Christmas Under Siege!

Once again, the Right has spoken with one voice - and can it really be true that there are people in this country who are not yet sick of that whining, wheedling, insinuating voice? - and declared a state of national crisis: Christmas is under siege!

Needless to say, as soon as the GOP's barrel-organ struck up its customary dirge, our media monkeys began turning cartwheels and swinging from lamp-posts and baring their nasty little teeth. "Can Christmas be saved?" they chattered. "Have liberals gone too far?"

Sane people thought, "They can't be serious. These people are not going to sit there with a straight face, week after week, and tell us that all good Americans must band together to 'save Christmas.'" But as usual, sane people were wrong.

I have some scatterbrained, fever-addled thoughts on why so much effort is being devoted to this imaginary War on Christmas (putting aside the GOP's ongoing project of hustling the fundamentalists for spare change, which has to be taken as a given whenever Der Kulturkampf is waged).

Let's begin with a simple proposition: You can't put people through an economic wringer, frighten the wits out of them with terrorism alerts, depress them with the horrors of a chaotic, aimless war, poison their minds with hatred against their fellow citizens, and expect to get a bumper crop of Christmas cheer in return.

If Christmas is besieged, it's largely because Americans themselves are besieged. For many people in this country, the difference between what life could be and what it is tends to become very stark at this time of the year.

Christmas is a time when people tend to brood about security. Surrounded by family, they tend to worry about their children, and about aging parents who may need special and expensive care. Burdens that are heavy at the best of times can become enormous. Problems become harder to hide, while the need to hide them increases.

When Christmas became an orgy of consumerism, it also became a test of one's earning power. As such, it's also a measure of one's security. These are tests that an increasing number of us can't help but fail in George W. Bush's America. For many Americans, the only way to celebrate Jesus' birth in the style to which he's become accustomed will be to contact the moneylenders in their temple, and ask for a higher credit limit.

Sad to say, Christmas often makes us feel we have something to prove. If our Christmasses were happy, then our children's must be every bit as happy, or heads will roll. And if our Christmasses were unhappy, then our children's must be perfect; no one - least of all the children themselves - can be allowed to stand in the way of the Christmas juggernaut, lest they be crushed beneath its tinsel'd wheels.

It's also true that a holiday dedicated to celebrating feelings that we've been encouraged by our leaders to devalue, or to give up entirely - like compassion, and a sense of community - is going to be a bittersweet affair at best. Christmas is one of the most explicit examples of how we replace emotions with things. But what happens when we can't afford these things, or when we can have them only by giving up some of our security, as we do when we go into debt? Anxiety and guilt, at the very least.

Meanwhile, the fundamentalist hand-wringing over Christmas shows how easily metaphysical truths get replaced with empty ritual. Dogma always fills the vacuum left by retreating or confounded faith; no society will be more observant of ritual - or more unforgiving of dissent - than one that has lost sight of whatever was good and true in its faith. What we're seeing in religious conservatism today is not some Great Revival, but the anxious bluffing of a spiritual tradition that's bet the farm on a pair of deuces.

What I'm saying, in a very roundabout way, is that Christmas is a tremendous machine for generating free-floating anxiety. It stirs up deep, deep emotions having to do with family, security, comfort, home, and community. These are things that the Bush administration has either failed to protect or attacked furiously in the last four years, and this has created still more anxiety; it hits people, very literally, where they live, in ways that they can't necessarily define or explain.

The Right's greatest talent - perhaps its only talent - is to ferret out such anxieties and exploit them. It pinpoints the things that make people feel scared or disappointed or resentful or insecure, and proposes reductive, self-serving, emotionally convenient causes and solutions for them.

Do you feel bad? Do you feel worried? Don't reflect, don't try to understand...just lash out at atheists and beat up on gays! After all, every second you spend thinking, you run the risk of blaming the wrong people for your problems.

The "Christmas Under Siege" story is a pre-emptive strike; the Right's power depends on deflecting negative feelings away from its vicious economic policies, obviously, but also on hiding its spiritual emptiness. Rather than be called Scrooges themselves, they've sensibly decided to go on the attack. As always with the Right, accusation is confession.

