Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This here's Cerastomata magnifica.

Christ almighty, what a week. Something new tomorrow. I promise!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Here's Halgerda tessellata, displaying the cosmopolitan insouciance that has made it the envy of boulevardiers from Manitoba to Kwajalein.

I may be able to write some actual posts in the next few days. I'm tantalizingly close to being done with my nightmare project, and must wait for a couple of files to arrive before I can continue, so it's entirely possible that I'll get back to a slightly more normal posting schedule over the weekend. What's far more exciting is the thought that I'll soon get back to reading my accustomed daily blogs. I've missed them!

Thanks for bearing with me in the meantime. I appreciate the kind e-mails I've gotten!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Hypselodoris infucata in the house, y'all!

As for me, I can't quite decide whether to drink rat poison, or get back to work.

I know...I'll get back to work so that I can afford rat poison! Ha!

Enough of this gay badinage. Have a nice weekend, friends!

No News Is Good News

For the past year, I've read about two hours' worth of news and blogs per day, by cycling through roughly sixty bookmarked pages. I haven't had time to do that for the last couple of weeks, and on scrolling through my accustomed sites this morning I felt completely overwhelmed. My impulse, frankly, was to run away from it all. I feel like I have a better understanding of the public's lack of interest in current events.

It's been nice, for instance, not to think about H5N1. Effect Measure recommends a new site called EPIDEMIca; I second the recommendation. It's very...thorough. Distressingly so. But the information is presented responsibly and skeptically.

Lately I've been thinking about the Republicans' nonsensical claim that we must fight terrorists in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them here. It'd be nice if we took that approach to epidemic disease. Given a choice between spending $300 billion of taxpayer money on the Iraq War, and $300 billion on global flu surveillance and research, I think I would've been tempted to pick the latter.

It's also been nice not to be exposed to stories like this one from Pharyngula, which suggests that the military is coming perilously close to impressment, a practice that we once went to war to stop.

And I've done just fine without being exposed to metaphors for modern society like this dead-end fire exit.

On the other hand, where but the Internet could I find pictures like this?

In other news, I have a family of pacific slope flycatchers in my carport, including four hatchlings whose tiny beaks stand at attention when I open the car door. I'm going to try to post photos of 'em in the next couple of days. (Though if I don't cut my bamboo soon, I may never be able to leave the house again.)

Noblesse Oblige

I thought I was done with book blogging after the last time, but when Revere writes me a prescription, I'm obliged to swallow it.

Number of books I own

Who's counting? My guess is roughly 6000 - 8000, but I'm constantly buying and selling 'em. One thing I can say for certain is that there's not enough room in my house for them. They're piled absolutely everywhere. It's obsessive behavior, and no good can come of it.

Last book I bought

If I could buy one book at a time, I'd be a better person. Here's the last batch I picked up:

Salt Dreams by William DeBuys and Joan Myers. This is a handsome book on the Salton Sea/Imperial Valley region, which is one of California's many lovely disaster areas. I've read about half of it, and it's pretty great.

Cold War Hothouses. This is a collection of essays on cold war culture and technology, which I bought mainly for its article on the Mission 66 national parks project. Some of the other essays look interesting, too.

Geographies of Exclusion by David Sibley. I read the chapter on "the exclusion of knowledge" and was fascinated by its brief discussion of "map-flapping," an 1885 method of transmitting mapped data by telegraph which was essentially a very, very slow form of fax machine. I had to buy it just for that; not sure how the rest of it'll be.

Civil Society and Fanaticism by Dominique Colas. The title pretty much gives this one away. It seemed timely, so into the pile it went.

Lichtenburg's The Waste Books. This is one of those books I've picked up many times over the years, but something in it always puts me off (I generally don't go in for Gnomic Utterance even when it's not trite). But I had money left on the credit slip and there's a nice new edition out, so what the heck. What sold me was line 98, which says nothing more than "A means of blowing out teeth with gunpowder."

I suspect I'll end up throwing it across the room at least once, all the same. Fuck aphorism, and (almost) all who sail with her!

Last book I read

It was either Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception or Gershom Scholem's Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship.

Five books that mean a lot to me

This'll be utterly redundant, but just about anything by Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Comyns, Tove Jansson, Herman Melville, or Simone Weil.

There you have it.

Now, I have to pass this on to five other bloggers...let's see...

Joseph at PublicOrgTheory
Wayne at Niches
Eli at Multi Medium
Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life
Monkeygrinder at Peak Energy

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Good heavens. Another week gone by already? Time flies when your workday starts at 8 AM and runs 'til 3 AM!

My recent work schedule may have me teetering vertiginously on the edge of mental and physical collapse, but I hope you'll note that I still found time to ply you with this intimate (yet tasteful!) snapshot of Chromodoris lochi doing its hermaphroditic thing.

As for Friday Hope Blogging...suffice it to say that I hope I can write 200 pages in five days!

