Visual Pyrotechnics

Having been obsessed with early American comic strips since I was a little kid, I was thrilled to get my grubby mitts on a new book called Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900-1969.

Now that I've pored over it, I'm still enthusiastic, but I'm also a bit more inclined to look this horse in the mouth. The biggest problem is that some of the strips are reduced so much as to be nearly unreadable (e.g., Herbert Crowley's mindboggling 1910 strip "The Wiggle Much," which - frustratingly enough - is one of the handful of strips I've never come across before).

Also, the anthology jumps to 1969 for no other reason than to accomodate the acid-casualty scrawlings of Rory Hayes, a marginal figure in the SF underground comics scene whose work inexplicably appealed to Robert Crumb. My gripe here isn't just aesthetic; one thing that fascinates me about certain strips published between, say, 1900 and 1920 is that they represent a degree of freedom and creativity in ephemeral mass art that hasn't really been matched since. Including any underground artist - let alone Hayes - muddies these waters, and also serves to perpetuate the absurd notion that these early comic artists were somehow "ahead of their time."

The author, Dan Nadel, claims that "experimentation" initially flourished in comics because there were no standards in place. But that doesn't make sense. Why would a lack of standards lead to the laboriously florid phantasmagoria of early American comics? My argument would be that this phantasmagoria actually reflects the standards of the mainstream visual culture of the era, from Victorian children's books, to sheet music, to advertisements, to the vertiginous architectural follies of Coney Island. (Never mind the influence of Tenniel and Cruikshank on that generation of illustrators). To a fair extent, the style of early comic strips is pretty much what you'd expect it to be: a blend of Victorian bizarrerie with fashionable, widely emulated modern art styles ranging from art nouveau to expressionism.

Why this style expressed the dream-life of that era is the really interesting question, I think, and the romantic notion of the maverick "visionary" artist does little to answer it. Nadel makes the common mistake of assuming that because comic strips were a new medium, work that looks experimental to us was, in fact, experimental rather than comparatively mainstream.

Beyond that, there's the issue of production to consider: how much of the shift away from what Nadel calls "visual pyrotechnics" had to do with changing production methods and economies of scale at major newspapers, as opposed to the advent of a comic-strip "language with structure and rules"? Given that even in this book, the economic realities of the printing and publishing industries restrict the presentation of these strips, I can't help wishing Nadel had addressed this issue. It has interesting implications.

I realize that I'm being a pedant and an ingrate. At the same time, I can't help noticing that in the last five years or so, early comic strips have enjoyed the closest thing to a vogue I've seen in my lifetime. And yet there's really been no serious effort to compile lesser-known strips in a readable format, and far too little effort to place them in any more thoughtful context than that of the "visionary." I know it's expensive to produce books of full-color comic strips, and I've seen enough remaindered anthologies of Polly and Her Pals to know that the audience for this stuff is very, very limited. Still, I can't stop hoping that one day, this work will get the treatment it deserves. That said, anyone who's interested in comics or graphic art has no choice but to pick up Art Out of Time, and to thank Nadel for compiling it.

(Also, anyone who's interested in some of the larger issues here should check out Thers's recent posts over at Whiskey Ashes. He's got much smarter stuff to say about these things than I do.)

This Post is Rated R (Gore, Adult Themes, Profanity)

The climate change "debate" is getting stranger every day. The CEI, having just informed us that "CO2 is life," is now complaining that Al Gore's plane trips are producing too much of this miracle-working molecule, thereby exacerbating an environmental crisis that doesn't exist.

Some commentators inform us that it's far too late to do anything but adapt to a problem they previously said was imaginary. Others point out that we could've taken effective action over a decade ago, if only that dirty cocksucker Al Gore hadn't tied our hands.

You remember, I'm sure, how the political and business establishment was just dying to take aggressive action against climate change back in the nineties, but kept being thwarted at every turn by the arch-fiend Gore (who actually used the awesome power of his office to make research, innovation, and entrepreneurship punishable by death).

Meanwhile, Debra J. Saunders, having already taken Gore to task for his fearmongering, now chides him for his sunny optimism:

Sacrifice? Struggle? Wrenching transformation? Forget that. Fighting global warming will be good for your bottom line.

How convenient.

Don't you just hate that awful Al Gore, with his stupid positive outlook? Thank heavens you'll never hear delusional nonsense like Gore's from the hardheaded realists in America's boardrooms.

Don't mention the part about improving the bottom line to the folks at the Rocky Mountain News; they're currently howling about Gore's slavish devotion to the heresy of central planning, which makes him incapable of grasping fun facts like these:

Without setting goals or timetables to reduce greenhouse gases, the United States has reduced its "energy intensity" - the amount of energy we consume per dollar - nearly twice as fast as the EU over the past decade. That's because U.S. entrepreneurs have been free to invest in cleaner, more efficient technologies that will actually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over time, rather than scrambling to meet arbitrary caps.

See, that's the difference between the USA and the EU. In Europe, socialist tyranny has made it impossible for entrepreneurs to invest in "cleaner, more efficient technologies." That's why you never, ever see investment in green technology over there. (Sure, Forbes.com says "the US...lags Europe in its adoption of clean technologies." But what do they know?)

Putting aside the tenuous connection between energy use and GDP in the US economy, could there be another reason for our decline in energy intensity? The bong-sucking longhairs at the US Department of Energy seem to think so:

[T]he simple E/GDP ratio measure of energy intensity overstates the extent to which energy efficiency improvements have occurred in the economy, because factors the affect intensity that are unrelated to the efficiency of energy use are included in the ratio....One example of such an 'other explanatory factor' is the shift of economic activity out of the industrial sector and manufacturing, that use large amounts of energy per unit of output, into service industries that use only very small amounts of energy. A shift from steel to electronics influences the simple E/GDP ratio, but is not indicative of improvements in energy efficiency.

The new system of energy intensity indicators...provides a truer measure of changes in energy intensity that are associated with improvements in the efficient use of energy....between 1985 and 2004, energy intensity, based on total energy and as measured by our newly developed index fell by 10%, considerably less than the simple E/GDP ratio would indicate. This 10% change over this 19-year period corresponds to an average annual percentage reduction in energy intensity of 0.56% per year. Other explanatory factors unrelated to efficiency improvements contributed to a decline in energy use of 17% between 1985 and 2004.

All that's on the one hand. On the other, Al Gore grew a beard. You just can't trust a guy like that.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

The pullyshed perle Aegires vellosus's whytenes doth declare;
Dyamand poyntyd to rase oute hartly care;
Geyne surfetous suspecte the emeraud commendable;
Relucent smaragd, obiecte imcomperable.

(Photo by Jun Imamoto)

Friday Hope Blogging

Adventus has posted a remarkable interview with Michael Berg, father of slain journalist Nicholas Berg:

O'BRIEN: But at some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, 'I'm glad he's dead, the man who killed my son'?



BERG: No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead?

If a voice as sane and courageous as Michael Berg’s doesn’t inspire hope, nothing can, or should.

As pretty much everyone knows, a vaccine for cervical cancer has been approved for sale. That’s good news, of course. But it also raises questions, as Echidne notes:

Unless some form of financial subsidy is provided, most women will not have access to the vaccine.

Then there is the sex roadblock. A virus that is transmitted by sex! What will people say if we vaccinate our unmarried daughters?

She’s right (she’s always right), and yet I’m cautiously optimistic about what will happen if a vaccine against cancer is impeded by regressive ideologies. I think this is one case where humanism will win out (especially as regards financial subsidies). And it’ll certainly bring the basic problems of poverty and misogyny into very sharp relief.

In other news, China is mass-producing solar water heaters:

At least 30 million Chinese households now have one and last year the country accounted for around 80 percent of the world market, said Eric Martinot, visiting scholar at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "We are at 15 to 20 percent annual growth and I don't see that slowing down."