What strikes me about the antics of Bill O'Reilly, as he fights his lonely battle to save Christmas, is that Scrooge honestly hated the holiday, and therefore refused to celebrate it; he didn't pretend to love it more deeply and fervently than anyone else. While Scrooge talked of tossing the poor into prisons and workhouses, and extolled the primacy of business over everything else in life, he didn't pretend to be brimming over with holiday cheer. That's because he was an emotional cripple, rather than a sanctimonious hypocrite.

Dickens understood hypocrites inside and out, and populated his later books with them in great numbers, but he didn't portray Scrooge as one of those tight-fisted, vicious, selfish people who pretends to be generous and jolly and pious. I imagine that's because he wanted Scrooge's redemption to be believable. If there's a single pious fraud in Dickens who has stopped being a pious fraud by the last chapter, I can't think of who it might be. Bounderby in Hard Times, an astounding hypocrite who is essentially identical to Bill O'Reilly, is not only not redeemed at the end of the book, but (in one of the most unsettling denouements ever written), establishes a society dedicated to creating simulacra of himself, so that the world will never suffer for lack of his wisdom. Dickens understood the difference between a person whose goodness has been submerged or sidetracked, like Scrooge, and a person who has torn goodness out by the roots and consciously replaced it with a ghastly counterfeit, like Bounderby. Or Bill O'Reilly.

Is Christmas under siege? For families whose loved ones have been living under literal siege in Iraq, thanks to the incompetence and callousness of the Bush administration, the question must seem trivial. For every family that lost a loved one in Iraq this year, in a war that will stand as a monument to dishonesty and bad judgment, the question must be irrelevant. For every bereaved parent or spouse or child or sibling who was horrified this week by Andrew Card's unblushing praise of Donald Rumsfeld - an utterly heartless man whose capacity for conscious evil has so far been limited only by his incompetence - the question must be insulting beyond belief.

Not just these suffering people, but the whole sane world must be appalled at the self-involvement of this country as we debate whether we're able to enjoy Christmas as much as we should, at a time when we're sending our children to kill and be killed in Iraq.

Starvation is On the March

World hunger increases; Bush cuts U.S. aid programs. Merry Christmas!

(Or as Bush would say, "Happy Holidays!")

[T]he Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping millions of people climb out of poverty.

[snip]

As a result, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services and other charities have suspended or eliminated programs that were intended to help the poor feed themselves through improvements in farming, education and health.

New Hope For the Wretched

Some of you may recall me harping on this point: it's been said that if 100 square miles of Nevada were covered with photovoltaics, it'd power the entire country. The obvious place to put the collectors, I argued, was on top of new and existing warehouses, carports, apartment buildings, and the like.

Turns out that San Diego, CA agrees with me; they've built a carport topped with photovoltaics, with excellent results.

(Full disclosure: it turns out that any number of people had already suggested this idea, so I'm not quite as ahead of the curve as I'd thought. This isn't the first time it's happened, either!)

The Limbaugh Effect

A new study on teen drug abuse shows that Rush Limbaugh has set an extremely bad example for America's youth:

Researchers are troubled by...a rise in the use of the pain-control narcotic OxyContin. Use of most other drugs declined or held steady.

If Limbaugh taught us nothing else in all the years he's been bellowing harebrained nonsense, he taught us that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a perfectly legitimate form of argument to use against one's opponents.

Therefore, there are two possibilities here. Did Limbaugh's high-profile abuse make this drug more attractive to curious teens? Or did the fact that he finally stopped popping several hundred tabs of Hillbilly Heroin per day mean that there was, for the first time in years, enough for everyone else?

Some Pig

Be it known:

"Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a spectacular job," the president's chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC's "This Week."

For some reason, when I read that quote, all I could think about was this book, which describes the power of words to create reality.

Next we'll be hearing that Rumsfeld is "terrific" and "radiant."

His Word Is As a Lamp Unto Our Feet

Once again, Bush's razor-sharp mind has slashed unerringly at hypocrisy and cant, and laid bare the throbbing heart of a complex situation.