In summation: God damn everything but the circus.

Foul Weather Friends

The mainstream media seem to be noticing - finally - that Rick Santorum received money from the CEO of AccuWeather, one of the nation's largest providers of weather data, before introducing a bill that could restrict the ability of the National Weather Service to provide free weather information.

"I don't think there's any coincidence between the two," Santorum said. "It's just that I happened to have a fundraiser in the town he was in."

Combined, Joel Myers and his brother, Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, have donated more than $11,000 to Santorum and the Republican Party since 2003, according to FEC filings compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine, a campaign finance tracking group.

There are a couple of interesting points about this story. First, it's important to remember that AccuWeather uses taxpayer-funded NWS data for its forecasts, and that a good deal of weather mapping and modeling technology comes from research funded by federal grants. It seems rather high-handed for a private firm to suckle so avidly at the public teat, and then complain, as Rick Santorum did on AccuWeather's behalf, that

"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free...."

Second, AccuWeather has misrepresented weather data for the benefit of the climate-change deniers at the Global Climate Coalition.

New Scientist explains:

[A] weather forecasting company called Accu-Weather published a report claiming that global warming over the past century had been "slight" and there was "no convincing observational evidence that...extreme temperature and precipitation events are on the rise". It turned out that the latter assertion was based on temperature readings from just three American weather stations and precipitation data from one. AccuWeather "shot themselves in the foot", according to Bruce Callander, head of the IPCC scientific unit at the Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre in Britain.

The Accu-Weather report was commissioned by a lobbying organisation called the Global Climate Coalition, which was set up in 1989 "to coordinate business participation in the scientific and policy debate on the global climate change issue". Its members include many big American producers and consumers of coal, oil and electricity - such as Dow Chemicals and the National Coal Association - all of whom might suffer from controls on emissions of carbon dioxide.

You can read a description of AccuWeather's scrupulous methodological errors here.

I really see no reason why our nation's laws should be rewritten - yet again - to accomodate a firm that has almost certainly perpetrated scientific fraud.

E-Waste and EPR in NYC

Treehugger reports on New York City's attempt to pass an EPR law requiring electronics manufacturers to take back their discarded and broken products. Companies that fail to comply with this law would lose the right to sell their products in NYC.

I'm a huge fan of EPR laws. Currently, manufacturers shift the cost of disposal and pollution onto taxpayers. Under EPR, they bear the economic brunt of their own bad decisions. Therefore, they have a strong financual incentive to reuse, recycle, and redesign their products.

This bill has already been called "onerous" by an industry insider, but it's nothing of the sort. It would require manufacturers to take back 30 percent of their devices by 2010, or alternatively, to offset the social costs of their pollution by donating used devices to schools and nonprofit groups. Thirty percent is nothing, and I don't believe in "mitigating" the noxious effects of heavy-metal leachates by donating Xboxes to public schools.

Which doesn't mean I'm against this law...far from it! I'm just noting how ridiculous it is that municipalities must negotiate with the makers of luxury items over how much of their toxic mess they're obliged to clean up. EPR laws make perfect sense, most of them are far less stringent than they should be, and no one should listen to the whining of manufacturers who are, in essence, refusing to meet the minimum standards of good citizenship.

Deep-Sea Antibiotics

Many readers are probably aware of the rise in cases of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Normally, this dangerous infection is found in hospitals, but lately cases have been turning up among the general public at an alarming rate.

However, it looks as though MRSA may have met its match:

UK experts from the Universities of Kent and Newcastle found a new species of a common bacterium that lives in the sea beds of Japan can kill MRSA.

Actinomycete bacteria are known for their antibiotic properties. The new species, verrucosispora maris, produces a unique antibiotic, abyssomicin C.

As one of the researchers notes:

"The ones from the bottom of the sea have not come into contact with disease-forming bacteria [on land] which therefore have not got any resistance to them."

One wonders what else is down there. Unfortunately, we're more interested in searching the oceans for oil than medicine. The discovery of abyssomicin C shows just how useful it is to leave ecosystems intact until we know what's in them.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is none other than Ceratosoma alleni, an improbable type of nudibranch discovered in 1993 by Jerry Allen of Tucson.

He wasn't the first person to see it, mind you...he was the first person to believe he'd seen it.

Friday Hope Blogging

As a general rule, Congress isn't the place to seek a medicine for one's melancholy. But this week, I do have some fair-to-middling positive news to report from those sacred precints.

I've often discussed the problems with chemical weapons disposal, including the Army's demented plan to dump hydrolysed VX nerve agent into the Delaware River.

Now, in a bipartisan effort, the House of Representatives has passed a bill with an amendment that would halt the Army's disposal plan. It goes to the Senate next, of course, and I think it stands a good chance of passing. But it wouldn't do any harm to give your senators a call...especially if you live in Pennsylvania, Delaware, or New Jersey.