Bank of America is offering a $3,000 reimbursement to full- and part-time employees who buy hybrid cars. Interesting...but not as interesting as Wal-Mart's decision to hire the Rocky Mountain Institute as a consultant on transportation and redesign. I remain mistrustful of partnerships like these, but I agree with Triple Pundit that this seems like a very positive development.

I’m very pleased to see that many American cities are banning or restricting suburban cul-de-sacs:

The most common complaint: traffic. Because most of the roads in a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs are dead ends, some traffic experts say the only way to navigate around the neighborhood is to take peripheral roads that are already cluttered with traffic. And because most cul-de-sacs aren't connected by sidewalks, the only way for people who live there to run errands is to get in their cars and join the traffic….[I]n Rock Hill, S.C., which changed its rules in March, developers who build cul-de-sacs are required to cut pedestrian paths through their bulb-like tips to connect them to other sidewalks and allow people to walk through neighborhoods unimpeded.

American researchers have found a fungus that eats phenolic resins (which means we’re one step closer to a fungus that eats suburbs!):

A fungus that normally eats wood can also chew up some of the long-lasting plastic resins that clog landfill sites, researchers in the United States have found. This potentially offers an environmentally friendly way to recycle the waste.

Meanwhile, Japanese researchers claim to have found an energy-efficient way of detoxifying asbestos:

Researchers in Gunma Prefecture have developed an energy-saving device to decompose and detoxify asbestos that uses about 80 percent less energy than the conventional method.

A 750-legged millipede that hasn’t been seen for 80 years was rediscovered in California:

The species seems to be restricted to a single ravine in San Benito county, part of the California Floristic Province, a biodiversity hotspot.

To paraphrase Emma Goldman, "If I can't dance to the stridulation of fire ants, I don't want to be in your revolution.” Apropos of which, the sound library of the USDA’s Insect Behavior and Biocontrol Research Unit offers a guided tour of the aural unconscious:

The sounds of crickets courting and flies flying familiar to many of us, but have you heard a rice weevil larva eating inside a wheat kernel, a termite cutting a piece of wood, or a grub chewing on a root?

Not exciting enough for you? Click here to hear Plodia interpunctella larvae in dry dog food.

Note, though, that our recordings of these insects are much less impressive than the lyrebird’s recordings of us. Click here to watch the lyrebird imitate chainsaws, camera shutters, and car alarms. (I’m reminded, for some reason, of Philip K. Dick’s story “The Preserving Machine,” in which musical scores are changed into animals, with unexpected results.)

A Slurry of Sterilized Waste

Given the ongoing attempt to foment hysteria over the stringently regulated use of cattle manure in organic farming, it’s instructive to consider this story:

Los Angeles officials said Wednesday they are considering a lawsuit to challenge Kern voters' decision to keep L.A. from trucking its sewage sludge to the other county.

The Kern ban came even as L.A. officials launched an experimental project to inject sludge beneath the ground in San Pedro.

Kern voters easily passed Measure E late Tuesday to prohibit the use of highly treated human waste, or biosolids, as fertilizer in unincorporated areas of their county.

Normally, 50 trucks travel from Los Angeles to Kern County every day, each carrying 22 tons of sludge contaminated by pharmaceuticals (among other things).

But never mind about that. The plan to inject sludge “beneath the ground” is far more interesting. The goal is to pump 400 tons of biosolids per day into the sandstone beneath Terminal Island, a doomed artificial island built around a mudflat at the former mouth of the Los Angeles River.

Under the plan, three wells would be drilled at the Terminal Island Treatment Plant. One well would be used to inject the slurry of sterilized waste into the spongelike sandstone where oil has been extracted. Two other wells would be used to monitor the spread of the biosolids in the rock.

"Over time, the expectation is that the material should break down into its constituent products: methane and carbon dioxide," said David Albright, manager of the EPA's groundwater office for the southwest region.

The slurry will be injected about one-half mile below the lowest groundwater level, and EPA officials said the project should have no impact on drinking water.

There's talk of sequestering the carbon dioxide, and storing the methane. As long as nothing goes wrong, it seems that this could indeed be preferable to hauling tons of sludge to Kern County and spreading it on fields, not least because the sludge currently shipped to Kern County comes from the treatment plant on Terminal Island. The question, of course, is whether it's reasonable to assume that nothing will go wrong.

Historical note: As a result of oil drilling, part of Terminal Island had subsided to 29 feet below sea level by the 1950s; the problem was “solved” by injecting water into the former wells. According to the Sierra Club (see previous link), that land is now “literally supported by constant, pressurized water injection.”

(Photo from the Center for Land Use Interpretation.)

Born to Trouble

In a typically powerful post, Robert M. Jeffers addresses some popular misconceptions:

"Progress" is now what will save us from ourselves or our "human condition." "Reason" will sweep up all the niggling problems that have beset us since our ancestors first left the trees. "Science" will lead us to a paradisial age which will raise us above ourselves and our limitations, our weaknesses and our venalities, our appetites and desires.

This ties in nicely, I think, with what Cervantes has to say:

Just as healing may sometimes involve coercion, force or fraud, disease may consist in part of subjective distress, and in part of social disability or deviance. After all, we are social beings; our status in society is a part of what we are. But whose job is it to define deviance, to ordain that it be corrected, and to carry out corrective action? Where does the authority come from?

And so a final dichotomy, between medical and social problems. Is there something wrong with this patient, or is there something wrong with the world in which this patient lives?

(Photo by Sarah Pickering.)

Sunscapes

Via Pruned:

The surface of the sun as observed by the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) in high temporal and spatial resolution. From coronal filaments, loops and mass ejections, magnetic arcades, ultraviolet and X-ray storms, and escaping prominences, earth-bound to create spectacular auroral displays or to wreak havoc on power grids and satellite telecommunication systems -- all archived in one giant database. And by giant I mean you can download 200+ gigabytes of movies in QuickTime and DVD img files! For free!

What are you waiting for?

Opportunities and Challenges

Canada's National Energy Board has taken a cold hard look at oil sands in a new report called Canada’s Oil Sands—Opportunities and Challenges to 2015: An Update.

The opportunity is easy enough to explain. Output could reach three million barrels per day by 2015. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that the USA currently imports about ten million gallons barrels of oil per day. How much oil China will want circa 2015 is an interesting question to ponder. Still, this would represent a 40% increase in oil production. That's a lot of money...on paper, at least.

What are the challenges? Oh, nothing very much. Rising costs for steel, cement, industrial equipment, and natural gas. Increased emission of greenhouse gases. A lack of skilled labor. Social disruption and collapsing infrastructure in towns near the oil fields. (The opportunity cost of squandering money, labor, and resources on oil sands isn't addressed...too hard to figure out, probably.)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, there's also the minor issue of water:

Both mining and in situ operations use large volumes of water for extracting bitumen from the oil sands. Between 2 to 4.5 barrels of water are withdrawn, primarily from the Athabasca River, to produce each barrel of synthetic crude oil (SCO) in a mining operation. Currently, approved oil sands mining projects are licensed to divert 370 million cubic metres (2.3 billion barrels) of freshwater per year from the Athabasca River.

Planned oil sands mines would push the cumulative withdrawal to 529 million cubic meters (3.3 billion barrels) per year. Despite some recycling, almost all of the water withdrawn for oil sands operations ends up in tailings ponds. Stakeholders agree that the Athabasca River does not have sufficient flows to support the needs of all planned oil sands mining operations.

On the bright side, Canada's melting glaciers - including the Athabasca Glacier - could provide a bit of extra water in the short term (and perhaps some valuable uranium, too). And one must also consider the cultural advantages.