Asked to weigh in on the recent spate of gruesome terrorist bombings in Iraq, the President put his renowned "gut instincts" to good use:

"No question about it," he said. "The bombers are having an effect."

Bush: A Nattering Nabob of Negativism

I missed this WaPo article on Friday, but it makes some excellent points. First off, it contrasts Bush's vaunted message of optimism about the future with his scaremongering on Social Security. Most notable is the fact that while he postulates economic growth as a result of his policies, he bases the SS "crisis" on his pessimistic vision that "a rising tide of retiring baby boomers will inevitably slow economic growth and bankrupt Social Security." In short, he can't make up his mind whether he's a prattling poltroon of positivism, or a nattering nabob of negativism.

There's plenty of evidence that he's the latter, at least as far as our futures are concerned. Needless to say, Bush's own economic future looks about as bright as you'd expect for someone who's looting taxpayer money for the benefit of himself and his friends. Bush's mixed message for America may boil down to something as simple as "I've got mine and yours, and you can go to hell."

If I understand Bush's vision of the future, his tax cuts will stimulate growth, but retiring baby boomers will nonetheless hobble growth and destroy Social Security. This means that we need to privatize SS to a certain extent, and tie it to stock-market performance, which will generate profits based on economic growth...the very growth that Bush says will be crippled by retiring baby boomers.

[T]hose projections are based on a dire view of the nation's economic future, one in which the growth in economic productivity crashes from the 3.4 percent rate of last year to 1.6 percent from 2012 on. Economic growth is anticipated to be cut nearly in half from historic trends, to 1.8 percent between 2015 and 2080.

We've been growing by more than three percent since the Civil War, so a 68-year run of economic slowdown sounds to me like a less than ideal scenario for the stock market.

And that's precisely the complaint that sensible economists have with Bush's projections: you don't get to posit a massive economic slowdown on the one hand (traditional 3.5-percent growth limping along at half that rate for decades), while assuming typical stock-market returns of roughly 7.8 percent on the other.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, which ardently opposes Bush's Social Security proposals, has concluded that stock gains under the trustees' economic projections would be 4.2 percent, a yield low enough to throw all of the White House's projected benefit gains into doubt.

Ideally, that would settle that. However, there was another very interesting quote in this article:

"Demography is destiny," Time Warner Inc. Chairman Richard D. Parsons said a day later, maintaining that an aging population will force Social Security changes, regardless of long-run economic growth.

That sounds kind of irrational. Fortunately, Parsons is a voice in the wilderness. After all, who's going to listen to anything the chairman of the biggest media conglomerate in the world says?

Surf's Up!

This article describes some of the unpleasant surprises that England's beaches have in store for the unwary:

The seas and beaches around the British Isles are polluted with a cocktail of man-made detritus, including anti-tank missiles, phials of anthrax vaccine, drums of toxic chemicals and even parts of Ministry of Defence missile systems, according to one of the most authoritative reports on the marine environment.

[snip]

Those injured...included surfers off the west of Scotland who were burnt after discarded flares ignited. A West Country beachcomber collapsed after inspecting a drum of chemicals on a Devon beach. One of the most disturbing cases involved almost 500 phials of anthrax vaccine that had drifted into a Dorset bay...Safety alerts were issued after people stumbled across anti-tank mines on two popular Norfolk beaches. Flammable liquids had to be cleared from a Guernsey beach last summer.

'It is quite alarming when we get reports of materials self-igniting on beaches,' Dixon said.

No doubt. For those who don't have the stamina to read the entire article, here's the punchline: the British government has plans to build a liquid gas terminal near a sunken munitions ship containing "1,400 tonnes of unsalvaged explosives and detonators."

Bleeding-Edge Technology

California's wind farms are killing thousands of birds every year. What's to be done? Here's one solution:

If environmentalists and state officials have their way, the towering windmills that dot the Altamont Pass will be replaced and moved to prevent the killing of thousands of birds annually, including species protected under federal and state laws.

In an effort to curtail the carnage, they say the turbines -- which provide one-third of California's wind power -- should be newer, taller models and be concentrated on the leeward side of the hills.

