading and writing and operating a computer are hugely important in our culture, yet none of these traits are adaptations, they're all evolutionary byproducts. But we don't think they're any less culturally important on that account. In other words, we don't assign cultural importance according to whether a trait is an evolutionary adaptation, and we shouldn't. Period. That goes for female orgasm as much as it goes for reading.

Since recorded history began, the dominant scientific, sociological, religious, and legal approaches to sexuality in general - and female sexuality in particular - have been vicious, ignorant, and oppressive....

You're right. And I make a point of further documenting this in the book, showing that many of the evolutionists I examine have been exactly as you say. I support your feminist point, and provide further, scholarly documentation for your feminist conclusion.

If anyone needs further evidence that my original post grotesquely misrepresented Dr. Lloyd's position - to say nothing of her integrity and intellect - I can provide more of her remarkably patient and even-tempered rebuttals. But I think the point is made, for now. I've already apologized to Dr. Lloyd privately, but I also want to apologize publicly. The journalistic sloppiness I displayed on this occasion can be put down to a combination of prejudice, suspicion, overwork, groupthink, and general ill temper...these are things to which all of us fall prey now and again. What's far more disturbing to me is the moral dimension of my critique; a couple of the things I said about Dr. Lloyd were inexcusably mean-spirited and stupid, and I regret them a great deal. In fact, I would certainly have deleted the post if Dr. Lloyd hadn't specifically asked me to leave it as it was.

In any case, this has been a valuable lesson to me, and I'm grateful to Dr. Lloyd for setting me straight far more gently than I deserved!

The Power-Hungry World

A pro-nuclear article in the Washington Times raises some interesting questions, as dishonest gibberish so often does.

Nuclear power is on the rise here and abroad after decades of dormancy, driven by the need for a cleaner environment and steady, secure sources of power in the Internet age.

The "rise" of nuclear power in the USA is largely rhetorical, and is fueled by the willingness of right-wing media to treat the matter as a fait accompli. Write enough articles about how everyone has embraced nuclear power, the logic goes, and eventually everyone will embrace nuclear power. It may work, or it may not. I suspect it won't.

If we want to talk about how nuclear power is faring in foreign lands, Germany's situation is worth a mention. Under that country's "nuclear exit strategy," all nuclear plants were supposed to be scrapped by 2020. Sounds great, in theory, but there is the small matter of waste to consider. Germany has enacted a ban on nuclear-waste exports to other nations, which leaves it with thousands of tons of hot radioactive waste, and no good place to put it.

Germany's not alone in this dilemma; things are tough all over. (Rather than bore you with the details here, I'll bore you with them over here.)

Now, let's get back to our friends at the Washington Times:

With worries about terrorism now paramount in the minds of the public and political leaders, concerns about safety that haunted nuclear utilities for decades appear to have receded, replaced by increasing confidence that after a half-century of operating without causing a major public health hazard in the United States, nuclear plants have by and large proven to be safe.

This is quite a paragraph. It begins with a non sequitur; whether terrorism is "paramount" in the minds of Americans or not - and polls suggest that it isn't - the notion that fear of terrorism has caused fear of nuclear power to "recede" makes no sense whatsoever. For one thing, these fears aren't mutually exclusive; the fact that nuclear plants and waste dumps are ideal targets for terrorism may not yet have percolated into the hive-mind of the Washington Times, but more individuated forms of consciousness have surely managed to grasp it.

Of course, what naysayers like myself fail to reckon with is the amazing progress we've made in ensuring plant safety:

A new generation of power plants on the drawing board, some with automatic methods of shutting down in emergencies, promises to be safer than before.

Wow...automatic shutdown systems! Whatever will they think of next?

As it happens, nuclear power plants are already equipped with automatic shutdown systems (whether they work reliably is another question). I don't know how many people will be comforted to learn that some unspecified percentage of the "new generation" of atomic plants will be equipped with this standard-issue safety feature.

So far we've learned that nuclear power is fashionable, and that it's possibly a bit safer than it used to be, and that it has been validated in some obscure way by 9/11. With those crackpot notions duly espoused, the only thing left to do is explain that nuclear energy is nonpolluting:

In the West, nuclear power is gaining an image as a clean energy source. Nuclear plants emit none of the pollutants or greenhouse gases that are byproducts of the most common sources of power: coal, oil and natural gas.

One might just as logically say that natural gas plants emit none of the radioactive isotopes that are byproducts of nuclear fission. In any case, uranium enrichment produces plenty of greenhouse gases, and the nuclear industry uses huge amounts of fossil fuel. France has estimated that its nuclear industry produces about 25 million tons of CO2 emissions per year, without factoring in emissions from uranium ore mining and preparation. We can argue about whether that's an improvement over other types of energy production, so long as we can agree that there's a stark quantitative difference between 25 million tons of emissions, and zero tons of emissions.

In closing, I'd like to turn things over the dewy-eyed, Birckenstock-wearing treehuggers at the Economist, who have managed to explain the financial problems with nuclear power pretty clearly:

Taking into account the uncertainties, most studies done on nuclear economics (including the most authoritative ones, done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs) conclude that new plants built by the private sector, with investors bearing the full brunt of risks, are not economic without subsidy.

Though nuclear vendors are promising that their new designs will cost only $1,500 per kW of installed capacity, that assumes ideal conditions and no delays. A more realistic assessment (indeed, the consensus view among experts not aligned with the nuclear industry) is that new plants will probably cost close to $2,000 per kW. That may be less in real terms than the capital cost of previous generations of nuclear plants, but it is still about double the capital cost of a conventional coal plant today.

And this, of course, is without factoring in waste disposal, a problem for which there is no safe and cost-effective solution, and which renders null and void any proposed environmental benefit of nuclear power.

Risk Management

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Unreleased footage from Iraq's prisons depicts the US-sanctioned rape of children in front of their parents.

With that rather astonishing fact in mind, let's have a brief look at this NYT article:

Officials See Risk in the Release of Images of Iraq Prisoner Abuse

Pentagon officials argued that releasing the images would incite public opinion in the Muslim world and put the lives of American soldiers at risk.

Let's be clear about this. If our government has ordered, condoned, or attempted to cover up a policy of raping children in front of their parents, all of our lives deserve to be at risk. These are acts of incalculable evil, and we're all culpable for them. If I've been raping and murdering children and burying their carcasses in my backyard, and the police become interested in me, I can't seek an injunction against a backhoe operator on the grounds that his activities will inconvenience me, or upset my neighbors. I gave up all consideration for myself and my neighbors when I committed those crimes.