My carefully considered guess is that they'll decide the opportunities outweigh the challenges. Apropos of which, this quote from Theodor Adorno:

The obviousness of disaster becomes an asset to its apologists - what everyone knows no one need say - and under cover of silence is allowed to proceed unopposed. Assent is given to what has been drummed into people's heads by philosophy of every hue: that whatever has the persistent momentum of existence on its side is thereby proved right.

(Photo by Edward Burtynsky.)

Who's Counting?

The Pentagon has apparently come up with a brilliant cost-cutting measure:

Citing what it acknowledged was an "unofficial" internal Pentagon document, a watchdog agency has charged that plans to cut funding next year for chemical weapons destruction will cost taxpayers more than five times as much as the government will save.

The Chemical Weapons Working Group said that the House of Representatives' version of next year's defense budget, which cuts $40 million from projects in Pueblo and Kentucky, will wind up costing $220 million over the long term.

Flashback to 2001:

Interviews and documents obtained by The Times show that senior officials have concluded that costs will ultimately rise to about $24 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $15 billion. Pentagon sources said the revised timetables are expected to show that work will not be completed at some of the sites until between 2008 and 2012.

Flashback to 1990:

In a report released on Wednesday, the accounting office said the Army's prototype disposal plant, now in operation, was 32 months behind schedule and would cost at least $190 million more than 1985 estimates. Delays will also increase the cost of storing chemical weapons by $33 million.

To quote myself, "Our CW program posed - and still poses - more danger to us than it ever did to any enemy."

A Dollar and a Dream

A new study claims that state-run lotteries are a remarkably effective way of broadening the gap between rich and poor:

A study published in the current issue of Policy Studies Journal finds that state-run lotteries have a serious effect on income distributions. More than taxes and other forms of gambling, lotteries promote the growth of inequality. That is, they aid the rich in getting richer and the poor in becoming poorer.

No surprise there. What's interesting is that the study also finds that other types of gambling don't necessarily have the same effect; the problem seems to be primarily with state-run lotteries.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with these lotteries is that they put the government in the position of promoting public innumeracy and irrationality. New York's lottery motto - "Hey, you never know!" - is a perfect example. The fact is, your chance of winning a multimillion-dollar jackpot is so vanishingly small that you'd be better off keeping your money, and pinning your hopes on finding a winning ticket on the sidewalk.

Lottery promoters tell stories - real or imagined - about winners, because they know that presenting narratives about events makes them seem more believable (cf. the availability heuristic). In a perfect world, governments would be educating citizens about the availability heuristic, and probability theory, rather than exploiting public ignorance of them. In any case, it's not surprising that the people who are most susceptible to lottery ads would be members of the underclass.

It's interesting to consider how government lotteries are promoted, compared to gambling hells like Las Vegas. Ads inviting people to Las Vegas encourage them to think of themselves as successful, attractive high rollers who can easily afford to throw a little money around. Lottery ads, by contrast, almost always have a subtext of desperation and despair; the difference between the two approaches boils down to the difference between escapism and escape.

The notion that state-run lotteries help schools has been debunked many times. The situation in Illinois is a good example of the shell game played with lottery earnings:

The percentage of the overall state budget spent on education stayed about the same after the 1985 earmark. Instead of boosting the total money spent on schools, the state just put less tax money toward education and backfilled with the lottery money.

What I find most fascinating about this article is that it shows how the dream of "hitting the jackpot" persists even among Americans who have no interest in gambling:

"It'll relieve taxes, and I won't play the damned thing anyway, so, personally, I couldn't lose," one Alsip reader said back then. "Now how could I not support a deal like that?"

Because it's too good to be true, that's why; somewhere along the line, you're going to pay dearly for your "windfall." In California, surveys have shown that lotteries make voters unwilling to approve new funding for schools. (Why should they, when they have a lottery?) What's the cost, over time, of a dysfunctional school system? Much, much more than you "saved" by demanding that the budget be balanced by exploiting the delusional hopes of the poor and desperate.

What one must understand is that the lottery doesn't transfer wealth from the poor to the rich because it's flawed. It does it because that's what it was designed to do. And the fact that it accomplishes this redistribution of wealth by feigning sympathy with the plight of the wage slave is what makes it evil, rather than merely corrupt.

The Organic Menace

A few weeks ago, I reported that Kenneth P. Green of the American Enterprise Institute had very selectively quoted a letter by Canadian scientists to support his contention that scientists were finally becoming "sensible" about global warming, and had stopped calling for "silly" reductions in emissions. In fact, as I demonstrated, the letter urgently called for immediate reductions in emissions. Green was simply lying.

Fresh from that rhetorical triumph, Green sets out to debunk three "myths" about organic farming. His dishonesty isn't quite as brazen this time around, in that anyone who wishes to check his facts has to look at several primary documents, instead of a single letter. Still, he's cobbled together an ungainly collection of lies and half-truths that would make a cat laugh.

[L]et's look at whether or not going vegan would stabilize the climate. Two vegetarian researchers recently published an article estimating that the typical American with a mixed diet puts out 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide each year than do people who consume only plants, which adds up to about 6 percent of U.S. emissions, but only 1.6 percent of worldwide emissions. But U.S. greenhouse emissions are a shrinking part of the world's inventory, as China and India are growing quickly. Whatever benefit that might come of American's going vegan would barely be noticeable, and quickly erased by emissions of developing countries.

It's interesting that Green apparently accepts the estimate of 1.5 tons of CO2 (which appears in this study). It'd be easier to quarrel with that number, I'd think, than to argue that if a specific action can't "stabilize the climate" in and of itself, there's no reason to pursue it as one strategy among others.

More to the point, Green conveniently ignores the study's findings on other greenhouse gases, such as those produced by manure lagoons:

[L]ivestock production and associated animal waste also emit greenhouse gases not associated with fossil-fuel combustion, primarily methane and nitrous oxide. "An example would be manure lagoons that are associated with large-scale pork production," Eshel said. "Those emit a lot of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere."

In my earlier post on Green, I pointed out that he uses the extent to which climate change has been allowed to proceed unchecked - thanks to the efforts of people like him - as an argument against taking anything other than adaptive action. (He's a bit like a doctor who tells you that you absolutely, positively don't have cancer - no matter what the tests say - and accuses you of being a hypochondriac and an hysteric. And then, once you finally get a correct diagnosis from another doctor, he says "You're too far gone. Treatment won't help, and even if it would, you couldn't afford it.")

Here's Green's next "myth":

Organic food sellers claim that organic farming is better than traditional farming because it uses less energy and chemicals to grow food. Some even claim that research published in Science showed organic farming was 50 percent more efficient than traditional farming. But what organic food purveyors don't talk about is that the same study showed crop yields were 20 percent lower. When you factor that into the equation, organic farming was only found to be about 19 percent more energy efficient per unit produced than traditional farming.

Or is it? As science writer Ron Bailey points out, the comparison wasn't really apples to apples. State-of-the-art organic farms were compared to older methods of traditional farming, not modern systems.

By "modern systems," Green means no-till farming; this would be a somewhat valid point, if it weren't possible to use no-till methods on organic farms. As usual, ideologues like Green like to pretend that there can be or will be no innovations in sustainable agriculture.

As for "science writer Ron Bailey," he writes for Reason magazine, and "was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute." (You may remember the CEI from their mindboggling pro-CO2 ad campaign). The article to which Green refers appeared in 2002. In 2005, however, researchers at Cornell University cast some doubt on his argument:

Organic farming produces the same yields of corn and soybeans as does conventional farming, but uses 30 percent less energy, less water and no pesticides, a review of a 22-year farming trial study concludes.

Further, a 2004 study found that organic crops seem to have higher yields under drought conditions, and are better at capturing water runoff. There's also some evidence that the yield of organic crops is comparatively stable year to year.