Note that this is an amendment to a financial authorization bill for the DoD, so the fight in the Senate will be to avoid having it removed; the bill is likely to pass whether the amendment's there or not.

Another bill that deserves support is The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2005 (S.742/H.R. 2562). This bill would make it illegal to put nontherapeutic antibiotics in animal feed.

This is a no-brainer, with support from the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, and more than 350 other organizations.

After scanning the bill, I'd say that if anything, it leaves a few too many loopholes open for irresponsible and unnecessary use of antibiotics. But it's a good start. You can get more information on the costs and dangers of unnecessary antibiotic use here.

Apparently, the House also voted to forbid studies that deliberately expose human volunteers to pesticides. The EPA had ostentatiously stopped a toxicology study on pesticides that used children as guinea-pigs, but reserved the right to conduct similar studies. I haven't seen the details of the House vote yet, so I can't comment. Sounds promising, though.

I continue to feel, as I've argued elsewhere, that issues like these are the key to winning congressional races in '06 and beyond.

Speaking of winning congressional races, I'm very cautiously optmistic about Randall Terry's interest in running against Florida state senator Jim King (R-FL). Whether it's a real plan, or just a crazed warning shot across the bow, it's encouraging:

[S]tate Republicans could be willing to risk alienating voters in a general election to fight for their values, even with a polarizing candidate such as Terry, analysts said.

"We're talking about conservative Christian voters who today are a huge part of the Republican Party base, and King has been willing to say `No' from time to time," said David Niven, a former political science professor at Florida Atlantic University. "King has been willing to say `No' to (Gov.) Jeb Bush and he's been willing to say `No' to the extreme religious voices within the Republican Party. Right now they're not used to hearing that."

Trouble in paradise, eh? It'll be interesting to see how the amoral, corporatist, GOP greedheads go about re-bottling their flock of fundamentalist djinn. My guess is it may be a bigger job than they bargained for. With a bit of luck, we'll see a battle worthy of the Kilkenny cats.

Nature's Little Kings

Over at PublicOrgTheory, Joseph Logan suggests that power is something people don't feel comfortable discussing:

Most news strikes me as being discussions of power without overtly discussing power. A story on President Bush's approval ratings nearing an all-time low is really about his power to push his agenda...but the article doesn't say that. A story on the Supreme Court's review of abortion is about the power of religious and feminist groups to advance their agendas...but the article doesn't say that. A story on a police crackdown in Zimbabwe is about maintaining or subverting existing power structures...but the article doesn't say that.

One might protest that power is an assumed aspect of everyday life, something so obvious as to not need highlighting. I disagree....I believe the tendency to assume it implicit in public life is a mechanism for avoiding it altogether.

I think there's some truth to that, and it brings a few scattered thoughts to mind. First, I'd argue that what we tend to call "power," these days, is paranoia and sadism that focuses mechanically on increasing the weakness and vulnerability of others.

Real power is the willingness to surrender oneself to goodness rather than to paranoia and sadism, or to pinched greed and calculation. Still, in political and social terms, "power" most reliably comes when you increase the weakness and vulnerability of others. The assumption seems to be that when you've increased someone else's weakness and vulnerability, you've decreased your own. Which is insane, of course.

So if power really is taboo, I'd imagine it's because weakness is taboo. Discussions about power are - or should be - uncomfortable partially because they're revealing; one's worship of power offers insight into what one is afraid of, and ashamed of, and where one's vulnerabilities lie, and whether or not one is sane.

Notwithstanding, absolute power is now an unabashed rallying-cry on the Right, where self-awareness has never been popular. The breast-beating and garment-rending over the filibuster compromise is a good example of the perennial state of dissatisfaction in which conservatives find themselves; no sooner do they proclaim themselves the Ultimate Ass-Kickin' Rulers of the Universe than they're gnawed by the rodent teeth of the Enemy Within, and go back to bemoaning their eternal victimhood.

Why does everybody pick on them, anyway? Why can't they get a break? All they're asking for is power so complete that it'll save them from the horrors of time, sex, and death. But for some reason, wicked people keep snatching this pretty bauble away. It seems odd that authoritarians simultaneously manage to see themselves as all-powerful and wretchedly weak...until you consider that the power is the mirror image of the weakness. Or, if you prefer, it's the gauze that binds their wounds.

It's amazing, really. The terrors that haunt these people have convinced them that roughly fifty percent of the country - a population that includes their neighbors and co-workers, their doctors and nurses, their customers and suppliers...their own children, in some cases - must be reduced to absolute powerlessness and driven into the Outer Darkness. That's a dead-end proposition if I've ever seen one.

But since power is illusory, it's no surprise that the people who worship it live in a fantasy world. One part of their fantasy is that they're self-sufficient; whatever they need, they can get it themselves. Another is that their aggression will somehow keep death and disaster at bay; what they do to others will never be done to them.