Notwithstanding, General Richard Myers warns us that

It is "probable that al-Qaeda and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill...."

It seems obvious to me that an administration whose actions so reliably aid al-Qaeda is incompetent at fighting al-Qaeda, but that's a mere detail.

A sane country holds its leaders accountable for crimes of this magnitude, because it realizes that the social and moral disequilibrium caused by failing to do so threatens every member of that society. Our morbid national obsession with morality - a showy, commercialized form of morality that lacks any consistency or validity, let alone compassion - is a perverted, superstitious recognition of this disequilibrium, and is about as sophisticated as knocking on wood to ward off evil. Apparently, if we can prevent infants from being raised by lesbians, we've done our part; we can shrug off the sexual torture of Iraqi children (and the very real possibility that these videotapes were created, at least in part, to serve as pornography for members of our government).

The argument that revealing the truth about these crimes would put the lives of American soldiers at risk is absurd. First, our soldiers' lives are already at risk, by virtue of being under the dominion of a corrupt administration. Second, there's a certain irony in the fact that BushCo is trying to protect itself by means of the basic argument against violating the Geneva Conventions, which is that committing war crimes puts one's own soldiers and civilians at risk. Needless to say, this is an argument that Bush and his creatures have been sneering at for years. Having rejected it summarily when it would've put a crimp in their plans, they have no right to invoke it in their own defense now.

My feeling is that if we're unwilling to identify and punish the officials behind these acts, we forfeit any right to complain about retribution, no matter what it is or whence it comes. Nature abhors a moral vacuum.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Not sure which nudibranch this is, but it's attractive!

I've claimed several times that I was "pretty much done" with my extremely time-consuming "real" job, and intimated that I was ready to get back to a more regular posting schedule. But I was kidding myself, unfortunately. As usual, the less work remained, the more time it took!

Now, however, I really am finished. The project's completely out of my hands, and will make no more demands on my time. So starting tomorrow, I'll be getting back to daily posting, or something very near to it. (Unless, of course, I'm too hungover after celebrating the end of this nightmare, and the bonus I received for dragging my poor carcass to the finish line.)

I must say, I'm really amazed at how many people have stuck with me over the last few months. Thanks!

Friday Hope Blogging

A short installment this week, but a sweet one. POGO has a great story about a successful example of "anonymous activism," in which current and former employees of the International Boundary Water Commission (IBWC) brought down the crooked Bush appointee who was running it into the ground:

They mounted a sophisticated campaign to expose how the new head of the commission, Arturo Duran, abused his public office -- everything from hiring his crony friends to buying a Cadillac Escalade with "shale nuance leather seating surfaces" on the taxpayer dime. They did it all ANONYMOUSLY.

Now the El Paso Times reports that President Bush has asked Duran to resign.

The exceedingly good folks at POGO, by the way, published a book a while back called The Art of Anonymous Activism. Looks like an ideal gift for any friends you might have in high places!

A comment on the POGO story alerted me to Anonymous Blogging, a nicely designed new site whose mission is

To produce and translate comprehensive instructions on processes and tools for blogging anonymously and to distribute them to the five countries that are the most dangerous and difficult for bloggers.

Have a look, and help out if you can.

In other news, climate change deniers look a wee bit more stupid than usual today, as we learn that one of their major pieces of "evidence" against global warming turns out to be an artefact of sensor placement. This discovery has temporarily reduced at least one group of anti-environmental lunatics - a class of people who are very seldom at a loss for words - to sullen silence.

Mark Herlong of the George C. Marshall Institute declined to comment. The group, financed by the petroleum industry, has used the data disparities to dispute the views of global warming activists.

Fun With Chemical Weapons

America's chemical weapons continue to be a greater threat to US citizens than they ever were to our "enemies." The federal government claims it has no money to clean up Camp Sibert, a highly contaminated site in Alabama which was formerly the nation's largest repository of chemical weapons.

A check in 2002 unearthed an old artillery shell containing the chemical phosgene, a choking agent, in a field near a family's home in Etowah County. The house is located at what was once an artillery range where troops trained in the use of chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, mustard gas leaks from a storage building:

Leaking mustard agent has been found in a second Blue Grass Army Depot storage building near Richmond, the Army announced yesterday. The building, known as an igloo, is being filtered to prevent the chemical agent from escaping into the air.

Disposal of these useless weapons - which have primarily been used on US citizens acting as human guinea-pigs - continues to be...well, problematic. The incinerator at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele, Utah is unreliable, to say the least. The Pentagon wants to tear it down when (or if) it finishes destroying its allotment of chemical weapons. But Utah Republicans can't bear the thought of losing this symbol of wastefulness, misplaced bellicosity, and environmental ruin. They want to turn it into a disposal site for conventional weapons.

"This large investment should not be abandoned," the Utahns wrote. "It would be a more responsible use of taxpayer funds, as well as more environmentally friendly, to consider converting the chemical destruction plant to a conventional munitions disposal operation rather than completely dismantling and tearing down this facility."

It's interesting to compare Republican solicitude for this godforsaken locale to their disregard for, say, Otero Mesa or ANWR. Saying that it's "environmentally friendly" to keep the Tooele incinerator running for the next couple of decades is like saying that it's hygienic to bathe in raw sewage.

In other news, two of our primary nerve-gas incinerators are apparently bedeviled by poltergeists:

The Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon had its fourth fire in as many months Friday night, temporarily suspending operations to destroy M55 rockets filled with GB sarin nerve agent. Previous fires were April 7 and 23 and May 18 at the depot, which is 35 miles south of the Tri-Cities. The fires each started in the M55 GB sarin rockets' motor section as a shearing machine was chopping up the rockets.

Similar fires have been breaking out at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. Fortunately, this is of no concern whatsoever:

The Army concluded in a preliminary assessment that safety at the incineration operations won't be reduced even if such fires continue.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Dendrodoris denisoni. It's a nice change from the woefully drab nudibranchs I usually post, isn't it?

Rather than gnawing at coral, D. denisoni dissolves it with digestive juices and then siphons it up. Nice work if you can get it!

A Blind Spot

This week, our president - one of the most diabolically insincere people on earth - evinced a "sincere" desire to see Intelligent Design taught in schools.

