Scare Tactics

A while back, the International Fabricare Institute (IFI) objected to restrictions on the dry-cleaning chemical perchloroethylene (PERC):

If one California regulatory agency has its way the cost of doing business will soar for hundreds of drycleaners in Southern California, simultaneously raising consumers' costs and jeopardizing many cleaners' ability to even remain in business.

A chilling vision of things to come! A paragraph or two later, the IFI complained about the "scare tactics" of PERC foes. (I've mentioned before how odd it is that industry groups can irresponsibly predict economic catastrophe if some chemical is banned or restricted, without being accused of "scaremongering.")

While the IFI shrieked and tore its hair out, cooler heads were discovering that a cheap, environmentally friendly, nontoxic cleaning agent actually works better than PERC:

In 2003, Consumer Reports compared the results of traditional cleaning with carbon dioxide, GreenEarth and wet cleaning. It concluded that carbon dioxide gave the best results, with GreenEarth coming in second. Both outperformed perchloroethylene.

Since CO2 is nontoxic and doesn't produce regulated waste, it seems obvious that cleaners and consumers would be better off cleaning clothes with CO2 wherever possible. A new article on a CO2-based cleaner in Northern California offers a cost comparison:

Shaghafi estimates that it will cost just $3 per load to run the new machines, much less than the $15 cost of cleaning with perchloroethylene.

But the investment in the new technology is significantly more expensive. Blue Sky spent $165,000 on each of its carbon dioxide machines -- far above the $30,000 to $50,000 for other kinds of dry cleaning machines.

OK, then. We'll say that the average conventional machine costs $40K, a quarter of the cost of the CO2 machine. That leaves the business in a $120K hole. However, the cost per load is one-fifth that of the conventional machine, so the owner saves $12 per load. That being the case, you'd need to do 10,000 loads to cover the price differential, which'd probably take two to four years for the average cleaner.

That's not the whole story, though. Cleaners that use PERC are defined as hazardous waste generators, and must comply with the Federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA); that's no easy task. They may also face even more stringent local regulations. In short, dry cleaners often end up spending a great deal of money and time on hazmat compliance, and you have to factor this in when assessing the relative costs of dry-cleaning agents.

California is currently offering a limited, relatively modest grant of $10K to cleaners who make the switch from PERC to C02. I don't think this amount reflects the total benefits of such a switch to taxpayers and communities. State and city regulation of dry cleaners is expensive, as is the transport and processing of PERC wastes. And the burden of compliance is such that many dry cleaners may be tempted to dispose of waste illegally, which can be unsafe and expensive for municipalities.

I think states should generously subsidize the cost of this switch among the largest dry-cleaning facilities (i.e., huge industrial operations that function 'round the clock). Having reduced PERC emissions and regulatory costs among the largest generators, they could perhaps ease up a bit on small, neighborhood dry cleaners. Alternatively, they could give large grants or generous loans to small businesses, and tax breaks to bigger companies that adopt the new technology. Either way, the fact remains that PERC is on its way out, and it's silly to try to scare people into dragging out its demise indefinitely. Instead, we should speed it on its way to the graveyard, and reward firms that have devised or embraced a better way of doing things.

Strategic Influence

The Army has hired a Detroit PR firm called Hass MS&L to provide "editorial content" to pro-military bloggers. Presumably, this'll be very attractive to those bloggers who worry that their subjectivity or incapacity sometimes prevents them from being an effective rubberstamp for the Pentagon.

William Arkin explains:

[T]he "content" under discussion, an Army public affairs officer tells me, is not the nitty gritty of deployments and living conditions overseas. It is planned to be an official counter to the perceived unwillingness of the mainstream media to report the "good news" from Iraq and the war on terror.

The logical problem here is that a piece of good news - say, a school re-opening in a Baghdad neighborhood - has much less emotional resonance with the American public than an explosion that kills ten U.S. soldiers. The bad news out of Iraq is always going to trump the good news...partially because the public simply doesn't care as much about Iraqi lives as it does about American ones, and partially because narratives of death and destruction resonate very deeply with a population that's been scared out of its wits for political convenience. Every time U.S. soliders die, a number of previously supportive Americans entertain the notion that the war might not be worthwhile; I'm not sure you can open enough schools or hold enough elections to overcome that process.