Yeah, they could do that. Or they could encase the existing turbines in a protective cage, by using some version of this breakthrough technology.

I wonder which solution would be cheaper and more effective?

Hardly Working

Don Rumsfeld is going to be taking some time out from his busy schedule, so that he can start signing death letters personally.

Previously, the letters were signed mechanically, by an unfeeling piece of office equipment.

From here on out, they'll be signed mechanically, by an unfeeling piece of office equipment.

Apocrypha

According to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), Iranians plan to crash airliners into New Hampshire's Seabrook nuclear plant. However, state and plant officals discount the reports.

Al Griffith, spokesman for Seabrook Station, said he’s not sure why this issue is resurfacing now, nearly two years after he first responded to media inquiries about threats against nuclear power plants.

It's resurfacing now because Weldon claims to have secret information from a former official of the Shah's regime, whom he refers to - imaginatively enough - as "Ali." He claims to have gone to the CIA with the information, and to a Senate intelligence oversight panel, and to have been rebuffed. It's no surprise, therefore, that as the New York Sun reports:

[T]he new book from Mr. Weldon, based in part on his meetings with Ali, will provide fresh ammunition for the Republicans against an intelligence community perceived by the White House as hostile to the president's policies.

The Sun article goes on to take a thinly veiled position of advocacy for Weldon's claims, noting that

[I]f Mr. Weldon's source turns out to be right, America could also be losing a valuable intelligence asset on Iran, a country where most intelligence analysts in America concede the CIA has too few human sources. The congressman's experience with America's spy service in the last year echoes frustrations from other American officials and analysts who have cultivated Iranians willing to provide America with intelligence, but who have been ignored.

Now, you can't make a claim like that without giving an example, so naturally the Sun complies:

After a December 2001 meeting in Rome between Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar, the State Department and CIA went out of their way to shut down the channel. Mr. Franklin is now the target of a grand jury investigation into alleged espionage activities for passing information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

These are very deep waters indeed; you can judge for yourself whether this is a good example of the CIA mishandling intelligence matters.

In any case, I don't believe in this "Ali." Weldon was intimately involved with the Rumsfeld Missile Defense Commission, which heavily overstated the threat of an Iranian attack on U.S. soil. And as one of Washington's most avid sucklers at the teat of the defense industry (Boeing, in particular) he's been a consistent scaremonger about every other apocryphal danger that could possibly justify increased defense spending.

Also, Weldon has a more personal gripe with the CIA and the State Department:

Karen Weldon, an inexperienced 29-year-old lobbyist from suburban Philadelphia, seemed an unlikely choice for clients seeking global public relations services. Yet her tiny firm was selected last year for a plum $240,000 contract to promote the good works of a wealthy Serbian family that had been linked to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

Despite a lack of professional credentials, she had one notable asset — her father, U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who is a leading voice in Washington on former Eastern Bloc affairs. She got the contract after he championed the efforts of two family members, Dragomir and Bogoljub Karic, to win U.S. visas from the State Department, which so far has refused them entry.

[snip]

Intelligence officials warned Weldon that the brothers were too close to Milosevic, who is accused of leading the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslav federation.
But the congressman has praised the Karics, who own a vast empire of banking, telecommunication and other firms, as model business leaders and humanitarians. He has portrayed them as victims of faulty intelligence reports and, last month, asked the CIA to sit down with them and sort things out. He has repeatedly pressed the State Department to give them visas.

Dual-Use Technology

Many people are aware that the state legislatures of Alabama, Georgia and Texas have laws forbidding the marketing of vibrators. Now, however, it transpires that cellphones are being used as vibrators.

So what's the solution, if you're someone who wants to crack down on machine-aided forms of self-stimulation? Do you outlaw downloads of programs like Purring Kitty? Do you outlaw phone attachments like the ones offered at Dial-An-Orgasm? Or do you force phone manufacturers to stop offering "vibrate" alerts?