Now, on to Green's last - and lamest - point:

The Institute of Food Technologists, an international, not-for-profit scientific society points out, "Organic foods are not superior in nutritional quality or safety when compared against conventional foods, yet organics do have the potential for greater pathogen contamination, and therefore greater risk of food poisoning."

In an earlier post on Kristin Gerencher - who also praises the "independence" of the Institute of Food Technologists - I noted that this group's corporate sponsors have included the Coca-Cola Company, Monsanto, and Archer Daniels Midland.

Given that the consumption of organic vegetables has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last decade, one would expect to see an accompanying uptick in food-poisoning cases attributable to organic produce. But there seems to be little evidence of this, and the FDA's food safety site has no special handling instructions or warnings for organic produce. The Wall Street Journal recently said that contaminated produce is a growing problem, but doesn't mention organic farming as a cause:

Several factors are responsible: the centralization of produce distribution, a rise in produce imports, as well as the growing popularity of pre-chopped fruits and vegetables.

Also, research conducted in 2004 found that "the E. coli prevalence in certified organic produce was 4.3%, a level not statistically different from that in conventional samples," a finding that infuriated the anti-organic think-tank illiterati:

According to Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, the report's chief author and faculty member at the University of Minnesota, "I had a very heated discussion with Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute. They were very dissatisfied with our findings and told me that our interpretations were not 'correct.'

You can read all about Alex Avery here.

All in all, it seems as though Green is one of those Chicken Littles the Right always complains about...the kind who tries to advance a political agenda by scaring the bejesus out of the consumer. And ultimately, that may be one of the best reasons to buy local, organic produce whenever possible: Unlike agribusiness and factory farms, the people who sell organic produce at farmers' markets probably won't donate any of their profits to pathologically dishonest think-tanks like AEI and CEI.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Ceratosoma sinuatum is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of it
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.

In other news, the Dharma Bums have upped the ante in the highly competitive world of cat blogging.

Friday Hope Blogging

Oy, what a week. The best news, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's over. (Actually, that'd be the second-best news, after the advent of Whiskey Ashes. Hooray for that, says I.)

To continue the theme of extracting benefits from human filth and corruption, I guess I should note this:

Highland Energy Inc. president David McLennan smelled an opportunity with the rotting garbage at the old Upper Sackville Landfill site. In July, the 32-hectare dump will make history as the first landfill in Atlantic Canada to turn its decomposing tires, buses, and food into energy.

A new study shows that green businesses outperform those who "stay the course":

In a report tabled to the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it was suggested that they outperformed the ‘business-as-usual’ guys by over 7%. An analyst at Innovest, who prepared the report speaks, unusually, in plain language, so we quote him: "These companies in the medium and long term will outperform their peers because those factors [social and environmental] will become increasingly germane to their performance."

Apropos of which:

The hedge fund giant Man Group revealed plans yesterday to become one of the first FTSE 100 companies to go completely carbon-neutral, reducing the number of flights its staff take, and committing to pay "carbon offsets" on the environmentally-unfriendly activities which it cannot avoid.

I was very interested to note that Man Group intends to use videoconferencing in place of air travel whenever possible. For some reason, I'd never thought about the impact of this technology on business travel and the airline industry.

Irrepressible.Info is a campaign launched by Amnesty International to protect Internet freedoms. They have a number of actions you can take, but I especially like this one:

Undermine censorship by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site.

They've prepared a database of censored material, which you can access here.

A study on the cost and benefits of AIDS treatment shows, not surprisingly, that spending money to save people's lives can save people's lives:

Per-person survival increased by three months in 1989-92 and then by two years in 1993-95; both eras were characterized by the introduction of certain measures to prevent opportunistic infections. But in the four HAART eras spanning 1996 to 2003, per-person survival increased by approximately eight, 11, 12, and 13 years. Over the past 10 years, the investigators concluded, widespread adoption of HAART regimens, in addition to prophylaxis, led to at least 3 million years of life saved in the United States.

It's not enough to stay alive, though. One must make the most of one's time on earth. That's why you should go here to see the effects of resonance on rice grains. (Turn your speakers down first, though!) Then, go here to see the effect of heat on popsicles. (Links via Coudal.)


Also, via things: City of Lost Refrigerators. Window seat photos. An airplane scrapyard. Magic posters. And circular saw blunders in anaglyphic 3D.

How to Make a Monster

At long last, there's an explanation for Glenn Reynolds and his ilk; we called them sociopathic halfwits one too many times, and they finally decided to knuckle under and deliver the goods. I hope those of you who've been claiming that Reynolds is a pea-brained demagogue with less moral awareness than a spirochete are happy with the monster you created:

Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging — or deliberately misconstruing — Ingemi’s point. Ingemi’s point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.

This is altogether marvelous stuff; every word is a sermon in itself.

I've been called a lot of names in the last few decades. I was told I hated America for opposing aid to Saddam in the eighties, and that I was objectively pro-Saddam for opposing war with him later. I've been called an anti-Semite for daring to question the policies of the Israeli far right, and a terrorist-coddler for supporting the Geneva Conventions, and a traitor for...well, for just about everything, really. And the number of names I've been called for "prematurely" accepting the reality of anthropogenic climate change is incalculable; suffice it to say that I was on the right side of this issue almost twenty years before Gregg Easterbrook, and he's still calling Al Gore names.

Of course, I'm also a "mullahcrat" or "dhimmicrat" who opposes Bush out of a secret love for Islamofascism. How I'm supposed to reconcile my desire to live under sharia with my "hatred of religion," my "moral relativism," and my desire to "destroy marriage" and "murder babies," is anybody's guess. But gosh...if you folks don't stop saying these awful things about me, I guess I'll have to give it a whirl!

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to Reynolds' application of his "rather uncontroversially obvious" moral axiom to issues like American race relations and educational policy. Something tells me he may find those waters a bit muddier.

The Rhetorical Dispute

I'm no Pollyanna, but the unpleasantness at Metacomments has really knocked me for a loop, to the extent that I've had no desire to post anything here lately.

It's not worth going over the details, any more than it'd be worthwhile to go swimming in the manure lagoon at a hog farm. What's shocking to me is the energy that people will spend justifying their bad qualities, versus cultivating their good ones. It's human nature, God knows, but blogs do seem to exacerbate it, and it bothers me.

I could also say that I'm amazed at the lengths to which people will go to defend personal failings that, if the truth were known, are probably the cause of most of their unhappiness. But as someone once said to me, "Why are you surprised at how badly people treat other people? Look at how they treat themselves."

Anyway, just for the record: If anyone wants to call me names, or attack my pet theories, or make pitiless fun of my beliefs, or announce that I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about...go right ahead. I'm a grown-up, and I can take it in stride (even if you use bad language). Hell, I may even agree with you.

But in cases where I don't agree, you'll find that I understand the difference between defending my point of view, and retaliating against you. Your IP address is of no interest to me. I don't care where you live, what you do for a living, or what your educational background is. All of that is your business, not mine. I figure that if I can't win an argument with my own words, and whatever tenuous grasp I have of facts and logic, I'm not going to be able to win it by posting information about where you work, or what sort of car you drive. I have no respect whatsoever for the intelligence or morality of bloggers who cross this line, whether they do so to attack my friends, or my opponents.

All of which is less important than this: I'm grateful for friends like Thers and NYMary. Anything else I might want to say is summed up very economically by M.M. Bakhtin:

The rhetorical dispute is a dispute in which it is important to gain victory over the opponent, not to approach the truth. This is the lowest form of rhetoric. In all higher forms one can reach solutions to questions that are capable of temporal, historical solutions, but not to ultimate questions (where rhetoric is impossible).

