Friday Hope Blogging

President Obama has directed federally subsidized hospitals to give gay visitation rights to the gay partners of gay patients who have chosen the gay lifestyle.

Hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid payments must let patients choose which persons, including gay and lesbian partners, can visit them and help make critical health decisions, President Barack Obama said Thursday.

Gay rights advocates hailed the move as a major step toward fairness for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans....

The designated visitors should have the same rights that immediate family members now enjoy, Obama's instructions said. It said Medicare-Medicaid hospitals, which include most of the nation's facilities, may not deny visitation and consultation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

Schools in Mississippi have been ordered to desegregate (what year is it, again?).

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.

Fewer women are dying in childbirth:

The rate at which women die in childbirth or soon after delivery has fallen by about 40 percent since 1980, with dramatic reductions in the populous nations of India, China, Brazil and Egypt.

H/t: Cheryl. (Feministing offers some caveats.)

A federal judge has ruled that the "National Day of Prayer" is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote that the government can no more enact laws supporting a day of prayer than it can encourage citizens to fast during Ramadan, attend a synagogue or practice magic.

"In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so personal and can have such a powerful effect on a community that the government may not use its authority to try to influence an individual's decision whether and when to pray," Crabb wrote.

This, of course, is typical anti-Christian hate speech from the oppressive secular mainstream. It's time to lock and load, metaphorically speaking, wink wink, you betcha!

In yet another attack on the cherished traditions of our Founding Fathers, agricultural researchers seem to have found a way of preserving table grapes without the use of sulfur dioxide:

[T]he hot water treatment resulted in significantly higher oxygen retention and lower carbon dioxide accumulation in packages, firmer texture, higher overall visual quality, lower decay rate, and lower microbial populations than other treatments or commercially packed grapes.

And yet another inquiry has cleared Phil Jones and CRU of wrongdoing:

"We were absolutely satisfied that these people were doing their job fairly and honestly," Lord Oxburgh, the head of the inquiry, said yesterday as reported by The Independent. "As far as we could see all of the conclusions were honestly and sensibly arrived at. We had no reason to question the conclusions, we had no reason to believe that they were reached by dishonest means."

By clearing the climatologists, the inquiries have also cleared decades of work on the science of climate change. However the panel did state that it would like to see better techniques used to analyze statistical data, though it added that such techniques would not have changed the researchers' overall findings.

Meanwhile, America's major-league baseball teams are promoting climate action:

America’s national pastime is leading the way on climate action by adopting a comprehensive conservation and greenhouse gas-reducing program, including a public outreach component at National League and American League ballparks this summer. The new sustainability drive involves all 30 Major League Baseball teams from coast to coast, in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Brazil has suspended its preliminary license for the construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Amazon rainforest.

Judge Antonio Carlos de Almeida Campelo also cancelled the construction auction for the project scheduled for April 20 and ruled that IBAMA, Brazil's environmental agency, refrain from issuing a new license for the project.

"It remains proven, unequivocally, that Belo Monte's plant will exploit the hydroelectric potential of areas occupied by Indigenous people who would be directly affected by the construction and development of the project," wrote the judge in the decision.

According to a new report by the UNDP, economic growth has little to do with human development and quality of life:

Times of India has gotten ahold of an as-yet-unreleased report, produced for the 20th anniversary Human Development Report, which shows that between 1970-2005 economic growth had little do to with increases in human development....

Furthermore, the paper found that empowerment of women broadly and household-level decisions about family planning and female schooling were strong drivers of increases in human development over time.

The SEC has brought civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs:

The agency alleges Goldman failed to disclose that one of its clients helped create — and then bet against — subprime mortgage securities that Goldman sold to investors.

Investors in the mortgage securities are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion, the SEC noted. The agency is seeking to recoup profits reaped on the deal.

Russia no longer produces weapons-grade plutonium:

The last Russian plutonium production reactor, ADE-2 at Zheleznogorsk, was shut down on April 15, 2010 at noon local time (04:00 UTC) as planned. This event marks the end of production of weapon-grade fissile materials in Russia.

Another h/t to Cheryl, who notes that "this is a particularly big deal, because many of Russia's production reactors also supplied electricity and hot water to local communities. So in order to end production of plutonium, they had to build alternative power plants for those communities."

She's also excited about the Nuclear Security Summit:

Shoutout to South Africa for giving up its nukes all by itself! And lookee here! Ukraine will give up its stockpile of enriched uranium! Canada too! Georgia has broken a uranium-smuggling ring!

There's lots more, so read the whole thing.

The geothermal power industry is growing:

In 2009, 188 new projects have been started which could together produce as much as 7875 MW of energy. These projects could potentially provide electricity for 7.6 million people, or enough energy to completely replace California’s coal-fired plants. “California could achieve its 2020 goal for global warming emissions reductions just by keeping energy demand level and replacing its coal-fired generation with geothermal,” said Karl Garwell, GEA’s Executive Director.

Who among us does not love solar-powered airships?

The High Speed Solar Airship (HSSA) is a high-flying airship concept that proposes using thin-film solar panels and other off-the-shelf components to create a cost-competitive, high speed vessel for cargo hauling. The airship has no fuel costs, since it uses 67.2 kW of solar panels, and it capitalizes on the fast winds of the Jet Stream to boost speeds on with west-to-east transport — flying at 30,000 feet, the airship could reach daytime speeds of 182 MPH and even continue flying at night with a speed of 165 MPH.

Image via Airships

Chesapeake Bay's population of blue crabs is rebounding:

The Chesapeake's blue crabs, in decline for a decade, are in the middle of an extraordinary comeback, officials in Maryland and Virginia said Wednesday. The estuary's crab population has more than doubled in two years, they said, reaching its highest level since 1997....

"Something like this is really rare to see in marine fisheries . . . to go from the situation where the crab had been over-fished and nearing possible collapse, to a point where it is now being sustainably fished," said Rom Lipcius, a marine scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

An inexpensive suction device may speed wound healing in the developing world:

MIT student Danielle Zurovcik recently developed a negative pressure pump that costs just $3 to build.

Zurovcik’s hand-powered suction-healing system is easy to use: just squeeze it and leave it in place on the wound. The plastic molded pump is connected to the underside of the wound dressing by a plastic tube. Zurovcik’s system can hold steady for days, so users don’t have to worry about it falling off. And while the device is somewhat clunky in its current incarnation, Zurovcik is already working on a pocket-sized version that can be concealed under clothing.