And what about the children? When you give your teen daughter a cellphone, aren't you running the risk of turning her into a compulsive masturbatrix? Would you not reproach yourself if, thanks to your thoughtlesness, she forsook childhood's wholesome amusements, and became yet another slack-jawed, hollow-eyed victim of unbridled lubricity? Shouldn't there be parental controls that will block the phone's ability to vibrate unless a code is entered?

I suspect that absurd questions like these are currently bedeviling the brains of our nation's most prominent busybodies.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

A Modest Proposal

Rationing of flu shots has apparently left the United States with a large surplus of vaccine. What's to be done? Here's one opinion:

[A] federal advisory panel Friday recommended the government ease restrictions on the nation's supply and make shots available to everyone 50 and older. The move was prompted by worries all of a sudden that tens of thousands of doses of flu vaccine might go to waste.

I have a better idea. Let's donate surplus vaccine to Asian countries where H5N1 avian flu is rampant, and distribute it to people who work with poultry (as Canada did back in January). Doing so could lessen the chances of human coinfection with H5N1 and this season's flu strain, and could thus postpone or prevent a deadly flu pandemic. Sounds like rational self-interest to me!

Junk Science

Okay, let's pretend for a moment that there's no evidence whatsoever that global warming presents a problem. Let's pretend it's all a matter of interpretation.

Now, how does this statement come across, as a simple matter of logic?

Bjorn Lomborg...dismissed concerns about the catastrophic impacts of rising sea levels.

"We are probably gong to see sea levels rise about 50 centimeters over the coming century. Now that is a substantial amount, but what we don't remember is that in the last century they rose somewhere between 10 and 25 centimeters - and did anyone notice? I mean it is something we dealt with," Lomborg told CNSNews.com.

Fair enough. Suppose I lost 5 to 10 percent of my income in a given period, but was able to "deal with it." Does that say anything about my ability to deal with a further loss of 20 percent? Of course not. Below a certain income level, I'm not going to be able to sustain myself. Where that level is depends on a variety of specific factors (my rent, my burden of debt), all of which have to be addressed. Whatever you believe about global warming - and Lomberg concedes that sea levels are rising because of it - you can't logically say "We dealt with 25 centimeters and no one noticed; therefore, another 50 centimeters is not a serious problem." That's just stupid. Lomborg, it's worth noting, holds no degree in environmental science or climatology; he's a political science major, and his work in environmental science has been torn to shreds by a number of experts in Scientific American. For more information on this astonishingly weird man, you can check out the very entertaining Lomborg-Errors website.

But if you really wish to be guided by illogical claims, made by people with no background in climatology or meteorology or environmental science, forget Lomborg: Myron Ebell is your man. Ebell holds degrees in economics; he has no expertise in the matter of climate change whatsoever, as this next quote demonstrates:

...Ebell questioned why rising Arctic temperatures were something to fear. "If global warming in the Arctic is such a problem, why do 80 percent of Canadians live within 50 miles of the U.S. border?" Ebell asked rhetorically. "If Canada warmed up a bit they might be able to live in more of their own country," he added.

And if San Francisco started freezing over in the winter, I could go sledding down Telegraph Hill. But so what? What's at issue here isn't where people can or can't live, it's what the effect of a warmer climate would be on all the biological and meteorological processes now happening in the Arctic.

Ebell's a member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a far-right think-tank comprised mainly of political scientists and economists with no background in hard science; you can read about them here.

Rummy666@hotmail.com

Defense Tech reports the odd news that Donald Rumsfeld very probably has no e-mail address:

Rumsfeld apparently has strong opinions on how to e-mail and keep an inbox clean....It wouldn't be the first time the SECDEF gave unsolicited advice on a subject about which he knows very little.

You could do worse than read, and marvel at, this little story. I find it very plausible, actually. I've run into many men of a certain age and occupation who consider typing of any kind to be woman's work, and accordingly have huge mental blocks against e-mail. They deal with it grudgingly, if at all.

On the other hand, it's also possible that Rumsfeld is so lazy, callous, and disengaged that he simply doesn't need an e-mail address. When neither your job nor your financial security depends on being aware and competent, why should you wade through dozens of Viagra ads, and the imprecations of ten thousand angry soldiers, and yet another mildly risque e-greeting card from Prince Bandar, in order to get some tidbit of information you know you're just going to ignore?