The reaction from the Left blogosphere was swift and predictable. The difference between faith and science was explained yet again, as was the difference between belief and proof. And I'm sure that every person who wrote one of these earnest pieces felt like a dauntless crusader for the truth, rather than like a monkey dancing feebly to the GOP's barrel-organ.

For the Right, the Left's reaction to such pronouncements is one of the primary reasons for making them. And the Left's stolid insistence on taking this disingenuous gobbledygook at face value drives me to despair. We don't believe anything Bush says, except when it comes to his "faith."

But this is not about faith; it's about fascism. The Bush Administration is fascistic by any reasonable definition of the term, and fascism thrives on the irrational the way Hummers thrive on cheap gasoline. There's no arguing with fascism, because it has consciously and proudly put itself beyond the reach of logic and proof and morality and compassion.

BushCo's irrationalism is not some sort of humble subservience before the glory of the Almighty; it's a psychologically liberating rejection of anything (including God) that might dare to put a limit on personal, temporal power...including, of course, the humanist ideal of an educated, scientifically literate public.

It's also calculating and cynical. Theodor Adorno often had occasion to note "the entirely calculated, highly rationalistic nature of [fascism's] irrationalism." Unfortunately, when this calculation dresses itself up in its Sunday best, much of today's Left loses the ability to recognize it as anything other than Faith Rampant and Militant. It's as though we're too busy arguing with Oz over whether wizards exist to look behind his curtain.

A while back, I discussed Hans Hörbiger's Cosmic Ice Doctrine, a crackpot theory that became orthodox in Nazi Germany. It didn't become orthodox simply because the Nazis refused to listen to respectable scientists, but because respectable scientists opposed it. Outraged scientists were, for Hitlerians, the best conceivable argument in favor of Hörbiger; anything that could dismay the "enemy" to such an extent was precisely as true as it needed to be.

I concluded that post with this thought:

It's not so much that people are ignorant, or are sinking back into a Medieval worldview, as that they're engaged in active, conscious rebellion against reason itself. I think this is a very important distinction to make, and that people who ignore it are adding to the Left's problems.

How far this rebellion will go is anybody's guess; the idea that the current Left represents a serious obstacle to it is, I think, a mistake. To the extent that we come armed with statistics and facts and pro-science polemics, we're more or less toothless.

I stand by that belief. And in closing, I'll add that the Right has been the primary force behind research into bioweapons. The PNAC recently became downright giddy at the thought of engineering viruses so that they'd target specific racial groups. These are people who are perfectly comfortable with hard science, when it suits their purposes.

But fussing over Intelligent Design achieves several important goals. First, it taps into the paranoia and anomie of the underclass, and turns it against educators and other "elites." Second, it works towards establishing epistemological nihilism as the law of the land. Third, it makes Bush a halo'd defender of the One True Faith. And last, it makes liberals pig-biting mad, which the Right can triumphantly point to as evidence of our hostility to all that "real Americans" hold dear.

Not a bad little racket, all in all.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

"Let Aquila rejoice with Bornella stellifer, who is no fish but a stupendous creeping thing."

Friday Hope Blogging

In honor of Julie Powell, I've dug up a few heartening agricultural stories this week. First, there's word of a new system that uses polarized light pulses to measure the nitrogen levels of crops, which may allow farmers to reduce their use of fertilizers.

The researchers hope their tractor-mountable N-Checker (for "nitrogen-checker") apparatus will help farmers determine in real time how much fertilizer to apply. By preventing waste, the system could decrease the cost of crop production and dramatically cut the nitrogen-laden runoff responsible for algal blooms and other damage to wetlands and waterways....The N-Checker can take 1000 measurements per second--at least every 10th of an inch--while moving at roughly 5 miles an hour. At that speed, a farmer could survey and fertilize tens of acres in a day, or hundreds of acres per day with a multi-sensor system.

Technological advances are all well and good, but there's a lot to be said for simply exercising common sense. In Africa, crop-destroying elephants are often maimed or killed by farmers. Here's an appealing low-tech solution to the problem:

Supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other groups, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust (EPDT) has not only promoted the use of chili peppers as a means of keeping elephants, buffalo, and other species away from important sources of human food, but has also introduced a viable cash crop to the economy of African nations.

"Chili peppers are unpalatable to crop-raiding mammals, so they give farmers an economically feasible means of minimizing damage to their investments," said Loki Osborn, project director for the EPDT. "They can be grown as buffer crops to prevent crop-raiding and then be harvested and sold on the world market through the trust."

Much as I enjoy hearing about innovative ideas like these, I'm usually far more thrilled when people stop doing unbelievably stupid things:

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that it was banning the use of the antibiotic Baytril in poultry because of concerns that it could lead to antibiotic-resistant infections in people.

The agency's commissioner, Lester M. Crawford, ordered that approval for use of the drug, known generically as enrofloxacin, be withdrawn effective Sept. 12. Baytril, manufactured by Bayer of Leverkusen, Germany, is in the same family as the popular drug Cipro, which is used in humans.

My view of fluoroquinolones is implacably negative, so I'm particularly happy to see this drug getting pulled.

All in all, it's been a terrible week for Bayer, which means that the human prospect has brightened by about one-tenth of a candela. This firm - which was formerly a member of the chemical cartel I.G. Farben, whom you may remember from the sixth Nuremberg Trial - was also forced to withdraw its application to plant genetically engineered canola:

The German biotech giant Bayer has withdrawn its applications to grow genetically modified (GM) oilseed rape in the European Union, Friends of the Earth revealed today. The move comes as public calls for GM-free zones spreads across Europe and follows a series of research findings which have uncovered environmental damage resulting from the GM crop being grown.

Amazing what public outcry can achieve in some parts of the world, eh?

A Worsening Temper

Writing for the New York Times must be one of the most stressful jobs on earth, given how many of its feature writers seem to be on the verge of psychological disintegration.

Consider the case of Julie Powell. She's worried that the Union Square farmers' market in New York - a perfectly lovely, innocuous, and inexpensive place that I used to visit every week - is "judging" her. Actually, she's not just worried about it; she's angry about it:

My worsening temper can be calibrated precisely not to the longer days but rather to another unrelenting symbol of the season: the blossoming farmers' market I walk through in Manhattan's Union Square. I confess that half an hour browsing in that utopia of produce - or the new Whole Foods Market at the square's south end - often leaves me longing for the antiseptic but nonjudgmental aisles of low-end supermarkets like Key Food or Western Beef.