An American nonprofit is promoting straw bale construction as a means of reducing earthquake fatalities in rural areas.

Pakistan Straw Bale and Appropriate Building is a nonprofit working at developing durable buildings that can be built with local resources, little money and stay safe during devastating earthquakes like the 2005 7.5 quake in Kashmir....

The 25 ft by 25 ft buildings cost a mere $2250 for materials — what many of us are willing to pay for countertops. Currently they have finished 11 buildings that are energy-efficient, safe, and very low impact.

Target is opening recycling centers at all of its stores.

The recycling stations will accept aluminum, glass and plastic beverage containers, plastic bags, MP3 players, cell phones and ink cartridges.

IBM will require its suppliers to create environmental management systems:

I.B.M. said on Wednesday that it will require its 28,000 suppliers in more than 90 countries to install management systems to gather data on their energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste and recycling.

Those companies in turn must ask their subcontractors to do the same if their products or services end up as a significant part of I.B.M.’s $40 billion global supply chain. The suppliers must also set environmental goals and make public their progress in meeting those objectives.

Massey Energy shareholders are calling for Don Blankenship to be fired:

Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, whose record of ignoring safety violations in has come under fierce scrutiny after the tragedy in his West Virginia Upper Big Branch mine left 29 dead. That mine itself had racked up 57 safety violations the same month the accident occurred, and had thousands more prior. Meanwhile, Blankenship has a long history of putting profits before safety, and has publicly declared this to be the case on a number of occasions--now, in light of recent evidence, shareholders of Massey Energy are calling for the company to fire him.

Caribbean countries will no longer permit ocean dumping:

Countries in the Caribbean have agreed to bar the dumping of all garbage at sea, ending rules that allow the disposal of metal, glass and other refuse a short distance from shore and almost any trash farther out....

"It's a big deal," said [Jeff] Ramos, a U.S. Coast Guard commander based on the Dutch island of Curacao near Venezuela. "Especially in the Caribbean, with all the tankers and the traffic going to the Panama Canal, it will make a big impact."

This is pretty remarkable:

Nine-year-old Morgan LaRue is the first cancer patient in Texas to benefit from a groundbreaking procedure that will magnetically lengthen her leg, sparing her the possibility of up to 10 future surgeries as her body grows.

A clever new iPhone app uses geotagging to alert city governments about problems that need fixing.

For now, CitySourced is limited to these neighborhood blight/maintenence issues like potholes and graffiti. You can report a "homeless encampment" but you can't report the problem of homelessness, or a lack of bike lanes on city streets. But it can only lead to more civic engagement and create a closer connection between voters and their representatives and that's certainly a big step in the right direction.

The only known copy of a 1913 film about Abraham Lincoln has been found and restored:

[A] contractor cleaning out an old New Hampshire barn destined for demolition found seven reels of nitrate film inside, including the only known copy of a 1913 silent film about Abraham Lincoln....

After working with the George Eastman House film preservation museum in Rochester, New York, the college determined that the film, directed by and starring Francis Ford, did not exist in film archives. In fact, it was one of eight silent films starring Ford as Lincoln; there are no known surviving copies of the others.

(h/t: ErinPDX.)

While we're at it: Photos of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption. A collection of Polish candy wrappers. Hard-boiled cartography. A paper astrolabe. The Right to Quiet Society. A close-up view of creeping speedwell. And Flickr's This is a Public Service Announcement pool.


SepiaTown "lets you view and share thousands of mapped historical images from around the globe" (via things). The world's oldest organisms. Shadows of clouds. Notes on the autofluorescence of old dry mounts of snail radulae. Photos by Jessica Lauren Taylor. Photos by Peter Ziebel. And an exhibition of photomicroscopy.


The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (via Peacay). AntWeb. Old photos of East Tennessee (via things). The post-apocalyptic Kremlin. Book covers by George Salter. Photos of Peru by Michael Hanson. The Archaeogeography Photoblogging Collective. A gallery of casino carpets. And images from the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection.


Last, here's a film of the meteor seen recently in the Midwest.



(Photo at top: "Up close, the solar surface is a striking patch work of granules in this very high resolution picture of the quiet Sun. Caused by convection, the granules are hot, rising columns of plasma edged by dark lanes of cooler, descending plasma. But the high-resolution view reveals that the dark lanes are dotted with many small, contrasting bright points. Constantly present on the solar surface, the bright points do not seem to be related to sunspots that come and go with the magnetic solar cycle. Nonetheless, the bright points are regions of concentrated magnetic fields and are bright because the magnetic pressure opens a window to hotter deeper layers below the photosphere. For scale, the white bar at the lower left corresponds to 5,000 kilometers across the Sun's surface. The sharp, narrow-band image was recorded in September, 2007 using the Swedish Solar Telescope on the astronomical island of La Palma." Via NASA.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

Women in Afghanistan are attending secret literacy classes:

[T]he man behind the covert schools said they have reached 29 villages and around 450 students. Ehsanullah Ehsan has devoted his life to educating women in some of the most culturally conservative places on earth....

"It was crazy. It was painful to me," he said. "I always saw that – why do women have to wear burqa, not men? Why do women have to be treated so inhumanly? My mother was the one who loved me most. It was my mother who nursed me. Why alienate half of humankind? So, I thought, I have to do what I can do."

Austin, TX has passed a law that will require Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) to post notices that they do not offer abortion services:

Austin is the second city to require such notices. The city of Baltimore passed such an ordinance last December. (For those curious what the required signs in Baltimore look like, an image of them can be seen here.) Many think that the ordinances have become necessary due to the misleading practices of many crisis pregnancy centers which have, in documented cases, mislead women into thinking they provide medical services and often provide outright incorrect information about abortion and birth control.

The Philippine Supreme Court has recognized a national gay rights group as a legitimate political party:

Voting 13-2, the court threw out decisions by the Elections Commission denying accreditation to Ang Ladlad (Out of the Closet) on grounds that it tolerates immorality and offends Christians and Muslims.

The justices said the party had complied with all legal requirements, and that there is no law against homosexuality.