UPDATE: What Watertiger said.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Indebted to no magnet and no chart,
Nor under guidance of the polar fire,
Thorunna florens is a voyager on many coasts,
Grazing at large in meadows submarine....

Friday Hope Blogging

Via Gristmill, the BBC has an interesting article on energy harvesting:

The possibilities of this new sustainable energy source need not stop there as vibrations are created everywhere that people and transport are - railway stations, airports, roads and public thoroughfares.

We are applying and testing our ideas practically within a building project within the next year, including a sprung floor fitted with heel-strike generations to harvest the energy from people walking across it. This power output will then be wired back to provide the lighting within that building.

There's some talk of satellite monitoring as a basis for early-warning systems for floods and landslides:

Using NASA's advanced Earth-observing satellites, scientists have discovered a new opportunity to build early detection systems that might protect thousands from floods and landslides. This potential breakthrough in disaster monitoring and warning links satellite observations of soil type, vegetation and land slope with observations of rainfall, rivers and topography.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has created a fascinating fire map of the world:

The ATSR World Fire Atlas (WFA) – the first multi-year global fire atlas ever developed – provides data approximately six hours after acquisition and represents an important scientific resource because fire is a major agent of environmental change.

India has banned a cattle drug that was killing vultures. And underwater grasses are making a comeback in the Chesapeake Bay. The "Four Sisters" - four enormous smokestacks off Cawthra Road in Mississauga, Ontario - are being demolished (news which makes me oddly wistful). And Brazil has created a buffer zone around its coral reefs:

The Abrolhos region, located off the coastal town of Caravelas in the far south of Bahia, northeast Brazil, is home to mangrove forests and restinga (a uniquely Brazilian ecosystem of sparsely vegetated sand ridges) and a complex of small islands, coral and algal reefs. Its natural resources directly support more than 100,000 people.

Here's an interesting example of biomimesis:

A desert beetle that wrings water from fog has inspired scientists to create a nanomaterial that literally plucks moisture from the air.

The story of the week, however, is surely Bacterial Hydrogen Production from Confectionary Waste:

As well as energy and environmental benefits, the technique could provide the confectionery industry (and potentially other foodstuff manufacturers) with a useful outlet for waste generated by their manufacturing processes. Much of this waste is currently disposed of in landfill sites.

Last, for my pal Steven, here's encouraging news of a trend towards deconsumption:

During the real-estate boom of the last decade, it seemed like there was no such thing as too big a home. Today, many Americans—and their local governments—are reconsidering that notion. Lawmakers in DeKalb County, Ga., passed a bill that allows residents to veto construction of new “megahouses.” In Marin County, Calif., would-be owners of new homes larger than 4,000 square feet must get approval from local authorities.

Pitkin County, Colo. (which includes Aspen), is now considering a 15,000-square-foot cap on home size. Already, houses larger than 5,000 square feet must include a source of renewable energy (such as solar panels) or pay a fee to support local renewable-energy projects. Interim legislation passed last February in Austin, Tex., restricts the size of new homes on existing residential lots: The homes must be no larger than 2,500 square feet, or less than 20% larger than the home that was removed, or no more than 40% as large as the lot. In April, a six-month moratorium was placed on construction of houses larger than 2,000 square feet in historic districts of Delray Beach, Fla.

Now, friends, you have two choices. You can perforate the synthetic contexts that amplify interstitial drosscapes, by means of the Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator. Or you can indulge your penchant for antiquarian escapism with Pub Signs of the Midlands and Dime Store Novels. Choose wisely!

The Snake Pit

About a month ago, Ford Motor Co. offered buyers the opportunity to neutralize their carbon-dioxide emissions by signing up with a carbon-offset company called TerraPass.

Deals like this are inevitably riskier for the smaller, greener firm; Ford has much less credibility to lose, in terms of its customer base, than TerraPass does. And because of the high visibility of this deal, there's a sense in which TerraPass is putting the overall credibility of such partnerships on the line.

Sad to say, things aren't going too well. Triple Pundit explains:

Ford is a donor to the Competitive Enterprise Institute who recently produced a series of bizarre advertisements that essentially claim CO2 induced global warming is a hoax. Terrapass (who has an excellent blog by the way) promptly called them on it. Stating publically that nothing short of a wholesale dismissal of the ads and a public withdrawl of support to CEI would be the appropriate response from Ford.

Niel Golightly, Ford's Director of Sustainable Business Strategies responds:

For the record, Ford did NOT fund these ads. More importantly, we most definitely do NOT agree with their content.

Not good enough, by any means. TerraPass is exactly right; Ford should publicly repudiate CEI and withdraw all funding. Issuing palliative boilerplate to pressure groups, while funding a massive disinformation project like CEI - from whose skywide forehead monsters of venality like Michael Fumento were hatched - is textbook greenwashing. And while TerraPass seems to have faith in Golightly, I'm pretty skeptical about the bona fides of a guy who makes cutesy comments like

'CO2 is life'?! Criminy, even we liberal arts majors know that’s bogus.

Whoa...this dude is totally one of us. I'm surprised he didn't quote some Belle and Sebastian lyrics to drive the point home.

Golightly says:

Major players like GE, DuPont, Shell, BP, Duke Energy, Goldman Sachs and many others including, yes, Ford Motor Company, are feverishly working on what it will take to be compeitive in a carbon-constrained economy. And they know the day is coming when customers will reject brands that aren’t part of solving the problem.

They also hope to postpone that day indefinitely by exploiting the idealism of firms like TerraPass on the one hand, and funding denialist disinformation on the other.

It's good that TerraPass is putting pressure on Ford, and I hope something comes of it. A better approach, for any future groups who wish to risk their credibility in order to improve an automaker's market share, would be to make defunding CEI - and the incestuous snake pit of think-tanks to which it belongs - a condition of partnership.

Gregg Easterbrook is a Liar and a Fraud

Gregg Easterbrook wants us to know that it is now officially "reasonable" to be concerned about climate change.

Does this mean that people who previously denied climate change were not reasonable? Of course not! It doesn't work that way. The center-right position is synonymous with reason; as such, it can grant validity to other positions, but can't be invalidated itself.

Thus, Easterbrook patiently explains that skepticism and even denialism were "reasonable" until quite recently:

Once global-warming science was too uncertain to form the basis of policy decisions — and this was hardly just the contention of oil executives. "There is no evidence yet" of dangerous climate change, a National Academy of Sciences report said in 1991.

Now, when someone quotes only a few words from an untitled scientific report, it always piques my curiosity. It seems very likely that Easterbrook is referring to Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, which was produced by an NAS synthesis panel in 1991. If so, it looks as though Easterbrook skimmed the introduction, and found this:

There is no evidence yet of imminent rapid change [my emphasis]. But if the higher GCM projections prove to be accurate, substantial responses would be needed, and the stresses on this planet and its inhabitants would be serious.

The phrase "there is no evidence yet" appears nowhere else in the report, judging from a search of its contents.

Just to underscore the dishonesty of Easterbrook's quote-mining, here's an excerpt from the findings and conclusions:

The panel finds that, even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses....Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises.

The report goes on to make recommendations for "reducing or offsetting" greenhouse gas emissions, including regulatory caps, incentives, and taxes ("policy decisions," in other words). It also notes:

The fact that people can adapt, or even that they are likely to do so, does not mean that the best policy is to wait for greenhouse warming to occur and let them adapt. Waiting and adapting may sacrifice overall economic improvement in the long run.

Next, Easterbrook dusts off this classic bit of disinformation:

A 1992 survey of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society found that only 17 percent of members believed there was sufficient grounds to declare an artificial greenhouse effect in progress.