What this aberrant, idiosyncratic reflex has to do with the rest of us is anybody's guess. Most of us, I suspect, understand the desire of farmers to sell fresh produce direct to consumers and the desire of consumers to buy fresh produce direct from farmers. But where normal people see a commonplace free-market tradition going back centuries, Powell sees a conspiracy to make good people (e.g., her own sweet self) feel bad through the promotion of organic farming.

Since she has no rational justification for treating this weird stance as relevant to anyone but herself, she's obliged to conjure one up out of thin air. Thus, we learn that her "worsening temper" isn't caused by (for example) petty, carping priggishness, but by her exquisitely refined moral sense:

[T]here remains buried in this philosophy two things that just get my hackles up. The first and most dangerous aspect is the temptation of economic elitism. Of course, food has always been about class. In his classic meditation "The Physiology of Taste," first published in 1825, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested a series of three "gastronomical tests," menus designed to expose the culinary sensitivity - or lack thereof - of one's dining companions...

So we're expected to fret over the clear and present danger of "economic elitism," even though "food has always been about class." I also note that Powell is rapturously conversant with Brillat-Savarin, which is at least suggestive of economic elitism (as are most "lifestyle" features in the Times).

But no sooner does Powell announce that the temptation of economic elitism is the "most dangerous aspect" of organic groceries than she changes her mind:

This sort of garden-variety condescension is eternal, and relatively harmless.

What makes the snobbery of the organic movement more insidious is that it equates privilege not only with good taste, but also with good ethics. Eat wild Brazil nuts and save the rainforest. Buy more expensive organic fruit for your children and fight the national epidemic of childhood obesity. Support a local farmer and give economic power to responsible stewards of sustainable agriculture. There's nothing wrong with any of these choices, but they do require time and money.

Shopping requires time and money, friends; please make a note of it.

The impossibility of following Powell's argument here makes me wonder if she missed her calling as a three-card monte dealer. Economic elitism is dangerous, but also eternal and relatively harmless. Ethical buying is insidious, but there's nothing wrong with it.

Of course, whether or not eating wild Brazil nuts actually helps the rainforest isn't worthy of discussion, any more than assessments of external costs or government subsidies are allowable when talking about relative prices. The only thing that matters is how your buying decisions make Powell - and the "low-end" shoppers she claims to represent - feel.

Now, there are many, many forms of conspicuous consumption that don't come in for this sort of dyspeptic pseudo-ethical scrutiny in the pages of the Times. What apparently bothers Powell - what always bothers commentators like Powell - is the mere concept of ethical buying. Loading up on status-conferring geegaws out of sheer cupidity is normal and laudable; I suspect that an article on the "insidious dangers" of paying $25,000 for a Rolex would never make it past the editors.

Gratifying one's palate with fois gras or veal or caviar is also normal. What Thorsten Veblen called "the ceremonial differentiation of the dietary" is perfectly acceptable, so long as it stems from hedonistic self-regard rather than from even the most tentative form of social concern. One may shop at Zabar's - or dine at Aureole - without sparing a thought for the clientele of Key Food. It's only when one pays premium prices for, say, fair-trade chocolate that one's motivations must be dissected and one's hidden selfishness or venality smoked out.

When you wed money to decency, you come perilously close to equating penury with immorality. The milk at Whole Foods is hormone-free; the milk at Western Beef is presumably full of the stuff - and substantially less expensive. The chicken at Whole Foods is organic and cage-free; the chicken at Western Beef is not. Is the woman who buys her children's food at the place where they take her food stamps therefore a bad mother?

A very touching question. Or it would be, if it weren't for that fact that mainstream American political culture - from the President on down - already equates penury with immorality. Like other propositions of Social Darwinism, it's prominently represented in the GOP's domestic platform, where it serves as an argument against social welfare programs and bankruptcy protections.

Obviously, the mother who buys food at Western Beef or Key Food isn't "bad." But the system that sells her meat that's pumped full of hormones - or worse yet, antibiotics - is very bad indeed. Unfortunately, the fact that it's economically convenient, and therefore morally acceptable, to feed the poor on contaminated low-quality meat is not the issue for Powell. She's too busy worrying whether shoppers at "low-end" grocery stores are getting sneered at by effete upperclass snobs. From there, the oddball anthropomorphic notion that the Union Square farmers' market is "judgmental" is just one blind leap of illogic away.

Managing Reality

My regular readers - that ever-rising tide of perspicacious humanity - will recall that I'm always complaining about a certain scientific view of reality as that which can be calculated. A regrettable correlate of this view is the assumption that what hasn't been calculated is unreal. Even more regrettable is the resulting equivalence between what can't be calculated in any sense (e.g., God), and what is merely difficult - or inconvenient - to calculate.

This is the besetting sin of economics in particular, but economics in its quasi-theological mode has shown a worrying ability to infect and cripple other disciplines. If refusing to worry about missing or nonconforming data is convenient for Milton Friedman, it's a moral duty for the rest of us.

Over at Defense Tech, Jeffrey Lewis has a must-read post on nuclear targeting protocols that makes these points brilliantly, along with many others. Starting from the tendency of organizations to "abstract reality in order to manage it," he goes on to discuss the reification of abstract, false, or imaginary data into reality; the logically indefensible exclusion of realities that can't be converted to data; and the episodes of all-too-literal insanity that result.

Only an organization would target 69 nuclear weapons on a single facility (later revealed to be the Sofrino missile defense radar) outside of Moscow in a strike designed to minimize "collateral damage". To take another example, STRATCOM calculates only blast damage from nuclear weapons. STRATCOM does not calculate the damage from any fires that would be ingnited, even though such fires would be far more damaging than any blast effects. Why? Because fire damage is hard to calculate and, therefore, not real.

Read the whole post, by all means. Everything Dr. Lewis writes is required reading, but this is one of the best blog posts I've seen in a while.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Hypselodoris iacula on parade.

Panopticon Follies

Of the many ideas championed by WorldChanging, pretty much the only one that sticks in my craw is the participatory panopticon. This week's example is particularly disturbing: it's a Malaysian site that allows citizens to post picturephone photos of traffic violators:

The Malaysian Star notes that the site is operated by the national Traffic Ministry.