Baltimore has come up with an innovative solution to the problem of food deserts:

Residents of two Baltimore neighborhoods that lack supermarkets will soon be able to order their groceries through a free delivery system that operates with the click of a mouse from the library.

The new Virtual Supermarket Project, city officials' latest attempt to solve Baltimore's long-standing history of neighborhoods with little access to healthful foods, offers laptops where residents can order groceries online from Santoni's Super Market in Highlandtown and pick them up the next day at the Orleans Street or Washington Village library branches of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The libraries are in East and West Baltimore's biggest "food deserts," areas targeted by the Health Department for their scarcity of grocery stores and nutritious food options.

A species of lemur that was thought to be extinct has been rediscovered:

Sibree's Dwarf Lemur was first described in 1896 but never studied during the 20th century. Over time, destruction of its native habitat led some to believe it might be extinct, until Mitchell Irwin of McGill University observed dwarf lemurs at Tsinjoarivo, in Eastern Madagascar, in 2001. Subsequent genetic analysis by Linn Groeneveld of the German Primate Center found the lemurs to be the long-lost Sibree's Dwarf Lemur.

Photo: McGill University

The California Public Utilities Commission has directed PG&E to stop threatening public power agencies:

Commissioners adopted a resolution telling PG&E and the state's other utilities that they cannot refuse to supply electricity to "community choice aggregators," a new type of public power agency being set up in Marin County and San Francisco. Marin's agency will start delivering electricity to its first customers on May 7, and San Francisco officials hope to follow suit soon after.

San Francisco is launching the nation's largest green loan program:

The advantages to the program are twofold: residents don’t have to pay for green improvements upfront, and they don’t have to continue paying for, say, solar panels if they move. Since the loans stay with the property, whoever owns the building continues to pay for improvements.

San Francico’s list of eligible projects is extensive, to say the least. Potential upgrades include geothermal heating pumps, solar panels, low-flow showerheads, greywater irrigation systems, green roofs, air filtration systems, and more.

Inhabitat discusses solar origami:

Standard flat solar panels are only optimized to capture sunlight at one point of the sun’s trajectory — otherwise they need automated tracking systems to follow the sun. MIT power engineering professor Jeffrey Grossman has found an artful answer to this planar problem — the ancient art of origami! Grossman found that folded solar cell systems could produce constant power throughout the day and didn’t need tracking. His new designs are up to two and a half times more efficient per comparative length and width than traditional flat arrays.

GE claims to have come up with a better LED bulb:

GE’s new bulb, the Energy Smart® LED bulb, will distribute light in all directions (just like the soon to-be-phased-out incandescent bulb, meaning in all directions) instead of just one. The light will also consume 9-W of energy and last for 17 years, which is 25 times longer than a 40-W incandescent bulb and three times longer than a normal CFL.

And Hitachi claims to have come up with a better lithium-ion battery:

In news that could affect everyone from laptop users to electric car drivers, Hitachi announced this week that it has figured out a way to double the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries — the batteries found inside virtually all of our energy-intensive electronics. According to Hitachi, that means their lithium-ion batteries can last up to 10 years without needing to be replaced.

Hitachi’s new batteries won’t initially find their way into our iPods, however. First, the electronics manufacturer plans to focus on grid-scale storage — i.e. solar or wind power storage. If Hitachi’s upgraded li-ion batteries are affordable and reliable enough, they could allow utilities to increase the amount of renewable but intermittent energy on the grid.

The US Energy Star program will allegedly be overhauled and improved:

It turns out that the issues with Energy Star are so systemic that the energy efficiency certification program may require a significant overhaul. The main change that Collins is proposing is to move the program toward third-party independent testing and certification instead of the self-policing that has been taking place thus far – a system that clearly is not working out.

St. Louis has approved a new tax to improve its transit system, just like Uncle Joe Stalin did when he decided to build the Belomorkanal.

In another vote of confidence for quality mass transit, St. Louis voters have overwhelmingly approved a measure that will raise the sales tax "to stabilize and eventually expand" its transportation network, according to Grist. The local Tea Party movement was ardently against the measure, and threw its weight behind defeating it. And then . . . . . . St. Louis voters approved the measure anyways--by an overwhelming margin of 24 points--establishing a half cent sales tax increase to fund the Metrolink public transit system.

Mission accomplished FUBO and ACORN!!!11 RIP America, 1767-2010.

Speaking of which, an op-ed in The Lancet calls for a global healthcare fund:

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has shown that one can pool different streams of international assistance into one stable and reliable aid source. Why don't we broaden the mandate of the Global Fund to all elements of a comprehensive primary health care, into a World Social Health Insurance fund, to which every country contributes according to its means, and receives according to its needs? The receiving countries would no longer have to shuffle money around or adapt unpredictable charity to what they perceive as their real needs.

Supposedly, this Neo-Communist Manifesto was written by scientists from the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp. But after checking the kerning and analyzing the syntax, I'm convinced that it was written by Bill Ayers while high on crack that Barack Obama sold to him while high on meth, exactly as predicted in Revelation 13:13.

Living animals have been found in a marine dead zone:

You're likely familiar with the ever-growing marine dead zones, areas in the ocean where no life was believed possible due to depleting oxygen levels. But in a truly startling discovery, scientists have stumbled upon the first animal that can survive without oxygen -- a feat that until now was only possible in bacteria. This has a number of implications: both regarding the possibility that life may yet adapt to more severe conditions on earth, and on whether life is possible on other oxygen-free planets -- and may be more abundant than we thought.

An endangered penguin chick has hatched at the Seattle Zoo:

"This hatching is significant for the penguin Species Survival Plan," said Mark Myers, a Woodland Park Zoo curator who specializes in birds. "Humboldt penguins are an endangered species and here at the zoo these birds are important conservation ambassadors to teach visitors about the impacts humans have on penguins in their range countries."

Photo by Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo

Guinea worm is close to being eradicated:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has led a 20-year campaign to eradicate Guinea worm, a parasite that has plagued humans since biblical times.

"We will not stop the efforts of the Carter Center until there are no cases of Guinea worm left in southern Sudan or Ghana or Mali or Ethiopia. That's the only places where we have a few cases left.

"We have been working on it now for more than 20 years. We have reduced it, the incidents, from more than 2.5 million cases down to about 2,500 cases in the whole world."