At the risk of shocking you, this is not true:

Gallup actually reported that 66 percent of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with only 10 percent disagreeing and the rest undecided. Gallup took the unusual step of issuing a written correction to Will's column (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/27/92): "Most scientists involved in research in this area believe that human-induced global warming is occurring now." Will never noted the error in his column.

Easterbrook has another piece of evidence:

In 1993 Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said there existed "a great range of uncertainty" regarding whether the world is warming.

Note that this quote follows the earlier pattern: Easterbrook transplants five words from an unknown context, and makes them refer to a conclusion of his own choosing. I couldn't find the quote in question, so I'll have to let this one go unchallenged for now.

I think I've made my point. But inasmuch as Easterbrook likes to present himself as a scientific wunderkind, I'll address one final issue:

Many greenhouse uncertainties remain, including whether rising temperatures would necessarily be bad. A warming world might moderate global energy demand: the rise in temperature so far has mostly expressed itself as milder winters, not hotter summers. Warming might open vast areas of Alaska, Canada and Russia to development.

First, a warmer world means colder oceans, which very likely means colder and more severe winters. The reasonable folks at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute explain:

Warming is causing more water to evaporate from the tropics, more rainfall in subpolar and polar regions, and more ice to melt at high latitudes. As a result, fresh water is being lost from the tropics and added to the ocean at higher latitudes. In the North Atlantic Ocean, the additional fresh water can change ocean circulation patterns, disrupting or redirecting currents that now carry warm water to the north. Redirecting or slowing this "Atlantic heat pump" would mean colder winters in the northeast U.S. and Western Europe. But the heat gained from higher greenhouse gas concentrations is still in the climate system, just elsewhere. The result: a warmer earth, a colder North Atlantic.

Second, a warmer world means more energy demand for - hold on to your hats - air conditioning. Third, melting tundra in the North is likely to release untold amounts of carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating the warming process:

The 3 to 7 degree rise in temperature predicted by global climate models could cause the breakdown of the arctic tundra’s vast store of soil carbon, releasing more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air than plants are capable of taking in, said Michelle Mack, a University of Florida ecologist (formerly of the University of Alaska Fairbanks) and one of the lead researchers on a study published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

I seldom urge letter-writing campaigns, but you might consider politely asking the New York Times to explain why it allows Easterbrook to impose on its readers with this noxious blend of deceptive quote-mining and hard-right pseudoscience.

Victims of Circumstance

President Bush explains his views on climate change:

[I]n my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment.

Is climate change manmade, or are we blameless victims of circumstance? Is cholera caused by raw sewage in the public's water supply, or by the malign influence of the stars? Are wildfires that destroy wealthy people's homes caused by allowing massive construction in regions ecologically defined by frequent wildfires, or set by a shadowy cabal of eco-terrorists?

These are very complex questions. Let's let the market decide.

Speaking of wildfires, Mike Davis makes an important point in The Ecology of Fear about the distinction between "natural" and "manmade" blazes:

Anglo-Californians have always criminalized the problem of mountain wildfire. The majority have never accepted the natural role or inevitability of the chaparral fire cycle. (Conversely, there has been a persistent tendency to naturalize the strictly human causality of tenement fire.)

What guides these judgments? Business, of course. Building luxury housing in firetrap canyons is good for business, in the short term, and so is cramming immigrant workers into firetrap tenements. When luxury houses go up in smoke, you can blame eco-terrorists, or meddling environmentalists who opposed clearcutting. When tenements go up in smoke, it's an act of God (and really...what did those people expect, living that way?).

In the same way, saying that greenhouse gases are "natural" allows one to feign helplessness in the face of titanic forces. Meanwhile, a real force of nature like coastal erosion is a problem that taxpayers can and must solve at all costs (especially when it threatens multimillion-dollar houses built along privatized beaches).

It's all a matter of pretending we have power where we don't, and pretending we don't have power where we do, in order to maintain the polite fiction that life is more important than money.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Janolus indicus, a "tuft that thrives on saline nothingness."

Friday Hope Blogging

I've been a bit out of touch lately, having spent the week with a nasty case of bronchitis (and its silver lining, a bottle of codeine cough syrup). Fortunately, today's news is ample enough for my purposes.

The oil and gas industry has suffered a pleasing setback:

The House narrowly beat back an effort Thursday to end the 25-year-old moratorium on oil and gas drilling off much of the nation's coasts after a bipartisan group of lawmakers from California and Florida joined to defeat the measure....The vote revealed deep fissures among Republicans over the issue of offshore drilling. Lawmakers were split between the competing desires to boost energy supplies and protect coastal views and marine ecosystems.

The environment is a wedge issue? Who would've guessed?

The Wall Street Journal reports on the potency of green issues at the local level, using battles over factory farms as an example:

Officials in Michigan are considering new legislation proposed by environmentalists to tighten regulations over the animal operations in that state, following complaints from several townships of spilled effluent.

Helping to lead that effort has been State Rep. Brian Palmer, Michigan's Republican majority whip. "I find myself in a very strange and unique alliance with the environmental groups on this issue," says Mr. Palmer, "because I believe they are absolutely right."

A survey of Minnesota hunters offers further evidence that the environment is an issue on which most Americans are united:

Of those polled, 76 percent said they were very or somewhat concerned that many fish and wildlife populations will decrease in the next 10 years, and most agreed that global warming is a factor. The poll, released Thursday, crossed political lines. Though most hunters and anglers are conservatives or moderates, 81 percent favor strong and quick government action to begin to curb the problem....

Speaking of government action, the New York Times has a terrific article on green policies in Chicago:

The tree planting...evolved over Mr. Daley's five terms into a much more sophisticated understanding of the benefits — including to the city's treasury — of conserving resources, saving energy, expanding parks, constructing environmentally sensitive buildings, reducing the amount of storm water, restoring wetlands, generating renewable energy and doing everything feasible to heal instead of harm the city's natural systems....

The Daley administration has planted 500,000 trees, is putting up the most energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive municipal buildings in the country, has agreed to provide developers with much faster permits if they construct green buildings, instituted a $600-million-a-year program to repair neighborhoods and city parks, promised to obtain 20 percent of the electricity used by the city from clean and renewable sources, and converted hundreds of abandoned and contaminated properties into new businesses.

I was also heartened by this article on green tourism. To me, the most interesting part was the description of a resort hotel whose swimming-pool uses saline in place of traditional pool chemicals. I'd never heard of this before; apparently, it's actually pretty common (though not common enough!).

In Colombia, a frog thought to be extinct has been found alive. And in Georgia, a healthy population of American chestnuts has been found; this tree was almost entirely wiped out by a blight in 1904.

"When the flowers are right, we're going to rush down and pollinate the flowers, collect the seeds a few weeks later and collect the nuts,'' Klaus said. "If we ever find a genetic solution to the chestnut blight, genes from that tree will find their way into those trees.''

General Hydrogen has sold its first hydrogen fuel-cell power pack for use in forklifts.

The Hydricity power packs, built around a Ballard fuel cell, can triple the runtime of battery-electric forklifts to 18 hours with constant voltage output, and can refuel in 3 minutes or less.

As a reward for wading through the above, you can take a look at these beautiful panoramic maps from the Library of Congress. Also, for those in the Washington DC area, the Smithsonian is hosting an exhibition of Antarctic photography by Joan Myers, whose incredible studies of the Salton Sea I've praised elsewhere.


You can get a sneak preview of the exhibition here, and you can watch a Quicktime "home movie" of her visit by clicking here.

Which reminds me...a few weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles, taking pictures of product murals and corner stores. By an odd coincidence, the new issue of Polar Inertia showcases the 99-cent stores and product murals of Los Angeles.

As always, the whole issue is worth an unhurried look.

Truth Versus Truthiness

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an Australian group opposing wind power has close ties with a British group funded by the nuclear industry.