This is a nice example of two aspects of the participatory panopticon: (a) it's global; and (b) it makes it far simpler to record (and, possibly, prosecute) petty crimes and deceptions.

Nice? I'm not convinced. The advent of a surveillance state is not more appealing simply because ordinary citizens are its agents. Quite the opposite.

The intriguing side of the particpatory panopticon is its ability to reveal and reduce instances of police brutality and similar abuses of power. The program cited by WorldChanging, however, is more along the lines of a neighborhood watch program, and as such is merely an intensification of an existing form of top-down social control.

Personally, I'm always happy to see bad drivers identified and punished, and chances are, the Malaysian program will accomplish nothing more sinister than that. That said, I don't see how Malaysia's network of citizen-informants is really "world changing," in practical or philosophical terms. While it may not be absolutely necessary to denounce it, I see no compelling reason to applaud it.

As for the question of reducing police brutality - at demonstrations, for instance - I've noted elsewhere that there's some debate over whether panoptic surveillance actually reduces crime on the part of citizens or terrorists. Accordingly, I think it'd be logical to question whether it can realistically reduce governmental crime. One also has to consider the technological and financial advantages that government agencies enjoy. Jamming camcorders is one possible law-enforcement response to the participitory panopticon; jamming digital cameras is another.

Ultimately, the only thing I'm quite certain the participatory panopticon will bring us is increased sexual harassment of women, in public and private.

Friday Hope Blogging

I was fairly heartened by the CDC's new report on the burden of toxic chemicals found in the bodies of randomly sampled American citizens. Here's the crucial point:

Children's lead levels, associated with brain and development problems, have decreased significantly. In the early 1990s 4.4% of kids under age 5 had elevated lead levels. Today's report, which covers 1999 to 2002, found only 1.6% did.

The decrease is largely due to regulatory and clean-up efforts, of course. For decades, one of the primary sources of lead exposure was the organometallic compound tetraethyl lead, which was used as an anti-knock additive. How TEL got into gasoline is a story in itself; despite the medical consensus on the hazards of lead in general and organic lead in particular, the industry successfully painted the issue as one of "progress." Lead was the guardian of America's health, and TEL was "an apparent gift from God." The epidemic of hallucinations and delerium among TEL workers was handled with typical aplomb by Standard Oil's chief chemist, who said "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard."

In the ensuing years, we put about 7 million metric tons of lead into our gasoline. By 1982, leaded gasoline accounted for almost 90 percent of lead in the atmosphere. However, as we phased TEL out, blood lead levels dropped dramatically within a remarkably short period of time. If the current decrease doesn't seem like much, bear in mind that between 1976 and 1991, the incidence of elevated blood lead levels dropped from 77.8 percent to 4.4 percent.

A similar regulatory and clean-up effort for mercury could have equally dramatic results, which is why efforts like this are well worth supporting:

A group of 32 mostly Democratic senators acted last week to force a floor vote on a resolution that would overturn an EPA rule establishing a cap-and-trade program to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced the resolution last month under a 1995 law that allows Congress to overturn final agency rules with a majority vote.

A Sustainable Empire

I was brooding the other day about how easily technology becomes normative. Self-interested or irrational decisions within a technological system, once implemented, become impersonal demands of that system. They become self-justifying givens that actually limit human possibilities. We cede authority to them, and allow them to make moral decisions for us. Technology regulates ethics, instead of vice versa, by means of our alleged moral obligation not to obstruct "progress."

What got me thinking about all this was the above illustration (taken from Susan Buck-Morss' The Dialectic of Seeing) of Abel Pifre's solar-powered printing press, which he built in 1880 and used to print 500 copies per hour of a periodical called Journal Soleil.

Though it's not widely known today, the 1800s were actually a boom time for solar energy, not merely in terms of inventions, but in terms of actual use. The main reason for the era's frantic research into solar power was the fear that coal would be depleted - like timber before it - leaving Europe with no source of cheap energy. One of the pioneers of solar power was Augustin-Bernard Mouchot, who argued that "peak coal" was imminent: "Eventually industry will no longer find in Europe the resources to satisfy its prodigious expansion....Coal will undoubtedly be used up."

Mouchot's various solar-powered inventions won government support, and solar-powered desalinators and stoves were accordingly built in the colonial outposts of Algeria. This indicates that alternative forms of energy - while not so productive of superstitious awe as those concealed batteries with which the explorer Henry Stanley used to shock African chieftans whose hands he shook - shouldn't necessarily be despised by the imperialist imagination. The term "revolutionary," in the technological context, far too often means a new way of making the same mistakes, or committing the same crimes.

In any case, it was the ever-more-powerful natural gas, oil, and electric companies that sank the nascent solar industry, largely through the use of subsidies that allowed them to sell power - and electric devices like water heaters - at or below cost.

Now, WorldChanging notes that ChevronTexaco has issued a reasonably honest assessment of peak oil, and is asking - in all humility, natch - for public input into possible solutions.

Needless to say, any energy shortage we face is largely the result of industry's ruthless promotion of the cornucopian myth that oil was bountiful, and could be squandered at will. This went along with an equally ruthless devaluing of solar power and other energy sources, and a concerted effort to coax consumers in California and Florida off solar power and onto natural gas or electricity (a goal that was pretty well achieved by the 1940s). After that point, natural gas became something that "normal" people used to heat their homes and swimming pools and what have you. Solar power suddenly seemed disreputable and shabby; it was something of interest only to hollow-eyed health-food faddists who fed exclusively on blackstrap molasses...people who had, through ignorance or stubbornness, chosen to creep along a thorny dead-end path instead of parading down the golden thoroughfare of Progress with everyone else.

Today, of course, there are plenty of Americans who see the ongoing death and destruction in Iraq as an acceptable trade-off for the petroleum-based "necessities" of life. There are several reasons for this, but a primary one is that companies like ChevronTexaco devoted themselves to the pretence that their shortsighted, greed-addled whims were somehow synonymous with social and economic progress.

All this being the case, talking with an oil company about peak-oil solutions is a bit like going over the blueprints for your new home with the arsonist who burned your old one down. One wouldn't welcome the solicitude of such a person, and one shouldn't welcome it from ChevronTexaco, either. The goal of such firms is the continuity of profitable operations; there's nothing they're less interested in than the democratization of energy or energy policy.