The US and Russia have finalized an agreement on plutonium disposal:

The new protocol amends an agreement signed by then-Vice President Al Gore and the Russian leadership in 2000 under which the two countries pledged to get rid of 34 tons of plutonium each. The material came from weapons that had been decommissioned.

Via CKR, who notes that "not being able to agree on this is one of the dumb things that was exacerbated by George Bush's bellicosity."

Spring on Mars. The game of Hell (via Neatorama). Old photos of Gorky Park. The Edwin Smith surgical papyrus. The Sunrise Project. And via Coudal, some vintage Russian board games. This one (which seems like it could be related to the bizarre silent serial Miss Mend) looks fun and educational:


Connecticut sketches and speculative subways. Drawings by a robot. Photos by Tom Fowlks. A collection of graphics from satirical journals. And the 1870 Statistical Map of the United States, based on data from the 9th Census.


Found Fotos. Miscellaneous graphics by Alvin Lustig. Photographs by Homer L. Shantz. The first lasers. Wartime food posters. The exciting story of Wire for Sound. An informative blog on Pathological Geomorphology (via Peacay). The eldritch horror of Kaprekar's Constant. And the Kaikidan Ekotoba monster scroll.


Also, this.



(Photo at top by John Stetson.)

Ideological Formations

John J. Miller visits Luray Caverns with his family, and finds that its bizarre formations remind him of FREEDOM.

I haven't visited enough caves to say how this one compares to others, but it did make this top-ten list and I recommend it highly. It's also a private business that sells tickets and souvenirs, not a public park that consumes taxpayer dollars. Luray Caverns may not be a model for balancing tourism and conservation at every natural wonder in the country, but it's probably a better one than most people realize. Americans can perform a lot of wonders on their own.

His enthusiasm is understandable. I mean, they actually play Luray's stalactites with mallets! That's a wonderful example of the creative solutions you get when you unleash the power of the Free Market.

I'm assuming Miller has never been to Carlsbad Caverns, where they also sell tickets and souvenirs (just like most other national parks). As for consuming taxpayer dollars, that's a complex subject...but for whatever it's worth, a recent study claims that while Carlsbad Caverns has an annual budget of about $6 million, "the total impact of the park is almost 1,000 jobs and $17 million in income in the county."

That doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me, even if the caverns do lack spectral mood lighting, pipe organs, and an animatronic figure of Ronald Reagan welcoming visitors to the snack bar.

One can only hope that despite Miller's excruciating political correctness, his family managed to enjoy the cave for its own sake. My parents had their faults, God knows, but at least they didn't reduce the scenic wonders we visited to economic case studies.

Two Species

George Monbiot is concerned — very concerned! — about the exoneration of Dr. Phil Jones. The failure of other people to be as concerned as he is points, as such failures often do, to systemic corruption. Or maybe to something even more troubling.

None of it made sense: the intolerant dismissal of requests for information, the utter failure to engage when the hacked emails were made public, the refusal by other scientists to accept that anything was wrong. Then I read an article by the computer scientist Steve Easterbrook, and for the first time the light began to dawn.

Easterbrook, seeking to defend Jones and his colleagues, describes a closed culture in which the rest of the world is a tedious and incomprehensible distraction. "Scientists normally only interact with other scientists. We live rather sheltered lives … to a scientist, anyone stupid enough to try to get scientific data through repeated FoI requests quite clearly deserves our utter contempt. Jones was merely expressing (in private) a sentiment that most scientists would share – and extreme frustration with people who clearly don't get it."

Monbiot concludes that journalists and scientists live in Two Different Worlds. You'd think that someone who's been following the climate "debate" for years would've figured that out long before now.

What scientists might regard as trivial and annoying, journalists and democracy campaigners see as central and irreducible. We speak in different tongues and inhabit different worlds.

Or as Pierre Bourdieu puts it in Science of Science and Reflexivity, "each discipline (as a field) is defined by a particular nomos, a principle of vision and division, a principle of construction of objective reality irreducible to that of another discipline." Roll over Wittgenstein, and tell Saussure the news!

Obviously, this raises interesting questions. But I think it's fair to say that the possible advent of a new "scientific" species — Homo sivanus, let's call it — is not one of them.

Perhaps eventually we'll split into two species. Reproducing only with each other, scientists will soon become so genetically isolated that they'll no longer be able to breed with other humans.

Perhaps. But another, more likely possibility is that Monbiot worried that the CRU hack posed a threat to his own credibility, was accordingly a wee bit hasty in calling for Dr. Jones to resign, and is now trying to backpedal by, like, getting all philosophical and shit.

Anyway, if we're to forestall Monbiot's imaginary evolutionary catastrophe, scientists must stop walling themselves off from the everyday world.

Painful and disorienting as it is, they must engage with that irritating distraction called the rest of the world. Everyone owes something to the laity, and science would die if it were not for the billions we spend on it. Scientists need make no intellectual concessions, but they have a duty to understand the context in which they operate.

See, I'd argue that Phil Jones et al did understand the context in which they operate, on the grounds that they recognized McIntyre's FoI filings as "trivial and annoying." Had these scientists really been as cloistered as Monbiot suggests, they may've been more likely to view McIntyre as an honest truth-seeker with whom there was no good reason not to cooperate. And indeed, political calculation is precisely what they tended to be accused of, precisely because they ran afoul of the Virgin/Whore Complex that outsiders tend to impose on the sciences.

Monbiot understands that while science and journalism are both closed worlds, one of them is much better at self-regulation than the other. Instead of thinking about why that might be, and considering "Climategate" — and his own reaction to it — in that context, he resorts to maudlin abstractions like these:

The incomprehension with which science and humanities students regard each other is a tragedy of lost opportunities. Early specialisation might allow us to compete in the ever more specialised labour market, but it equips us for nothing else. As Professor Don Nutbeam, the vice-chancellor of Southampton University, complains: "Young people learn more and more about less and less."

Right. 'Cause the orchestrated misrepresentation of a bunch of hacked e-mails has everything to do with the philosophical schism between science and the humanities, and little if anything to do with the political and economic interests of the people who own the media.

Which just goes to show that OMG we all live in different worlds, and as Krazy Kat pointed out, "lenguage is, that we may mis-unda-stend each udda."