That group was set up by Sir Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. Sir Bernard is now a director of Supporters of Nuclear Energy, and a former consultant to British Nuclear Fuels. Coastal Guardians Victoria has also worked closely with the now-discredited British botanist David Bellamy, who believes climate change is a myth.

I've discussed David Bellamy at length here. Note, too, the Janus-faced approach of the nuclear industry: touting nuclear power as a "green" solution to climate change, while aiding and abetting climate-change denialists and other anti-environmental extremists.

That's not what's interesting about this article, though. What really startles me is that the author, Wendy Frew, seems to believe that the claims of public figures can be assessed in terms of their agreement with reality (as opposed to, say, market forces):

Mr Le Roy said wind power would not work because it needed back-up power (the national electricity grid is, in fact, already served by back-up power); green groups were split over wind power (all of Australia's major environment groups support wind power); and that wind turbines did not work because they could not store electricity. However, there is no effective way to store large amounts of electricity, regardless of whether it comes from coal or wind, energy experts say.

In most American papers, the same article would be very likely to follow the "competing claims" model (Electricity storage: Views differ) in which scientific belief becomes a matter of consumer choice. This, of course, results in an unnaturally extended shelf-life for the claims of disingenuous, anti-scientific hacks like LeRoy. It's the intellectual equivalent of ethanol subsidies.

The question is, does the "essential meaning" of such articles come from an authorial intent to maintain "balance," or from the specific political exigencies of the American journalistic field?

Railroaded

A businessman named Charles Sotelo wants to buy an abandoned rail corridor running from the Mexican border to Benson, Arizona. The BLM had intended to turn the track into a nature trail, because a good portion of it lies along the San Pedro River:

The San Pedro is the last surviving desert river in the southwest. Congress recognized its importance in 1988 with the creation of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. It provides the most intact habitat in the world for the endangered Huachuca Water Umbel and is prized for its outstanding diversity of migratory birds, wildlife and cottonwood-willow forest.

Although Sotelo has no experience in railroad operations, his aim is to use the tracks to transport tanks of sulfuric acid into Arizona from Mexico. In support of this humanitarian endeavor, he and his investors have claimed they'll upgrade the tracks.

According to government documents, Sotelo's group pledges nearly $4 million toward upgrading 76.2 miles of track from Benson to the Mexican border. But much behind this proposal is murky, including the fact that Sotelo has refused to identify Sonora-Arizona's investors....

Sotelo himself seems a bit touchy about the subject. When I called his Bisbee office, the proprietor of Valle Realty and Development refused to discuss his railroad plans by phone. When I pressed, he hung up.

This seems to be SOP for Sotelo. In 2001, he "asked Cochise County to rezone about 40 acres of a 50-acre parcel of land east of Naco from transitional residential to heavy industry." A number of experts voiced concern about Sotelo's plans, and noted that his plans for transporting hazardous materials didn't meet federal requirements. Sotelo later withdrew his plans, after officials noted that they were "vague," and "gave him 30 days to define exactly what type of hazardous materials would be warehoused or transported under his proposed development."

Not long after that, Sotelo tried to do an end-run around regulations by claiming that a proposed 1,775-foot rail line to the Mexican border was a line relocation and didn't require prior approval. The request was denied.

Sotelo claims his railroad will result in economic growth and opportunity. But then, so would a broad trail running along "the last surviving desert river in the southwest," especially if it's home to birds that are hard to see elsewhere. As usual, the dichotomy between economic well-being and conservation is a false one.

We All Scream

Every year, the chemical industry pays PR firms millions of dollars to explain that toxic materials pose no danger to public health, and to discredit anyone who says otherwise. I sometimes wonder how many innovative products and processes might've been perfected by now, if those millions had been used instead for research and development.

Now, a South African firm suggests that there is indeed a more cost-effective solution to dealing with chemophobic worrywarts:

The Vito ice cream factory, where a safety valve injected a ton of ammonia gas into the atmosphere last week, treated an affected school to ice creams on Monday, on the day a requested technical report landed on management's desk....

The children spent their break time licking ice creams and ice lollies. "When you spoil them, it's all forgotten," Belthorn acting principal Thomas Joemat joked.

The accident sent 160 people to the hospital; some are still recovering. Their ice cream, I assume, was delivered by special courier.

The company responsible for the leak also took the opportunity to introduce the children to its products:

"They've been reading words like 'toxic' and 'poisonous' and obviously got quite a fright. We want to enlighten them about how ammonia can be used constructively," said Harnekar.

Got that? It wasn't the experience of finding themselves in a huge plume of foul-smelling, eye-burning, suffocating gas that gave these kids a fright...it was reading irresponsible agitprop about the hazards of ammonia.

All the same, there are possibilities here. Next year's budget for cleaning up the Hanford site is $1.8 billion. I'm thinking it would cost a good deal less to give everyone within a 200-mile radius free popsicles every day for the next five years. It'd probably do about as much for public safety, too. Definitely worth looking into, I think.

Our Collective Fate? Lies!

Victor Davis Hanson has decided to show us what it would be like if today's liberal media had been reporting during World War II.

In a fictional op-ed piece dated May 21, 1945 - so tantalizingly close to Hiroshima, and victory! - Hanson's imaginary America-hatin' editorialist gives FDR what for:

It is not out of “Roosevelt hating,” but out of the need for truth that requires this paper to remind the American people that Mr. Roosevelt, in whose hands our collective fate lies, has been untruthful to his wife about his liaisons, untruthful to the American people about the extent of his crippling illness, and thus, not surprisingly, untruthful to the United States Congress about the extent of our prewar involvement with the British Empire in its European war and the secret nature of our present commitments.

Emphasis added, for the simple reason that FDR died on April 12, 1945...which is something a renowned author writing in a high-profile magazine probably should've known, or looked up.

My suspicion is that Hanson wished to score propaganda points by mentioning certain events in his piece, but also wished to heap abuse on Roosevelt in a way that would've seemed particularly unrealistic after his death. Accordingly, he either gambled on the date and lost, or consciously picked one that looked "truthy."

The larger issue is that talk like that of Hanson's sock-puppet was heard very often in the thirties and forties, mainly from right-wing politicians and industrialists. Now would probably be a good time to reissue Rex Stout's The Illustrious Dunderheads, come to think of it:

The quotations in this book are only a sampling of the speeches delivered in the halls of Congress and elsewhere by U.S. Senators and Congressmen who have given currency to Nazi propaganda which is designed to bring about the defeat of the United States, the creation of a fascist America subservient to Hitler's Germany.

NOTE: Those who wish to read the childish, boorish, and sexually retarded version of this post may go here.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

False glozing pleasures, casks of happiness,
Foolish night-fires, women's and children's wishes,
Chromodoris roboi, gilded emptiness,
Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes;

These are the pleasures here.

Friday Hope Blogging

I've been complaining quite a bit about the Big Three automakers lately, but this is pretty impressive:

GM’s Tonawanda (NY) Engine Plant, the world’s largest engine manufacturing facility, has achieved landfill-free status in its manufacturing operations by reducing waste generation, recycling and converting waste to energy. More than 95% of the waste materials from the plant’s manufacturing operations (23,233 tons annually) are recycled and nearly 5% (or 1,060 tons annually) are converted to energy at waste-to-energy facilities.

And my pal Rorschach informs me of these glad tidings:

An attempt by a Ford shareholder to force the automaker to drop protections for LGBT workers from its human resources regulations was swiftly defeated on Thursday. Shareholders at the company's annual meeting in Dearborn voted 95 percent to reject the proposal.

Meanwhile, Brockton, Massachusetts is nearing completion of the Brightfields plan it announced a few years back.