In an earlier, satirical post on our Dark Green Future, I discussed the "greening" of internment camps and torture chambers. The French government's use of solar power in Algeria - as well as the use of solar power by colonial explorers and the military in the 1800s - is a good example of how seemingly laudable advances in technology can leave unconscionable political and economic structures intact, or strengthen them. No matter how environmentally beneficial they may be, alternative sources of energy must lead to a greater decentralization of power to be really revolutionary. Otherwise, we're liable to end up with nothing more than a sustainable empire, in which ChevronTexaco plays much the same role that it does today.

"Common Sense Has Found An Advocate"

As its name suggests, the Independent Women's Forum is a congerie of crypto-misogynist dimwits who are incapable of independent thought and honest debate. Ever alert for a chance to indulge in obscure and laborious forms of sanctimony, they've decided that we have, as a society, failed to model our family lives sufficiently on those of penguins.

[T]he mating practices of the emperor penguins of Antarctica, the harshest land on earth, can put today’s American courtship and child-raising customs to shame. Penguins are completely monogamous (no commitment-phobes!), and they get together for the most important reason on earth: raising the next generation. Once mated, Ma and Pa Penguin take turns cradling their egg, and then their little one, on their feet so it won’t freeze on the ice beneath, while either Ma or Pa heads off 70 miles to the nearest ocean to fill up with fish, much of which will be regurgitated to the little one. Icy winds, blizzards, exhaustion, near-starvation: sorry, but kids come first in the penguin family, which is always a two-parent family, because penguins know that every child needs both a mother and a father.

I bow to no one in my admiration for penguins. Still, I'm not sure I want to pattern my life on theirs, no matter how fulfilling it might be to vomit half-digested herring into my child's gaping maw.

However, if Fallen Humanity did decide to emulate penguins, I note that we'd apparently have to do away with work-related gender distinctions. The division of labor seems admirably balanced among penguins, which makes them rather postfeminist, I'd say. They're not as radically anti-male and anti-family as seahorses or spiders, but they're not quite ready for Phyllis Schlafly's stamp of approval, either.

"Penguins know that every child needs a father and a mother." Of course, this is something a lot of otherwise appealing animals don't know. I suppose we may now cluck our tongues disapprovingly at elephants. And certain monkeys should probably be imprisoned or executed.

Another small problem with this argument is that penguins don't mate for life:

In only one aspect does penguin family life seem less than ideal in human terms: once the kids are sufficiently grown, their parents separate, to find brand-new mates the next mating season. "Grow Old Along With Me" is not their song. But isn’t that about equivalent to the human parents who don’t get along but bravely stick with the marriage until their offspring turn adult?

Since a four-year-old with ADD could identify the logical flaws in that paragraph, I won't insult your intelligence by pointing them out. I'll merely say that if protecting these magnificent birds is ever invoked as a reason not to drill for oil in the Antarctic, I suspect that the cynical jackals at the IWF will suddenly be far less taken with their moral virtues.

By the way, did the IWF piece remind anyone else of John Cleese's lecture on molluscs?

[T]he great scallop...this tatty, scrofulous old rapist, is second in depravity only to the common clam. This latter is a right whore, a harlot, a trollop, a cynical bed-hopping firm-breasted Rabelaisian bit of sea food that makes Fanny Hill look like a dead Pope. And finally, among the lamellibranch bivalves, that most depraved of the whole sub-species - the whelk. The whelk is nothing but a homosexual of the worst kind. This gay boy of the gastropods, this queer crustacean, this mincing mollusc, this screaming, prancing, limp-wristed queen of the deep makes me sick!

Link via Alicublog.

UPDATE: Matt from Tattered Coat has the punchline.

A Major Boon to Agriculture

Be it known:

A long-standing debate over ethanol's economic efficiency and energy attributes is evaporating under the pressure of fast-rising oil and gasoline prices.

In other words, irrationality, shortsightedness, and willful ignorance are setting the market value of a commodity. The system works!

This article helpfully goes on to explain (for those who came in late) that the demand for ethanol is increasing, but that there's some debate over its energy efficiency.

Proponents claim that ethanol - made mostly from corn - is a cost-effective, cleaner-burning fuel that lessens the need to import petroleum.

Opponents say ethanol takes more energy to produce than it yields, lessens automotive fuel mileage and wouldn't be economically efficient without a federal tax credit of 51 cents per gallon.

That's a fair assessment of both positions. What's missing is the fact that only one of these positions - the latter one - is correct. The idea that there is a fact of the matter, and that it's accessible to human percipience, remains an alien conception among American journalists.

Of course, it's also important to remember that gasoline wouldn't be economically efficient without tax credits and subsidies either. Even before externalities are factored in, the price of gasoline is artificially low.

The latest attack on ethanol's efficiency comes from professors David Pimentel of Cornell and Tad Patzek of UC-Berkeley.

"The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an economical fuel,” Pimentel said. “Further, its production and use contribute to air, water and soil pollution and global warming.”

Sounds like a bargain, especially when you learn that Pimentel and Patzek didn't take certain costs into account:

Although additional costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers and the costs associated with environmental pollution or degradation, those figures were not included in the analysis.

As important as these factors are, the amount of water used to produce ethanol crops is arguably just as important, especially in states like Nebraska.

But what the heck...let's just ignore all of these issues, and soothe our sprained intellects with the balm of commodity fetishism:

Even though Colorado's average retail gasoline price last week reached a record high of $2.30, energy analysts say ethanol's cheaper price is helping to keep a lid on gasoline costs.

You're not having any problem following this, are you? The price of one commodity for which there's no accurate assessment of cost is holding down the price of another commodity for which there's no accurate assessment of cost. The music swells, and the blind lead the blind into a radiant sunset.

One ethanol proponent, at least, is refreshingly candid:

"We see it as a major boon to agriculture with benefits to consumers as well," said Jim Geist, a spokesman for the proposed Great Western Ethanol plant.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Hypselodoris picta, also known as Hypselodoris webbi. Nudibranch photos don't get too much better than this!

I have to add that this is the first time I've used Blogger Images, and I'm very pleased with it. I have few enough opportunities to praise Blogger, so I wanted to make the most of this one.

Friday Hope Blogging

I'm very glad to have the time this week to get back to this long-neglected tradition. And being as this is a comeback of sorts, I thought I'd devote it to stories of far more important and heartening comebacks.