The Elizabethan poet John Davies had a similarly poignant self-regard, but he also had a clear sense of where his power ended:

I know I am one of Nature's little kings,
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

By contrast, Nature's Little Kings on the Right recall Brecht's line in "As You Make Your Bed":

If somebody's going to be trampled, it's you.
And if someone's going to do the trampling, it's me.

Apropos of which, perhaps one of the things that infuriates conservatives about the theory of evolution is the central role of chance. Absolute power is threatened by blind chance; therefore, many conservatives have apparently concluded not that absolute power is impossible, but that chance doesn't exist. (And it may not, for all I know.)

And yet, even the most powerful people sometimes fall victim to seemingly random events...as, for instance, when their own actions destroy them in a simple instance of cause and effect. Thus, it's reported by Otto Friedrich that when an SS officer lay dying in the mud, after being knifed by a girl he'd raped, he moaned, "What did I ever do to deserve this agony?"

That's the clearest example I know of the authoritarian understanding of power and causality. What isn't under their power, they rule with an iron fist and God's imprimatur, from now 'til Doomsday. What is under their power remains completely out of their hands, and utterly unpredictable.

The point being, I suppose, that if we want to talk about power, we need to bone up on pathology. It may be some time yet before they're prised apart.

Glorified Puddles

A fine article in the St. Petersburg Times explains how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is allowing tens of thousands of acres of Florida wetlands to be turned into housing developments and malls, in defiance of the law, common sense, and the public interest.

The destruction itself isn't news, of course. The dream-logic of growth for growth's sake - which, like malignant cancer, is eminently natural - elevates destruction to a quasi-religious duty. What's interesting about wetland destruction in Florida is the role played by mitigation banking, that wonderful new free-market solution to all our environmental woes.

In 1999, Wal-Mart proposed a supercenter on 28 acres near the Cypress Lakes development in Oldsmar. Smack in the middle was a five-acre wetland that Wal-Mart said had to go.

The corps ordered something called "mitigation," the linchpin of the no net loss policy. It generally requires offsetting losses by creating new wetlands. But man-made wetlands frequently fail, a fact corps officials are well aware of.

"Mitigation is a fraud," said Anderson, the retired corps permit reviewer.

It turns out that in Florida, "mitigation" often means flooding an acre or two of ground in order to make up for destroying a complex aquatic ecosystem. Of course, this means you end up with two ruined ecosystems. But who's counting?

In Wal-Mart's case, they created "wetlands" around their supercenter's parking lot. To decorate these glorified puddles, they transplanted vegetation and cypress trees from the doomed wetland. In an arrangement typical of mitigation-banking schemes, they also agreed to preserve 26 acres of wetlands elsewhere.

And here's what happened:

Five years later, many of the transplanted trees are dead. Rainstorms send polluted water from the parking lot flowing into the largest man-made wetland, which doubles as a retention pond....And the preserved wetland? Without the corps' knowledge, Wal-Mart tried to sell it for development. Only after a civic group protested did the the corps force Wal-Mart to donate the land to Pinellas County.

There you have it: free-market solutions in action.

Occurrences like these are always presented as astonishing aberrations, and yet they're as persistent and predictable as virtually any natural phenomena on earth. This is what that hopelessly counterintuitive abstraction we call the free market does, and what any rational person must expect it to do in the future (unless it's sunk with all hands, as befits a pirate vessel).

Economic corruption is no less of an empirically verifiable physical fact than gravity, not least in that they both pull all of us down together. And yet, our experts will confess to nothing more than rueful surprise when things go as they always have:

James Connaughton, President George W. Bush's top environmental adviser, acknowledges that "sometimes some of these projects don't work out the way we think they should."

Obviously, the problem is that our legislators are dewy-eyed idealists, innocent as suckling babes of industry's slavering appetite for unethical short-term profit. And who are we to burden these trusting hearts with the truth? To describe our reality as it is would be an act of war against Candyland, that peaceable kingdom whose citizens never hurt a living soul.

The Adult Table

A clever fellow named George Simpson is gloating over a Pew study that suggests bloggers had little influence on the 2004 presidential elections.

This makes Simpson happy, because he thinks people should get their news from Trained Professionals.

We tend to undervalue the job that news organizations do, especially when they pull a Janet Cooke or Jayson Blair. But god help us if the Fourth Estate was not there to keep the other three (Kings, Lords, and Commons) in check, and keep us informed.

God help us, indeed. We might start believing in manufactured crises, and disbelieving in real ones. In a worst-case scenario, we might even end up going to war under false pretences.

Isn't that why we read newspapers and watch TV news, so that somebody with some professional judgment can search through all the chaff and find the grains of wheat?