We are deprived by our stupid schooling system of most of the wonders of the world, of the skills and knowledge required to navigate it, above all of the ability to understand each other. Our narrow, antiquated education is forcing us apart like the characters in a Francis Bacon painting, each locked in our boxes, unable to communicate.

Oh, please. Once again: What happened here is that some climate scientists had their e-mails stolen, the media allowed denialists to define what those e-mails meant, and Monbiot found it professionally expedient to portray himself as God's Last Honest Man. Now that the hysteria has died down somewhat, and someone owes someone else an apology (hint hint), Monbiot sees fit to hide his head in the sands of existential angst.

The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter.

As Above, So Below

A leaked military video — which, as PZ Myers notes, you cannot unwatch — shows soliders in an attack helicopter firing on people who were walking down the street, about a mile away. A man arrives in a van with two small children, and tries to help the wounded. They kill him, too. "It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one soldier says.

It doesn't sound quite right when you describe it that way, does it? In "reality," the people in the helicopter were Americans, and the people on the ground were Iraqis, which allows us to put things in perspective. Maybe it looked as though the Iraqis had a grenade launcher. Maybe the soldiers were scared. Maybe they were inexperienced. Maybe they were angry or stressed out. Maybe they couldn't see the kids in the van, at first. Maybe the whole thing was an unfortunate aberration from our generally principled approach to...whatever it is we're doing over there.

Then again, maybe it's not an aberration, but war in its purest form. Maybe it's the comforting thoughts of heroism and necessity and "protecting our way of life" that are aberrant, in the real world. Maybe the bloodlust that motivated these killings is the same one that made this war feel "necessary" to so many people. Maybe the rationalizations for this crime are based on the same thinking that made it inevitable.

This isn't some aberration. What these soldiers did to these people is what we did to Iraq. We attacked it because it was there, and we could, and we thought it would make us feel better. We did it because we're stupid, because we're brutal, because we're bored, because we don't like foreigners, because we're scared of our own shadow. We did it because the seriousness of war made us feel like serious people. We did it because we're angry and unhappy, and we'd rather take our anger and unhappiness out on others than accept any measure of the "personal responsibility" we claim to hold dear.

I'm joking, of course. It's their fault. It must be. The people we kill are bad, as evidenced by the fact that we killed them. Which is a second murder, and a second bereavement for survivors. But it's their fault for trying to live in a battle zone.

It must be.

What we can't hide we can always treat, yet again, as some sort of an exception, some sort of a perversion of our finer feelings.

As if there were ever anything more to this war than what you can see in this video, if you can stand not just to look, but to understand.

Fight the Power!

Phi Beta Cons alerts me to a new study that attempts to figure out why academics tend to be somewhat more liberal than, say, investment bankers. Popular theories include administrative bias, self-selection (i.e., academia's reputation for liberalism attracts liberals), and a program of institutional brainwashing that turns larval professors into an amen corner for Gilles Deleuze and Che Guevara.

This brings up a few scattered thoughts. The study notes that "professors are more likely than others...to have a high tolerance for controversial ideas." There are grounds for questioning this claim, I think. That said, the typical conservative rejoinder that professors tend not to be tolerant of controversial right-wing ideas overlooks the fact that right-wing ideas tend not to be controversial. The basic concepts of feminism, for instance, remain much more controversial than conservative ideas on gender and sexuality. The same goes — generally speaking — for pacifism versus Just War Theory; an absolute prohibition on torture versus dime-novel blather about "ticking time bombs"; socialism versus capitalism; and so on. Which is why argumentum ad populum is one of the Right's favorite logical fallacies.

Typically, conservative kulturkampfers want to have it both ways: they want to appeal to the traditional values held by all goodhearted people, and to pretend that American Exceptionalism is some sort of subaltern micronarrative that's been drowned out by the dominant culture. Accordingly, the Right tends to represent its articles of faith as heretical even — or especially — when they're common as dirt. It's a bit like putting crows on the Endangered Species List, on the grounds that some people think there are too many of them.

Just as tolerance must tolerate intolerance, or reveal itself as a pietistic fraud, multiculturalism must make room at the table for people who want to stamp it out before it destroys Western Civilization. We've liberated the wretched of the earth, and allowed them to indulge in an orgy of cultural miscegenation and male-bashing. Now, it's time to fulfill the promise of the civil rights movement by giving angry white people a voice. Hasta la victoria siempre, Wolverines!

As someone who's devoted tens of minutes to making fun of this approach, I'm dismayed to find that it's more or less what the authors of this study recommend:

In an interview, Gross said that conservatives who want to see more conservative professors may need to engage in the same kinds of activities that female and minority scholars have used with success to diversify the professoriate in terms of race and gender.

Anti-diversity diversity is clearly an idea whose time has come, not least because this movement has plenty of readymade leaders: Glenn Beck is the Rosa Parks of white culture! It takes a nation of millions to hold Rush Limbaugh back! Doc Thompson knows why the caged bird sings! Max Boot's got a right to the tree of life! Well-behaved Teabaggers rarely make history!

Sometimes it seems as though the only lesson these people learned from the civil rights movement is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Incidentally, Gross advises conservatives that they can take this approach without demonizing academia. Isn't it pretty to think so?

Sunday Music Blogging

Moral Confusion

Slightly shorter Sam Harris:

Good news, Freethinkers! I've come up with a way for us to define morality in universal, scientific terms, which will make it easier and more economical to use. Basically, it's a simple matter of defending vague utilitarian platitudes by means of 1) crotchety appeals to common sense; 2) a firm conviction that my critics are intellectually or emotionally defective; and 3) several platoons of strawmen.

I regret to say that a number of people have been going out of their way to disagree with me. I've even been accused, with malice aforethought, of logical fallacies like petitio principii. As if!

Why do treat people me this way, when all I'm trying to do is help them recognize that the foundations of human knowledge must perforce stand upon the ontological bedrock of the "rather obvious"? And to comprehend that all so-called "alternative" theories of moral judgment secretly agree with mine?

There are several reasons. Some of my critics have clearly fallen under the spell of philosophers who happen to be wrong, duh. Others, I'm sorry to say, are such appalling moral cripples that I can scarcely stand to be in the same room with them. (Ah me, how I've suffered on behalf of Truth!)