My exquisitely sapient friend Hedwig brings the roses to my cheeks with news of an increase in the number of an odd and captivating bird:

According to a recent report, New Zealand's Takahe, Porphyrio hochstetteri, the world's largest flightless rail, has experienced a dramatic increase in numbers. The annual census, carried out by New Zealand's Department of Conservation, covers a core part of the 50,000 hectare Takahe Special Area within Fiordland National Park. The 2005 census showed that Takahe experienced a 13.6% increase in the number of adult birds, with the number of breeding pairs up 7.9%.

If we're going to be bringing animals back from the brink of extinction, we may as well reclaim some of their habitat while we're at it. Apropos of which, Time has a fine article on the increasingly popular movement to destroy dams; it includes a photo of the spectacular demolition of Virginia's Embrey Dam, which further incarmined my already hypersanguinated malar dermis (to coin a phrase).

That many good things can happen when dams are removed is well documented. In 1999, for example, when a deconstruction crew took a wrecking ball to the Edwards Dam on Maine's Kennebec River, the results stunned even those who had lobbied for the dam's removal. Important fish species that used to swim from the ocean to spawn upstream--Atlantic salmon, alewives, sturgeon and shad--didn't just come back, marvels Pete Didisheim, advocacy director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, "they surged back." The next year, almost a million alewives were massing in the river. Fish are also rebounding in Virginia's Rappahannock River after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted a gaping hole in the Embrey Dam last year.

The article reports that 175 dams have been dismantled in the last six years. It's a start!

Last, researchers have made the astonishing discovery that it may well be possible to recover some portion of memory lost to Alzheimer's Disease:

New research shows a mutant protein named tau is poisoning brain cells, and that blocking its production may allow some of those sick neurons to recover. It worked in demented mice who, to the scientists' surprise, fairly rapidly regained memory.

Things Continue To Affect Other Things

This morning, I came across an article claiming that scientists were "blaming" birds for polluting the Arctic with DDT and mercury. I was tempted to write an aggrieved little post on it, but I decided I couldn't be bothered.

Then I came across the Guardian's version of the story, entitled "Arctic pollution blamed on seabirds," which started out like this:

Seabirds - conspicuous polluters of newly polished cars in seaside towns - are also the culprits behind the pollution of the Arctic, according to Canadian scientists.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious point, which is that the birds in question are not culprits, but victims. I'm sure each of the journalists who chose to take this tone would agree, if pressed on the matter. What I do find somewhat sinister is that this tone seems to recur whenever there's a scientific story that's "funny" (e.g., it deals with excretion or sex...nudge nudge!), no matter how grim the implications of that story may be. You may recall how the rather alarming news that prescription antidepressants excreted in human urine were making their way into marine organisms was the inspiration for reams of limp journalistic raillery about "depressed fish."

There's no diabolical conspiracy involved, obviously. There's simply the fact that on a certain level, all hacks think alike. "If the fish are absorbing antidepressants...then any fish that was depressed would perk right up! Depressed fish! That's it! That's my angle! Boy, it's scary where my mind goes sometimes."

Anyway, having had our requisite giggle over the homely imperatives of the animal body, let's see if we can find a more substantive issue here. Professor Jules Blais, who conducted the study in question, has a wee bit of a confession to make:

"These contaminants have been washed into the ocean, where we generally assumed they were no longer affecting terrestrial ecosystems," Professor Blais said. "Our study shows that seabirds, which feed in the ocean but then come back to land, are returning not only with food for their young, but contaminants as well. The contaminants ... are released on land."

It's comforting that Professor Blais acknowledges the tendency of rivers to flow to the sea. But on what conceivable grounds could one "generally assume" that contaminants in the ocean would have no effect on terrestrial ecosystems? This is a fact so obvious that even politicians have occasionally recognized it. Blais' comment - assuming it's accurately represented - betrays a fairly profound alienation from everyday reality, of the sort I've had occasion to bemoan elsewhere.

What Are Bats Worth?

I've written before on attempts to place a dollar value on ecosystem services, a trend I feel is necessary in theory, but increasingly troubling in practice.

In Texas, researchers are currently attempting to calculate the value to farmers of the Mexican free-tailed bat, based on the number of destructive insect pests the bats eat.

Up until now...estimates assigning a dollar value to Mexican free-tailed bats have been roundabout guesses, based on rudimentary counts of the bats' population, research into their diet and analysis of the quantity of pests in fields. The current study would be the first to quantify it....A local agronomist said that in Frio County alone the bats save farmers $2.5 million in pesticide.

What continues to bother me about market-based ecosystem valuation - apart from the fact that it assumes markets are rational, instead of seeing them as a ritualized, socially sanctioned form of hysteria - is that it commodifies things like free-tailed bats. If these bats do indeed save farmers $2.5 million, it's very likely that farmers will support bat conservation. However, it's also likely that they'll see bats as their property, in some obscure but vehement sense, and will view future developments from that standpoint. In other words, in a conflict between what benefits bats as self-directed entities, and what benefits farmers as "consumers" of bat-provided services, decisions are likely to be based on the onerous economics of pesticide application.

Can super-bats be genetically engineered, or made to eat different sorts of pests? Might we see Mexican free-tailed bat populations fall victim to downsizing and right-sizing, as more effective predators are bred or introduced? The problem with valuing ecosystem services is that it runs the risk of reifying a haphazard economic arrangement into a law of nature. Further, it has a normative tendency that can lead to pseudo-objective distinctions being made between "useful" and "non-useful" bats...those who pull their weight, and those who don't. The notion of life as an end in itself remains disturbingly alien to homo economicus.

"A Threshold of Indeterminacy"

In the wake of Thursday's bombings, Defense Tech discusses the failure - or perhaps irrelevance - of London's surveillance system.

Londoners are seen on the city's vast amalgam of surveillance cameras an average of 300 times a day. Which means that the terrorists behind yesterday's bombings almost certainly knew they'd be caught on tape -- and went ahead with their attacks anyway.

The article goes on to discuss whether the "surveillance-as-deterrent" concept - which it traces back as far as Bentham's panopticon - actually translates into lower crime rates, even as regards more ordinary forms of crime.

Whether this type of surveillance works or not is somewhat immaterial; it has a self-perpetuating logic all its own. And of course, it may work much better, someday, if we keep shortchanging schools and hospitals in order to throw money at it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about Walter Benjamin's assertion that the "state of emergency" decreed by government is not the exception, but the rule. Giorgio Agamben sees the state of exception as a "threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism," and views it as characteristic of modern government.