A once-polluted former industrial site that lay fallow off Brockton's Grove Street for over 40 years will soon host New England's first ''brightfields," a facility for generating solar energy. Over the next three months, a 425-kilowatt array of 1,395 solar panels will be installed across 3 acres of the old Brockton Gas Works site. The project, which will produce enough energy to power City Hall and meet a portion of the police station's energy demand, demonstrates that former industrial areas, landfills, and swaths of blighted land can be transformed into something more productive.

I'm less excited than Treehugger about these solar-powered ships, but I'll mention them anyway:

In the past week or so, two new proposals have emerged that the term audicous hardly seems to encompass. One is to build two 600 passenger hybrid-electric ferries to carry tourists to the island national park of Alcatraz from San Francisco. The ferries utilise massive solar wings to generate electricity, which cut fuel needs in half, with zero emissions while docking at the wharf. "As needed, the vessels will operate with diesel generators burning low-sulfur diesel fuel and equipped with air pollution controls that cut emissions by 70% to 90% (compared to conventional marine diesels)." The first such craft is due in two years.

The other proposal involves using solar "aquatankers" to haul water from a wet region of Australia to the drought-ridden city of Perth. Suffice it to say that I don't approve.

However, I do approve of this new design for offshore wind farms:

The wind turbines and towers would be assembled at a shipyard and placed on top of large floating cylinders. The canisters would be ballasted on the bottom with high-density concrete to keep the structure from tipping over, and the whole turbine assembly would be tugged out to sea. There, four steel cables would be attached to the platform, anchoring it to the sea floor.

The biggest benefits here are that the turbines can be sited far enough away from shore as to be invisible, and will be driven by faster and more reliable wind speeds. Also, I'd assume that using cable anchors is preferable to sinking dozens of shafts into the sea floor, both from a cost and an environmental point of view. But that's sheer speculation on my part.

In San Francisco, it looks as though an impossibly stupid power-plant cooling system is going to be shut down:

Mirant's own consultant...concluded the pumps kill 300 hundred [sic] million fish larvae every year. And water gushing from the discharge pipe — 26,000 gallons in the time it takes to read this sentence — scours the Bay's floor, kicking up sediments loaded with PCBs, mercury, arsenic, chromium and other industrial pollutants.

WorldChanging discusses organic LEDs (OLEDs), which I'm embarassed to say I've never heard of before. They sound interesting, though:

OLED's are greener to manufacture than LED's or fluorescents, and can even be printed by inkjet, instead of requiring vacuum chambers, high temperatures, and bevies of toxic chemicals like lead or mercury. This is a big reason to keep an eye on them for the future. Because of these facts, they will also end up cheaper to make than today's technologies.

Not sure what to make of this story, but it's certainly worth reading:

[O]ne particular antibiotic – fosfomycin – can treat Listeria in the body, despite it being ineffective in laboratory conditions. Because it was not effective in the laboratory, this drug has never been considered for the treatment of listeriosis, in spite of it reaching the infection sites more effectively than other antibiotics.

Professor Vazquez-Boland said: "Our results illustrate that antibiotic resistance in the laboratory does not always mean that the drug will not work in the infected patient. This work brings some optimism to the highly worrying problem of the increasing resistance to antibiotics."

Lots of blogs are talking about Worldmapper this week, and rightly so (I believe I saw it first at BLDGBLOG, so that's who gets the hat tip). Have a look...it's fascinating, and visually stunning.

On a related note, We Make Money Not Art discusses new research on Earth's magnetic field, compiled from ship's logs dating back to 1590. If that's too dry for you, you could always watch Perversion for Profit, which brings a whole new meaning to "The Russians are coming!"

Keeping the Public Informed

The National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa is accused of dumping liquefied animal remains into that city's wastewater system. The reporting on this story is unhelpful:

When this waste breaks down it creates complex proteins called "prions." Prions are listed as an environmental hazard by the EPA. Prions can cause potenially [sic] fatal diseases in humans and animals. Prion diseases include chronic wasting disease, which is found in deer and elk populations, and mad cow disease (BSE). So far no cases of either disease has ever been found in Iowa.

Prions aren't a breakdown product of animal remains; they occur naturally in mammalian cells. If there are prions in the remains at NADC, they probably result from experiments like this one.

And prion diseases aren't "potentially fatal." They're always fatal, without exception.

Here's the really odd part:

The problem, is when the NADC disposes of waste from animals they test for various diseases these employees say they have allegedly not been burning all that waste. Inceneration [sic] is the safest way to dispose of the potentially hazardous waste. The employees say the NADC has been using a bleaching process on the liquid remains of animals.

Well, that's as it should be, since bleach deactivates prions.

The concern, it seems, is that prions might contaminate the sewage sludge that gets spread on fields used to grow human and animal crops. But if they're using bleach to deactivate the prions - as the whistleblowing employees themselves claim is the case - that shouldn't be an issue.

I don't get this story at all.

UPDATE: This article says the whistleblowers are complaining that the NADC isn't using bleach:

Officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs the lab, said the heat treatment used in Ames is an approved method that deactivates the protein that causes the disease. The workers maintain that other labs use a safer system - bleaching, then cooking.

A Medicine for Melancholy

China wants to build 48 new airports. Fortunately, the good folks at Raytheon are proposing to make shale-oil recovery cost-effective and environmentally safe, apparently by using some form of death-ray:

"Raytheon is an expert in RF technology," said Lee Silvestre, director of Mission Innovation at Raytheon IDS. "What makes this effort a breakthrough is that similar RF technology that we have been applying in core defense products -- radars for tracking and guidance systems -- has demonstrated applications in the energy crisis."

Whatever Raytheon's scheme is, it was probably foreshadowed in The Comic Book Periodic Table of the Elements.


Even with Raytheon on your team, you can't be absolutely sure that your short-sighted, midbogglingly stupid decisions will lead to an optimal outcome for you and your cronies. That's why the SurvivaBall is vital to your contingency planning:

Fred Wolf and a colleague at Halliburton demonstrated yesterday at the Catastrophic Loss conference in Florida three SurvivaBall mockups, and described how the inflatable units will sustainably protect managers from natural or cultural disturbances of any intensity or duration. The devices will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will not go unfulfilled even when most human life is rendered impossible by catastrophes or the consequent epidemics and armed conflicts.

If you're a Titan of Industry - like the ones who are lobbying to end buyer incentives for hybrid cars - you'll definitely want American taxpayers to buy you enough SurvivaBalls for the non-expendable personnel on your org chart! Especially since Project BioShield isn't working out too well:

The new developments are merely the latest problems in a program that was supposed to showcase the Bush administration's commitment to developing a broad national defense against bioterror attacks...but lately members from both parties have criticized the government's handling of it and demanded more progress. The anthrax program is by far the biggest contract awarded under BioShield to date.

If you can't afford a SurvivaBall, don't despair. The Inflatable Breasts Dress is better than nothing:

With large inflated breasts, she felt like she had a protective zone.

UPDATE: Just in case I've confused anyone, please note that at least one thing described in this post is a joke.

Online Blogintegrity

My involvement in the Online Blogintegrity project is - at least for now - the brightest jewel in my moral diadem. Though I had to give up reading bedtime stories to pediatric burn victims in order to participate, I'm confident that I made the right choice.

Some people, I imagine, might find it difficult to write posts that are commensurate with the gravity of this endeavor. With all due modesty, I've had no such problem. On the contrary - if I can speak for a moment from a position of pure objectivity - my posts thusfar represent an amalgam of clarity, rigor, and compassion that comes tantalizingly close to the perfection of thought.

I think you'll agree.

The Descent of Huygens Onto Titan

This is one of the greatest things I've ever seen in my life.

UPDATE: Click the text, please...not the image. It's just a screen capture.

(Quicktime required.)