Another part of the problem is our modern tendency toward moral relativism. This may possibly have made some sort of sense as a response to the ethnocentric authoritarianism of the bad old days, but only an imbecile would use it as a shield against Eternal Verities like the ones I intend to discover.

If error can run so rampant among supposedly intelligent people, you can imagine how bad things are elsewhere. That's why we need to create — or acknowledge [waves modestly] — a class of "moral experts" who will all agree on certain basic, undeconstructible concepts, just like teh physicists do.

The first step is to purge ourselves of emotionalism and political correctness, and recognize that some people's lives simply aren't successful, in moral and therefore scientific terms. Any practical concerns about what might happen after "moral experts" make this judgment are misplaced, because the people making it are the smart ones, in scientific and therefore moral terms.

This, as anyone who's neither stupid nor bad will concede, is exactly what the world has been missing all these years.

It's all so obvious! And yet it's so hard to compel people to believe it, even though it's for their own good. Why can't everyone simply be reasonable?

PS. Don't be talkin' to me about Hume and Rawls and people like that. I've read them.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to lie down in a sewer and eat some tinfoil.

UPDATE: RMJ has much more, qualitatively and quantitatively speaking.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

A judge has ruled that human genes cannot be patented:

On Monday, federal district court Judge Robert Sweet made history by issuing the first ruling ever that human genes can’t be patented.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been issuing patents on human genes for over 20 years, giving private corporations, individuals, and universities exclusive rights to those genes and to test, study, or even look at them. This is the first time a court has said that this practice is unlawful.

Washington state has banned the shackling of pregnant inmates:

Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law a bill that bans the use of restraints on female inmates in labor or post-partum recovery except under emergency circumstances, and severely limits the use of restraints on inmates in their third trimester as well. This kind of shackling is not only an infringement upon a woman’s constitutionally protected reproductive freedom, but especially burdens poor women and women of color who are over-represented in the prison system.

Colorado has forbidden insurers from charging women extra money for coverage under individual insurance plans:

Gov. Bill Ritter said Monday it's time to end discrimination in health care as he signed a bill ensuring that women in Colorado will no longer have to pay higher insurance rates than men.

Ritter said gender discrimination allowed insurance companies to charge rates up to 60 percent higher than rates for men.

The Supreme Court has ruled that lawyers who represent immigrants must tell them whether pleading guilty to a crime could lead to deportation.

The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that lawyers for people thinking of pleading guilty to a crime must advise their clients who are not citizens about the possibility that they will be deported.

Likening deportation to the punishments of banishment and exile, Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for five justices, said the Constitution guaranteed competent legal advice on at least some collateral consequences of guilty pleas.

“It is our responsibility under the Constitution to ensure that no criminal defendant — whether a citizen or not — is left to the mercies of incompetent counsel,” Justice Stevens wrote.

The Minutemen Civil Defense Corps is disbanding:

Carmen Mercer, the group's president, made the announcement only days after circulating a new call to action to its members to come to the border "locked, loaded and ready."

The group has struggled through leadership conflicts, financial mismanagement battles, and failed political campaigns over the years. This recent action reflects a split in the organization over accelerating liability threats due to its membership base which is difficult to control, increasingly hostile and aggressive.

The House of Commons has exonerated Dr. Phil Jones and CRU:

Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous....

Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.

We have a new START Treaty. Details are scanty and early reviews are mixed, but Cheryl Rofer makes an essential point:

[T]he best outcome may be what got us to this New START. The negotiations themselves are part of moving forward for the two nations. They give both a view into the other’s thinking, and they allow the negotiators to form personal relationships, or at least to become aware of the other’s limitations and strengths. Both sides view these negotiations as the beginning of a continuing interaction.

The EPA's new water regulations will prevent mountaintop mining:

The Obama administration Thursday spelled out tighter water quality standards for surface coal mines in Appalachia in a move that could curtail mountaintop removal mining.

The policy will sharply reduce the practice of filling valleys with waste from mountaintop removal and other types of surface mines in a six-state region, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said.

The DOT and EPA have finalized the new standards for auto emissions:

According to the EPA, today’s combined rule will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 960 million metric tons and save some 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the covered vehicles. The new rule, which covers more than 60 percent of all U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, will increase national gas-mileage standards for covered vehicles by about 5 percent per year, with the standard reaching 35.5 mpg for model year 2016, ahead of the existing deadline to achieve 35 mpg by 2020.

Colorado's largest utility is making a substantial shift from coal to natural gas:

Xcel Energy...has come to an agreement with the state government where it would retire coal plants powering about 900 megawatts by 2017 and replace them with natural gas-fired power. This move will mean a 30 percent reduction in Xcel’s Colorado coal fleet and a cut of as much as 5 million tons a year in carbon pollution. And this is all without federal legislation requiring cuts in emissions.

US manufacturers of guns, guitars, tools, and furniture are now required to reveal the source of the wood they use:

April 1st, 2010, marks the beginning of US enforcement for basic transparency requirements under the Lacey Act for guitars, revolvers, hand tools, pool cue, and certain furniture. This requires manufacturers of such items to declare basic information about where their wood comes from and how it is sourced.

"The declaration requirement of the Lacey Act is a critically important part of achieving greater supply chain transparency and legality, the over-arching goals set forth by Lacey," said Alexander von Bismarck of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in a press release."For the first time, companies are required by law to ask basic questions about their supply chains and understand exactly where their wood comes from."

Argentina has created a new protected area for the Rockhopper penguin:

Argentina has announced the establishment of a new protected area in the Province of Santa Cruz, along its 3,000 mile coastline. The area, named Parque Marino Isla Pingüino ('Penguin Island Marine Park'), covers 650 square miles (1,700 square kilometers) of coastal miles and nearly 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the Atlantic shore.

"This decision by Argentine officials represents a significant commitment by the government to protect an extraordinary marine ecosystem,” said Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Latin American Programs Avecita Chicchon. "The creation of this park will help to ensure a future for the threatened species in this region and will protect the area’s unique natural heritage."

Photo by Graham Harris/Wildlife Conservation Society

Wisconsin has severely restricted the sale of lawn fertilizers containing phosphorus:

Recognizing the need to protect Wisconsin's lakes and rivers, which support a large and economically important tourism industry, and which provide drinking water for a large portion of Wisconsin's residents, the State no longer allows sale of phosphorus-containing lawn products intended for maintenance (recurring) application. There are exemptions for starting up a new lawn, gardening, and so on, but the bottom line is that retailers and producers are going need to stock no-phosphorus lawn care products.