Well, the media made professional judgments in regards to the Iraq War; unfortunately, the "grains of wheat" turned out to be forgeries and lies. Tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead and dying because a majority of media outlets chose to act as sedulous apes for BushCo, instead of keeping its creatures "in check."

Nonetheless, Simpson - who obviously has no close relatives deployed in Iraq - finds it pleasant to sit amid the smoking ruins of representative democracy, and enjoy the droll spectacle of the "Bursting Blog Bubble."

With all the press screw-ups with which we are all now too familiar, I still tend to trust the AP over some guy who sits around all day banging out his thoughts--presumably for posterity (or bragging rights).

You have to love the term "some guy." Many blogs - this one, for instance - are indeed the work of "some guy." But blogs like Arms Control Wonk and Effect Measure and Defense Tech and Informed Comment are the work of acknowledged experts in their respective fields; surely the fact that they work in a medium Simpson despises doesn't make their insights irrelevant. If the media had given real consideration to voices like these, instead of culling repeatedly from the same tiny herd of Bush-allied thinktank alumni, America would be a very different place today.

But to Simpson, everything in Blogistan is a matter of "posterity" and "bragging rights"; we're not to assume that anyone's motivations are better than that, nor are we to take bloggers seriously even when they can actually prove the facts of a case. A mainstream reporter for AP can be trusted by default, even when he or she uses blind quotes, or presents fact as opinion, or opinion as fact. But a blogger can't be trusted, even when he or she links directly to reams of evidence from reputable sources so that you can check facts as you go.

What makes Simpson's piece particularly grating is that while he sings his song of love to the mass media, newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor are soberly wondering why the Downing Street memo didn't cause a splash in the United States:

There may have been a point at which the US news media would have been all over a story about a British official's report that the Bush administration appeared intent on invading Iraq long before it sought Congress' approval – and that it "fixed" intelligence to fit its intention. But May 2005 is apparently way past that point.

One possible reason the story didn't make a big splash is that virtually no American newspaper chose to put the story on its front page. Many never carried it at all; many others waited for a week or two and then buried it in the back pages. To be fair, some of them may've assumed that the memo was a fake designed to boomerang on them. Still, the story could just as easily have been covered from that perspective: "News outlets wary of memo purporting to show that Bush fixed intelligence." There's always a way to cover a story, if it's really important to you.

Anyway, get a load of Simpson's gasping, shuddering climax:

When bloggers start schlepping down to check the police blotter at 3 a.m. just to make sure the victim's name is spelled correctly, then they can pull up a chair to the adult table.

One of the nice things about blogging is that in addition to dissecting Simpson's article, I can indulge in the luxury of saying that he's making a complete fucking asshole of himself here. At the risk of being redundant, "the adult table" to which Simpson refers comprises a gaggle of bloodstained popinjays and cowards who allowed the Bush Administration to take us to war on false pretences, and who believe that they've served the public interest whenever they present us with two sides to a story...no matter how cartoonish, nonsensical, or cynical one or both of those sides may be.

Blogging may indeed be ineffectual; I'm quite sure that mine is. But at its best, blogging is informed by a certain moral seriousness about matters of life and death. That's in short supply these days, and some people aren't willing to trade it for a seat with the self-satisfied martinets at Simpson's "adult table."

Deadly Leprosy Epidemic Threatens America's Future!

As most readers probably know, we face a grave risk of a deadly influenza pandemic.

But that's not what's upsetting BushCo's handmaidens at WorldNetDaily. No, they're worried about leprosy.

Leprosy, the contagious skin disease evoking thoughts of biblical and medieval times, is now making its mark in the United States, and many believe the influx of illegal aliens is a main factor.

Of course, the real problem, as regards immigration and travel - legal and otherwise - is TB; avian flu is another serious consideration. But for some strange reason, WND prefers to harp on the "danger" of Hansen's Disease, a rare illness that happens to be slow-moving, eminently treatable, not terribly contagious, and declining worldwide.

It seems pretty obvious that WND chose to accuse illegal immigrants of spreading "leprosy" primarily because they believed it would resonate strongly with fundamentalist Christians (along with all the other know-nothing dimwits and hysterics who make up BushCo's base). Rapture Ready, of course, has already picked up the story.

The WND piece is essentially a rewrite of a week-old article by Ben Whitford, which appeared on the Columbia News Service site. The article was titled "Leprosy in America: New Cause for Concern." That title's a bit alarmist for my taste, but it's certainly preferable to WND's "Invasion USA: Are illegals making U.S. a leper colony?" It's also worth noting that Whitford's article doesn't focus specifically on illegal immigrants, but on immigration in general.

The Whitford story includes details that WND tellingly left out, such as this bit of information from Steve Pfeiffer, head of statistics and epidemiology at the National Hansen's Disease Program:

Pfeiffer...stressed that people with leprosy become non-infectious almost immediately after they receive treatment--and that most people who are exposed to leprosy in others never succumb to the disease.