It's the claim that a state of exception exists that leads us to accept the loss of privacy, and the suspicion of guilt, that panoptic mass surveillance represents. It also leads us to accept that there are certain people who represent "life unworthy of life," who can be killed at will, and who can paradoxically be made entirely subject to the law without having any recourse to it (cf. Guantanamo).

Which means that law is no longer law, but whim. However, the beauty of the state of exception is that it tends to be a reversion to a form of rule in which the sovereign is synonymous both with the state, and with nature or God. Thus, an act of violence that seems to be a cruel whim is actually in harmony with a spiritual order that, in Benjamin's phrase, "engenders those to whom punishment is due."

Francois Jullien's discussion of ancient theories of Chinese despotism in The Propensity of Things describes how the ruler must act as a force of nature, guided not by morality but by necessity:

Results follow automatically, for they are simply effects. Such a mechanism is inexhaustible, because it functions "naturally"...the nature of this power is that it issues orders ad infinitum without wearing out.

Jullien is speaking of the Legalist School, which flourished about five hundred years before Christ. Their central notion was that "humanity is not adequate for a government." In order to rule, one must be pitiless and inspire fear; to attempt to rule according ordinary human virtues was to Legalists self-contradictory foolishness. As Wang-Tsit Chan says in A Source Book In Chinese Philosophy, the Legalists

[A]ccepted no authority expect that of the ruler and looked for no precedent....aggression, war, and regimentation would be used without hesitation so long as they contributed to the power of the ruler.

Having recognized a person - or group of people - as "life unworthy of life," a Legalist ruler would know that to kill would be to act in harmony with nature.

The problem is, of course, that anyone can designate a class of people as unworthy of life, as today's terrorists do when they proclaim that their victims are protected neither by law nor by God. They've made the same determination that Agamben reports was made by the German penologist Karl Binding and the German doctor Alfred Hoche in their Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived (1920), which is that there is no reason, "be it juridicial, social, or religious, not to authorize the killing of...men, who are nothing but the frightening reverse image of authentic humanity."

It's odd how often people who object to the "frightening reverse image of authentic humanity" exemplify it. In any case, the rulers held up as exemplary by the Legalist School are just such images. Like terrorists, they're able to kill with a steady hand and a dry eye, confident that they embody the laws that govern the unfolding of history. The Legalists were opposed to the Confucian school, whose talk of morality and virtue in rulers they found nonsensical. For its part, Confucianism generally held the view that a tyrannical emperor was himself "life unworthy of life," who could be killed at will for having betrayed the "Mandate of Heaven." Sic semper tyrannis, as the saying is. What could possibly go wrong?

All of this tends to reinforce the commonplace notion that between terrorists and politicians, there's not as much difference as one might wish. Defense Tech's mention of the panopticon reminds me that Jullien sees the Legalists' notion of power as a sort of society-wide panopticon, in which the ruler's position in the scheme of things allows him to remain opaque, while forcing transparency on others. Of course, the goal of terrorists is similarly to convince the public that they're invisibly in all places at once. Between the terrorists' imitation of omnipresence, and the government's, it's no wonder that things feel rather claustrophobic these days for "authentic humanity." Hell does indeed go 'round and 'round.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Halgerda aurantiomaculata. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!

Speaking of despair, I've actually been working on a post for most of the day, to little avail. It's too hot to think, for one thing. And the subject matter is not exactly cheerful. I think it can wait 'til tomorrow, at the very least.

On the bright side, I had the rare good sense to contact a very dear friend who lives in London, near the site of one of the bombings. We hadn't talked in a long time, for a number of reasons that are, in retrospect, pretty silly. She was OK, fortunately. And it was instructive, at my age, to ponder the thought that catering to my own stubbornness and vanity might - just possibly - be a waste of time.

And now, I'll tip my dunce cap at a jaunty angle, and head out on the town!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Not sure which nudibranch this is, but it certainly livens up its landscape!

I actually wrote a new post today, believe it or not. Not quite the triumphant return I'd planned, but possibly worth a look anyway.

Let Us Spray

President Bush claims that his new aid package for Africa will cut malaria deaths in half. The objectively racist, America-hating cynics at the WaPo were quick to cast aspersions on his pledge, as though the fact that Bush continually lies and breaks promises somehow makes him untrustworthy:

[S]ome analysts and advocates said the president's lofty language was not fully supported by his numbers, which they said were reached in part by repackaging previous pledges.

The WaPo also notes that there are three components to the Bush plan:

The program would provide indoor spraying, long-lasting insecticide-treated nets and new combination drugs for treatment, Bush said....

Indoor spraying, eh? A while ago, I blogged on Eritrea's 90-percent reduction in malaria cases, which it achieved primarily through the use of treated mosquito netting. There was another component to that story, which I didn't mention at the time. Chris Walker, Health Specialist at the World Bank, explains:

"If you go back five years, Eritrea used indoor spraying very extensively. But that's been cut back a lot with this project," he says.

"We've also introduced other kinds of insecticides which are more environmentally friendly than those they were using...."

For "those they were using," you can read "DDT."

So what does Bush mean by "indoor spraying"? One hint comes from the Website of Africa Fighting Malaria, which is a pro-DDT pressure group run by Richard Tren and Roger Bate. Tren is involved in a whole galaxy of bizarre loony-libertarian causes, from privatization of South Africa's water supply, to embracing global warming as a positive development, to banning the use of generic AIDS drugs. Bate is one of the kingpins of the ultra-right anti-environment movement; he loves DDT so much that he stridently agitates for spraying it in regions where the mosquitos have already developed resistance.

With all that in mind, let's look at what AFM has to say about Bush's anti-malaria plan:

Thankfully President Bush offered some hope to those seeking reform in the way malaria control is conducted. First, in specifically mentioning support for indoor spraying with insecticides President Bush has boosted hopes in African countries that this highly effective intervention will be scaled up.

I guess the most you can say us that if this "humanitarian" plan is indeed a giveaway to Monsanto, there's a chance that Bush will actually fund it...which is something he's never quite managed with his other aid packages.

Tim Lambert at Deltoid has lots more on Tren, Bate, and AFM.

I'd like to add that Bono, who proclaimed that "there's no denying the commitment" of Bush to Africa, is an utter schmuck.