The Aramark food service company has agreed to pay more for tomatoes in order to benefit laborers:

Food service giant Aramark agreed to pay extra for Florida tomatoes produced under a strict code of conduct....

Farmworkers helped develop the agreement, which mandates a strict code of conduct for growers. Aramark also will pay a 1.5-cent premium for every pound of tomatoes picked, with the extra money going directly to harvesters, who will now earn 82 cents for each 32-pound bucket they pick, up from 50 cents per bucket. The raise means their annual earnings could rise from about $10,000 to between $16,000 and $17,000.

A brown kiwi has hatched at the Smithsonian National Zoo:

One of the world's most endangered birds--a brown kiwi (Apteryx mantelli)--hatched at the Smithsonian's National Zoo's Bird House early yesterday....

The box will be not be on exhibit, but will be accessible by webcam on the Zoo's Web site. "Since kiwis are nocturnal, the best time to view the chick exploring and foraging in its box will be in the evening," the zoo said.

Photo by Mehgan Murphy, National Zoo

California's "ghost fleet" will finally be cleared from Suisun Bay:

The U.S. Maritime Administration, the federal agency responsible for San Francisco Bay’s ghost fleet, has agreed to clean up and remove the abandoned and decaying ships from the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet....

Under the settlement, which must be approved by the Court, MARAD will permanently remove all of the obsolete vessels for disposal by September 2017, starting with the worst ships first. More immediately, MARAD will get rid of the piles of hazardous paint chips from vessel decks within 120 days and, by September of next year, clean all peeling paint from the exteriors of the 25 worst ships while in dry dock.

The EPA's new auto emission standards are based on grams of CO2 emitted per mile:

This is a good change. Miles per gallon of gas generally corresponded to a car's cleanliness in the past, but we're entering a time when cars can have multiple energy inputs and aren't just exclusively powered by gas. This will be a better way for the EPA to measure the environmental impact of cars in a future where they use many different fuel sources.

A small handheld device may allow health workers to check patients' immune status in a matter of minutes:

Right now it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quickly detect HIV in patients living in impoverished countries. That may all change soon, though — researchers at a California outfit called the Palo Alto Research Center have built an iPod-sized handheld device that can offer up an immune check-up in under 10 minutes — all with a prick of the finger.

The $250 prototype device analyzes blood taken from a finger prick by sending blood cells through a laser beam-illuminated channel, where a detector checks out light patterns to count CD4+ T cells — immune system cells killed by HIV....

The research center’s device could be invaluable to third world health workers who may not have access to labs.

Researchers have apparently grown human bones from liposuctioned fat:

The lab breakthrough is a huge step forward for bone-replacement procedures. Being able to grow any bone from actual human tissue could eliminate the need for bone grafts, a painful procedure that requires harvesting bone samples from other parts of the body. Growing human bones could also replace titanium bone implants, which aren’t as biocompatible as human tissue.

Researchers say they’ll test the grown bones in animals and a few humans, and the process may be used in hospitals within the next decade.

Washington DC's tax on plastic bags seems to have been amazingly effective:

[T]he number of plastic bags handed out by supermarkets and other establishments dropped from the 2009 monthly average of 22.5 million to just 3 million in January. While significantly reducing plastic waste, the tax simultaneously generated $150,000 in revenue, which will be used to clean up the Anacostia River.

The advent of devices like the iPad may drastically reduce the print run of magazines:

Magazines are being printed in volumes every day, and the sheer bulk in waste is staggering. Time magazine prints more than four million copies a year, all in a slick glossy format that has not always been recyclable. But now, a technological gadget could provide a means for curbing the amount of glossy magazines that are produced–and therefore the number that end up in landfills....

From a convenience standpoint it makes sense, since you can download a wrinkle free perfect copy when you feel the urge. There are no trips to the mailbox or news stand, and physical storage is a non-issue.

Music Makes Me, an audio blog "for lovers of 78s, vinyl, jazz, esoterica and the spoken word." Photographs of Tehran by Alfred Yaghobzadeh. A survey of Teabonics. Drawings made around dead flies. Map art by Susan Rankin. Photos by Sally Gall. And helpful advice on being kind to books.


The National Colour Palette (via Coudal). Microscopic stars and imaginary snapshots. Sleeping insects, covered in dew. Nineteenth-century printed illustrations based on photographs. Red and White. Paintings by Horace Trenerry. And paintings by Eric Ravilious.


Book covers by Eyke Volkmer. Ernst Haeckel: Die Radiolarien. A palette of palates. A tour of the Uglich Hydropower plant. Photos by Hans de Loof. Bird's-eye views of Lithuania. And a survey of vintage advertising art by Donald Brun.


Also, a movie, obviously.




(Illustration at top: "The Fort" by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1925.)

Clean and Lovely

If you're anything like me, you've gotten your fill of irresponsible, extremist rhetoric over the past few weeks. I think it's high time we put all that aside, so that we can consider -- as dispassionately as possible -- the necessity of exterminating Evildoers with drones.

As Danger Room notes, NPR's Neal Conan recently presided over a chinwag on this very topic. Given how déclassé our national discourse has been lately, I can't tell you how pleasant it was to hear this matter discussed politely and rationally, as befits civilized adults in The Greatest Country on Earth.

First, Conan gives us a timely lesson on military history:

PAUL (Caller): Good afternoon, gentlemen. I'm a former Marine, and I work in law enforcement, and so while I can't say that I perfectly understand all of the costs and all of the factors that are involved in this, I do support the drone strikes because that I feel that some of the alternatives, as one of your speakers just pointed out, are much bloodier, whether it would be a Dresden-style, you know, aerial rolling bombardment, artillery...

CONAN: Well, nobody bombs like that. The United States doesn't bomb like that anymore. They are JDAMs that are dropped with geo-positioning satellites that are quite accurate.

Perhaps I'm reading Conan uncharitably — which is easy to do, since he's the main reason I'd rather chew thumbtacks than listen to NPR — but it sounds as though he thinks the mass incineration of civilians in Dresden resulted from the inaccuracy of our weapons, rather than from the Allies' decision to drop several hundred tons of incendiary bombs in and around the city center, while using conventional explosives to destroy water mains and block evacuation routes.