WND has some other tricks up its sleeve. Have a look at this paragraph from Whitford's story:

[T]he short time between many immigrants’ entry to the US and their diagnosis with leprosy suggests that some immigrants, mostly from Mexico, may now be coming to the U.S. specifically to seek treatment, Pfeifer said.

I'm not thrilled with how this is written, because it sloppily implies that "many" immigrants are diagnosed with leprosy. What Whitford's trying to say is this: of the tiny number of immigrants found to have leprosy, "many" were diagnosed not long after arriving in the United States, which suggests that "some" of them may have come to the United States for treatment. In other words, some portion of some percentage of a vanishingly small minority may be seeking treatment in the United States.

Now, look at how WND rewords this:

But Pfeifer suggests many aliens are coming to the U.S. specifically to get treated for their skin condition, due to the short time between many immigrants' entry to the U.S. and their diagnosis with leprosy.

Here, the ambiguity in Whitford's account is intensified, and "many" is used where Whitford was careful to use "some." The implication is that lepers are pouring into the country, threatening us all with disfigurement and death, and putting an intolerable strain on our public-health infrastructure. (It's worth mentioning here that the WHO offers free multidrug treatment to HD sufferers in many poor countries.)

To be fair, WND does quote Dr. Denis Daumerie, head of the World Health Organization's leprosy-elimination program, who sneers at the idea of a leprosy epidemic:

"There is no risk of an epidemic of leprosy....There's absolutely no risk that the few immigrants who are affected by the disease, if they are diagnosed and treated, will spread the disease in the U.S."

But given the misleading vividness of the opening paragraph, and the implication that Daumerie is in a minority (despite his views being pretty much in line with Pfeiffer's, in the original article), I suspect that WND's readers will see Daumerie as an objectively pro-leprosy America-hater, and proceed blithely onwards to spittle-flecked, anti-immigrant hysteria.

The Joy of Uselessness

It'd be foolhardy of me to imagine that I have anything worthwhile to add to Echidne's comments on the "evolutionary uselessness" of the female orgasm. However, the fact that I've been enraged ever since I read her post leaves me no choice but to try.

The article Echidne discusses deals with the views of Dr. Elizabeth Lloyd, who champions an earlier theory of Dr. Donald Symons:

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts - a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life....In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while "females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan."

Echidne wonders how multiple orgasms fit into this scheme. It's a good question. I've had occasion to note, over the course of my reproachable existence, that if anyone's orgasmic capacity should be considered substandard, it's that of men. And yet, one doesn't want to imply that abundantly orgasmic women are more "feminine" than others, as Dr. Lloyd, to her credit, notes:

If women, she said, are told that it is "natural" to have orgasms every time they have intercourse....then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

So what's the solution to the fact that our culture makes sexual "underachievers" feel abnormal? Apparently, the solution is to inform nonorgasmic women - despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever - that the female orgasm is "useless" in the grand scheme of evolution, and that only for men is it natural to have orgasms. That sounds like cold comfort indeed, especially given that many of these women are still going to have sexual urges, and be expected to cater to those of others. And, of course, the flipside of this argument is that women who are orgasmic are abnormal oddballs who represent an evolutionary dead end. You gals can't do anything right, can you?

Speculations like Dr. Lloyd's are basically pseudoscientific, like phrenology and astrology. I once knew someone who argued to me that astrology, whatever I thought about it, nonetheless had a success rate higher than mere chance could explain. Rather than argue over that point, I said, "Suppose I believed racial stereotypes about blacks, and because I felt they had a certain predictive power. Would it be ethical to pre-judge black strangers on that basis?"

In other words, how should I form an opinion about an individual: from assumptions about supposed tendencies of his or her racial group, or from direct, open-minded interaction? Even if astrology were real, what would be more important to focus on from an intersubjective (i.e., ethical) standpoint: the alleged similarities between Aquarians, or the observable differences that make them individuals?

Similarly, the fact that Dr. Lloyd's wildly irrational hypothesis could prove to be true - someday - doesn't change the fact that it should, ethically speaking, be treated as addled nonsense until then. Its potential for misuse, by people who find it agreeable to claim that woman aren't supposed to feel sexual pleasure, outweighs any conceivable benefit. The irresponsible overeagerness to privilege certain points along the continuum of human behavior as more "natural" or "useful" than others - especially in cases involving sex or race - is precisely why evolutionary psychologists are so often accused of being simpleminded buffoons with axes to grind.

Speaking of simpleminded buffoons with axes to grind, here's Dr. Lloyd again:

"Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function," Dr. Lloyd said.

Well, maybe. It didn't work so well for the "vestigial" appendix, after all. In any case, there's a huge difference between describing how the parts of our body should function, and ordaining how we should function, socially and sexually. Any theory that draws normative conclusions from an evolutionary interpretation of human behavior is a question-begging product of pseudoscience, and is likely to be dangerous into the bargain.