The Festive Season

Joe Spector of Overland Park, Kansas, has placed one flag in his yard for each of the more than 1300 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. He's displaying the flags instead of Christmas decorations. Photo via Cryptome.

All Wrong

Did you happen to wonder where that unlicensed doctor from Florida got the botox he injected into his hapless patients? If so, you're not alone:

Homeland Security restrictions should have prevented an unlicensed doctor in Broward County from buying concentrated botulinum toxin, widely recognized as the most poisonous substance and a feared bioterrorism agent.

Yet the deadly toxin that landed four Florida residents in intensive care last month was made in a California lab, marketed by an Arizona biological supply company and shipped to Broward without raising any alarms.

So far, so good. Homeland security is a toothless sham...no surprises there. But get this:

"A single gram of crystalline toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, would kill more than a million people," the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, "although technical factors would make such dissemination difficult."

"Difficult" is an understatement; "impossible," though also inaccurate, would be closer to the truth. The chance of a terrorist killing a million people with a gram of botulinum toxin is effectively nil.

Surely this is the worst of all possible worlds: the threat from bioterrorism gets blown completely out of proportion by the media, while the Department of Homeland Security allows bioterror agents to be marketed, sold, and injected into people by unlicensed doctors. Good job, everyone! Take a nice long vacation...you've earned it!

How Things Affect Other Things

As I've noted elsewhere, scientists are increasingly willing to consider the possibility that things may, in some cases, affect other things:

Welcome to the new science of ecotoxicology in which scientists try to understand how the synthetic chemicals we're pouring into our environment affect the way earthly life goes about its business.

Recent research about musk fragrances and mussels illustrates this point. When gills from live mussels were exposed to water with low concentrations of six commercial musks, they were not poisoned....That was expected.

But after two hours, the researchers washed the gills and put them in musk-free water that also contained a red dye. Cells in the gill tissue took up the dye. That was not expected.

Those cells have a mechanism to detect a foreign substance...and keep it out. That worked for cells not exposed to the musk in the first place. Cells that had been exposed lost this natural defense.

That finding has a disturbing global implication....Cells in many animal species, including humans, use the same protective mechanism to ward off foreign substances.

[snip]

Laboratory research that leads to wider study is a hallmark of ecotoxicology. Scientists wouldn't know what to look for in the field without it.

Yet, "it is a virtual certainty that other effects are occurring in the field that we are presently overlooking in the lab," note the editors of Environmental Science & Technology, an American Chemical Society journal, which devoted a special issue to this new science.

Well, thank goodness that we have a "new science" upon this tired earth - a science based on "laboratory research that leads to wider study," which has already revolutionized our thinking by suggesting that things may happen in the world that are overlooked in the laboratory.

Science, to me, has always been about the investigation of relationships: how things affect other things. Forgive me for harping on this yet again, but the shelves of our bookstores are groaning under the weight of pop-science books about chaos theory. At this point, the concept that you can't necessarily ignore even the most minute aspects of a dynamic system should be pretty well understood.

A Republican for Transparency?

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) claims that he'll introduce legislation mandating strict deadlines for governmental compliance with FOIA requests.

[A]gencies are supposed to provide information on a timely basis. That rarely happens. In fact, the median response time from the Agriculture Department is 905 business days; it's 1,113 from the Environmental Protection Agency. In some of the most extreme examples, requests made in the 1980s still haven't been processed.

Cornyn wants to put teeth in the FOIA by creating strict deadlines for agencies to cough up information. He also wants to extend the act to cover the legislative branch, which conveniently exempted itself from its provisions.

"We the people are the bosses and not the servants," he said. "If we the people are going to remain well-informed so we can tell our elected officials what we want and what we won't put up with, we have to be able to be informed."

Sounds good to me! Cornyn has one of the worst voting records in the Senate, so I'm a bit skeptical of his motives (not least because such a bill is obviously not very likely to make it through this Congress). But if he's actually serious, good for him.