The fact that replicas of German apartments were built at Dugway Proving Ground, complete with typical working-class furniture, in order to make sure that the firebombing campaign would produce the requisite shock and awe, also suggests that the raids on Dresden were "quite accurate," in their own little way.

Nitpicking aside, everyone agrees that drones sometimes kill bystanders who may or may not be innocent. Prof. Peter Alston, who is the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, expresses the misgivings of the average filthy hippie:

You can't simply say that any civilians who are killed are collateral damage, but that's too bad. You can't say that, one, because international law prohibits it, and two, because...you are dramatically turning off the people of Pakistan and making the war far harder for the United States to win.

Which prompts Prof. Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University to leap up and slap the hash pipe from Alston's teeth:

This phrase, international law doesn't permit, makes it sound that there's a world government, and there's a world court, and all these players out there behave, and this bad United States gets out of line.

There's a jungle out there, and the law of the jungle prevails....

Speaking as one of those schmucks who assumed not only that there is a world court, but also that treaties signed by the United States have some sort of legal and ethical force, I can't tell you how liberating it is to know that we actually get to do whatever the fuck we want 'cause nature is red in tooth and claw. I guess we should be grateful to the Islamofascists for impressing this point on us so forcefully.

Etzioni goes on to claim that there's no such thing as "a clean, lovely war." Which is quite accurate, as strawman arguments go. I myself have argued that our condemnation of chemical weapons may simply be an attempt to make conventional weapons seem civilized. I've even been known to sneer at environmentally friendly munitions.

And yet. It's one thing to acknowledge that killing is killing, whether it's done with phosgene or thermobaric shells. But the claim that international law must play second fiddle, at best, to "the law of the jungle" has legal and moral implications that go very far beyond the issue of drone operations in Pakistan.

The funny thing about Etzioni's position is that drones appeal to him because "the drone can linger hours over the target making sure lawyers can look at it." Obviously, he believes that war is cleaner and lovelier with drones than without. But when questions arise about the legality of (certain) drone attacks, citing the law apparently becomes "legalistic" and "simplistic." When confronting barbarians, you can't let the laws that supposedly distinguish you from barbarians tie your hands: if the Evildoers are unmanly enough to hide among civilians, it makes killing them that much more of a duty.

The argument that America is wonderfully judicious in its use of force, and that the law of the jungle prevails in any case, is either becoming more common, or I'm noticing it more. Either way, I'm pretty sure that laws are supposed to apply even to people who are quite certain that their intentions are good.

Strong Reactions

This week, we're all trying to figure out why a country that measures its self-esteem in firepower, and is culturally inclined to see killing people as the solution to virtually every problem on earth, should suddenly be prone to violent rhetoric and worse.

Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor acknowledges that there may be faults on both sides: for every violent extremist, there's someone who unfairly accused his or her ideology of being violent and extreme (even though most of the people who subscribe to it are merely angry and antisocial).

The sensible outlook, as usual, is that of right-leaning centrism, which is able to discern the basic moral equivalence between spouting eliminationist rhetoric, and pointing out that eliminationist rhetoric could make members of a gun-fetishizing subculture more likely to go on shooting sprees. The fact is, most teabaggers are far less likely to commit acts of reactionary violence than to view other people's acts of reactionary violence as the logical result of allowing a foreign-born Marxist usurper to occupy the White House. Others simply take a harmless onanistic pleasure in violent rhetoric, and shouldn't be accused of being dangerous, for our sake if not theirs. (You wouldn't like them when they're angry.)

The Republicans ratchet up the anger over the country's changing direction. The Democrats play to fears by painting large swaths of Americans as radicals, racists, and rabble-rousers.

Why should someone who is merely trying to ratchet up public anger be tarred with the epithet "rabble-rouser"? And why should violent anti-government rhetoric be called "radical," when everyone who matters knows that this term is reserved for committed jihadists like Code Pink?

It'd be one thing to "play to fears" by demonizing Muslims, or the French...but these are Americans we're talking about. Real Americans, to be precise. A little respect is in order. Or else.

Besides, if people didn't rail against ZOG from time to time, nothing would ever get done around here.

"It's part of the balancing act this country has faced the whole time," says John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "If we only had moderate rhetoric, how do you create change? When something is radically wrong, how do you not do something radical to get it back on track?"

"Love thy neighbor as thyself" is a far more radical proposition than any I've seen from the Teabaggers, but it doesn't seem to be quite as chic as threatening to gun down census workers. Since one can propose radical change in moderate terms (i.e., without inciting violence or dehumanizing people), perhaps it's not really reasonable to treat the paranoid style as our national Engine of Progress.

Jonsson very nearly says as much, in a luminous formulation you'd do well to staple to the door of your underground bunker.

[S]uch politics include a measure of risk. Words can, in fact, spark violence.

Well, yeah. The difficulty here lies in determining which violent threats against members of Congress are metaphors, and which are directives. Fortunately, Michelle Malkin has taken a break from posting the home addresses of her enemies to explain the distinction...or at least, the need for one.

For every truly reprehensible act of bigotry or violence, there are also instances of misrepresentation to manufacture controversy and "[criminalize] political dissent," as the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin puts it.

"Criminalizing" dissent is roughly equivalent with "censoring" it, which is roughly equivalent with expressing dismay at its content. That's the sort of thing up with which True Patriots will not put, so praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

Geer reassures us that all of this is part of a natural cycle. "Liberal agitators" say that conservatives are "unhinged," and conservatives say that liberals are secular Islamofascists in league with al-Qaeda. 'Twas ever thus! It's a peculiarity of our national character, it seems, and its current persistence has nothing to do with the business models or political interests of media outlets that treat unfounded accusations and their point-by-point refutations as epistemically equivalent.

So what happens next?

On healthcare, "the strong reactions from Republicans could put them on the fringe," he adds. "But if the healthcare reform backfires, then it's going to hurt the Democrats."

And if these "strong reactions" create a perception that healthcare reform has backfired? And this perception is presented as definitive by journalists whose commitment to "objectivity" excuses them from considering their own role in creating it? My guess is, it'll be further proof that this is a center-right country, and no commies need apply.

It's part of the balancing act this country has faced the whole time.

(Image via Freeper Madness.)