The fact that "suggestive" evidence can be produced for some bizarre proposition means nothing. People didn't make phrenology or astrology up out of whole cloth; they found what looked to them like evidence, in the form of patterns and correlations that seemed to offer predictive or explanatory power. From there to Bedlam is, too often, a journey of a few small steps:

"Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it's phasing out," Dr. Hrdy said. "Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about."

Then again, perhaps the reason orgasm is erratic is that human beings are erratic...and never more erratic than when they're trying to navigate the treacherous waters of human sexuality (too often equipped, I might add, with charts drawn up by unreliable sources like Drs. Lloyd and Symons). Since recorded history began, the dominant scientific, sociological, religious, and legal approaches to sexuality in general - and female sexuality in particular - have been vicious, ignorant, and oppressive; I don't think it's unreasonable to see current sexual behavior as reflecting this legacy in any number of ways.

In 1970, after the the racist pseudoscientist Philip Jensen based a famous argument for the genetic inferiority of blacks on IQ tests, Scientific American was quick to notice the problem with his assumptions:

One would certainly expect, even for equivalent occupational classes, that the black level is on average lower than the white. No amount of money can...buy off more than 200 years of accumulated racial prejudices on the part of the whites, or reconstitute the disrupted black family, in part culturally inherited from the days of slavery. It is impossible to accept the idea that matching for status provides an adequate, or even a substantial control over the most important environmental differences between blacks and whites.

And adjusting for these environmental differences is child's play, compared to the methodological problems raised by Dr. Lloyd's argument. There are no objective means of studying a theory like hers. And even if there were - even if you could somehow study female sexual responsiveness in a cultural and emotional vacuum - it'd be meaningless, because it wouldn't have any bearing on the world in which women are obliged to live.

But still...isn't it nice to have a scientific field that's as faith-based, misogynistic, and sexually dismal as religious fundamentalism?

UPDATE: I made a number of very serious errors in this post, especially as regards my representation of Dr. Lloyd's views. Accordingly, I've issued an apology and retraction, which you can read here.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Ceratosoma magnifica. I have nothing to add.

Friday Hope Blogging

I've often posted about cheap and easy solutions to contaminated water in poor countries. This week, I have several more examples of ingenious low-tech water purifiers.

Near Near Future describes a personal water-purifier called the LifeStraw:

LifeStraw, by Torben Vestergaard Frandsen, is a 25 cm long plastic straw/pipe filter which turns dirty water into clean, drinkable water. Sucked up water meets two textile filters that filter out big materials, even clusters of bacteria. Then the water is led into a chamber of iodine impregnated beads, where bacteria, viruses and parasites are killed....The last chamber consists of granulated active carbon, which role is to take the main part of the bad smell of iodine, and to take the parasites that have not been taken by the pre-filter or killed by the iodine.

The LifeStraw retains its potency for a year. Another interesting portable purifier relies on a bellows-and-membrane arrangement to filter water.

Of course, these are Western technological devices, which must be manufactured elsewhere and distributed in poor villages. This leaves villagers in a position of utter dependence; if first-world political or economic considerations get in the way of manufacturing or distribution, they're out of luck. That's why real progress is more likely to come from rejecting this technological paradigm, in favor of local, low-tech solutions. Thus, as remarkable as the LifeStraw is, I'm more excited by water filters that can be constructed by anyone, from waste materials like cow dung and coffee grounds:

An Australian inventor claims that a handful of clay, yesterday’s coffee grounds and some cow manure are the ingredients that could bring clean, safe drinking water to much of the third world. The simple new technology, developed by ANU materials scientist Mr Tony Flynn, allows water filters to be made from commonly available materials and fired on the ground using cow manure as the source of heat, without the need for kiln. The filters have been tested and shown to remove common pathogens including E-coli. Unlike other water filtering devices, the filters are simple and inexpensive to make.

That was supposed to be it for this week, but I just came upon another bit of water-related good news, this time from WorldChanging:

Oculus Innovative Sciences, a Petaluma, California-based biomedical company, has developed a formulation of "ion-imbalanced, super-oxygenated" water which is able to kill bacteria, viruses and spores, but leave multicellular organisms unharmed. But not untouched -- the super-oxygenated water actually speeds healing of severe burns, diabetic ulcers, even necrotic flesh. The product is called Microcyn, and this week it received "510K" approval from the FDA as a medical device.

Reading stories like these, I'm always struck by what an awe-inspiring power it is to be able to alleviate suffering, to heal people. I've never seen a weapons system yet that impressed me half as much as the average ER nurse does. That's why it's so consistently exhilarating to find oneself on the side of real power, no matter who "wins" according to the grubby calculations of dead-eyed political hacks.

Someone recently said, apropos of the Great Men of our era, "They have so much death, but we have so much life." I take this to mean that their power amounts to absolutely nothing. They've already lost the only game worth playing.

Fringe Terrorists vs. Mainstream Terrorists

If you believe the FBI, the top domestic terror threat comes from environmental and animal-rights activists. According to John Lewis,

"There is nothing else going on in this country over the last several years that is racking up the high number of violent crimes and terrorist actions," Lewis said.

If you're racking your brains trying to think of an example of a deadly strike by one of these groups, don't bother; there haven't been any. Nonetheless,

Lewis said the FBI concluded those groups were more of a threat after comparing them with "right-wing extremists, KKK, anti-abortion groups and the like." He said most animal rights and eco-extremists so far have refrained from violence targeting human life.

So what sort of terrorism are we talking about? Arson and property damage, mainly. These are serious crimes, but anti-abortion terrorists resort to both tactics as often as any of the most radical environmental groups. Still, let me make it clear that people who would set fire to a lot full of SUVs in order to protest "pollution" are about as stupid as it's possible to be; they're a danger to themselves and others, and are a legitimate focus of law-enforcement efforts. I'm not arguing that eco-terrorists are harmless and ought to be coddled; I'm arguing that they're not the most dangerous domestic terrorists by any sane person's reckoning.

Other cited examples of eco-terrorist activity include releasing captive animals (definitely illegal, and often counterproductive from an environmentalist perspective, but hardly terrorism), and making harassing phone calls (which, I suppose, makes Fox News a terrorist outfit).

Let's compare all this to anti-abortion terrorists. Clayton Waagner identified himself as a terrorist - apparently unaware of the fact that former FBI head William Webster proclaimed in 1984 that it's not terrorism to attack abortion clinics - and openly declared war on the United States. Among other crimes, he mailed hundreds of fake anthrax letters to clinics and doctors around the country. The cost to society of responding to such letters is staggering, because each letter has to be treated as though it actually contains anthrax.

That, of course, was the action of one man; ReligiousTolerance.org has a useful year-by-year chart of anti-clinic violence and threats of violence by the Christian Right, as does the site referenced immediately above. Regardless, violent radicals like Randall Terry and Paul Hill have routinely been treated as respectable ethical beings by the media; you're not going to see an advocate for radical eco-terrorism mainstreamed by way of a polite discussion with Ted Koppel. This media blackout curtails the ability of eco-terrorist groups to gain new recruits.

Next, let's consider meth labs. Meth labs are very likely to explode or catch fire. Meth chemists often dump dangerous chemicals in public places. People who run meth labs frequently boobytrap them with bombs, incendiary devices, tripwired shotguns, or ricin. Meth is often produced by members of white-power groups. And in some cases, the proceeds from meth labs may fund such groups. In addition, meth chemists represent a pool of "talent" that can be hired by white-power groups to produce sarin, anthrax, and other forms of WMD. Meth labs, I'd argue, should be considered important loci of domestic terrorism, and are definitely a bigger threat to American lives and property values than all eco-terror groups combined.

To my knowledge, no environmental or animal-rights group is known to have plotted chemical or biological warfare against society at large, with the exception of the obscure and abortive RISE group, which was dreamed up in 1971 by a pair of hapless teenagers. One may well speculate whether current groups might harbor similar ambitions, but it's well known that right-wing groups have salivated over both forms of terrorism for years, and that instructions on launching chemical and bacteriological attacks are widely circulated by right-wing sites on the Internets, and at gun shows.

All of this is pretty goddamn obvious. So why are these environmental fringe groups the top target of the FBI's domestic-terrorism efforts? Here's a likely explanation:

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the panel's chairman, said he hoped to examine more closely how the groups might be getting assistance in fund raising and communications from tax-exempt organizations' "mainstream activists" not directly blamed for the violence.

Backward Progress

I'm way too busy to post anything even remotely original today, but I'd like to plug this WorldChanging article on bioprospecting in historical texts. The idea is that there are lots of old books containing ethnomedical information, which haven't yet been analyzed in terms of what we now know about medicine and biochemistry. In addition to being medically useful, such information could produce a more accurate picture of the economic value of, say, rain forests.

I suspect that this sort of "prospecting" in old texts could be productive in many fields. There's a widespread assumption that progress happens when technology becomes more complex, or more efficient. But I'd argue that progress, properly so called, refers to an increase in a society's ability to survive. Technological advances may, or may not, increase a society's viability; in some cases, true progress may involve going backwards. In fact, some technological abilities can actually thwart progress, either by offering a false solution to a real problem, or by solving an illusory problem invented specially for the occasion. (The disturbing ways in which these technologies then become normative and self-justifying is a topic for another day.)

Anyway, as I discussed here, many old technologies were "superseded" without being perfected. It's time to revisit these technologies, and see whether we can improve on them. I'm not generally given to quoting Winston Churchill, but I do agree with his observation that "the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."