Hass MS&L's expertise is in PR for the American automotive industry; this, as Arkin notes, doesn't inspire confidence. For instance, the firm is behind GM's corporate blog, which is an indispensible site for those who want to explore the brighter side of dead-end thinking and looming bankruptcy. GM's logic - like BushCo's - is typical of failing corporations: "Why whistle past the graveyard, when you can hire a brass band and a choir?"

I'd suggest that the Army is taking a bit of a risk here. It's inviting considerable scrutiny of its PR message, particularly by soldiers and their families, which could have unforeseen consequences for morale. The situation, I think, is similar to that which compromised so many of BushCo's PR efforts in Iraq; you can talk all you want about "progress" and "freedom," but if the people on the receiving end of your pep talks don't have water or heat or jobs, they're going to be hostile to your message...more hostile, possibly, than if you'd kept your mouth shut.

By the same token, propaganda targeted at the military has to include honest acknowledgment of the problems soldiers face, and the realities of life in a war zone, or it'll be ineffective. The pamphlet What is Propaganda?, published in 1944 by the U.S. Armed Forces Institute, makes this point clearly:

One must be careful to distinguish between the opinion that propaganda creates and the opinion that is developed by events....a man's own knowledge and experience may cause him to hold an opinion no matter how heavy the barrage of propaganda attempting to force him to change it.

The Bush administration has put a great deal of faith in the ability of words to create reality, and there's no doubt they've had some remarkable successes in that line. But now, they've reached a point of diminishing returns. The taxpayer money that'll be squandered on promoting the "good news" from Iraq on blogs would be better spent by paying Iraqi workers to reconstruct Iraq:

More than thirty months after the March 2003 invasion, Iraqis still complain of a lack of basic amenities like heating oil, water, and electricity.

Until problems like these are solved, perceptions will continue to be shaped more by events than by press releases, or bought-out journalists, or co-opted blogs, or speeches by the President.

Gilding the Lily

There's exciting news from the mist-shrouded frontlines of the War on Terror:

AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror.

Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe.

If this story is "chilling," it's mainly because the rhetorical strategy of portraying one's enemy as an ambulatory pestilence has a particularly unwholesome pedigree. (Apropos of which, some readers may recall the Right's earlier attempt to suggest that immigrants are spreading leprosy within the USA.)

As evidence that this story is dubious, let's consider dengue fever. It's debilitating enough that the US Army has long considered it a promising incapacitating agent in biowarfare. People who have it are contagious for only about six days, so if you want to hire a suicide bomber to infect people with it, you'd need to find someone who's not only contagious, but is able to walk - and perhaps run - despite high fever and crippling, arthritis-like joint pain (this disease is also known as "breakbone fever"). Even if you managed that, the chances that you could infect bystanders by blowing up a dengue fever carrier in their vicinity are rather slim, not least because it can't be transmitted in aerosol form. And even if you did infect people, it's far from certain that they'd die of the infection.

The hemorrhagic form of dengue is a good deal more deadly, but it's also a good deal more inconvenient for the would-be bomber. Still, a word to the wise: If you see someone who looks like a member of al-Qaeda crawling painfully down the street with blood pouring from every orifice, watch out! He could be a suicide bomber.

As for AIDS and hepatitis...well, what else is new? Even if a suicide bomber doesn't have hepatitis or AIDS, there's no guarantee that one or more of his victims won't; any victim's remains could possibly infect someone else. That's going to be a danger in any situation involving flying bone splinters and spattering blood (e.g., dentistry). But my personal view is that in most regions where suicide bombers operate, the wounded will face more immediate and faster-moving complications than AIDS...septicemia, for instance.

If this story came from a source within al-Qaeda, it seems pretty obvious that it's propaganda, and that it's intended to increase the anxiety of soldiers in Iraq, many of whom are wallowing daily in human gore. If it came from a government source, my earlier observations apply: this is probably another example of propaganda that strives to make the enemy seem emotionally equivalent with disease and contagion.

I tend to favor the latter theory. Back in 2002, the hard-right propagandist Michael Ledeen was promoting the hepatitis-infected suicide bomber meme in the pages of the National Review, although he didn't specifically say that the bombers had been been chosen because of their infections. Other commentators, such as Alan Dershowitz, took that ball and ran with it:

Recently, Israeli doctors expressed concern that the blood of some of the suicide bombers, which splatters all over the scene and is touched by medical personnel, as well as their bones, which penetrate the bodies of the victims, might contain hepatitis or the AIDS virus, raising the fear that terrorist leaders could be turning suicide bombers into biological warfare carriers either by injecting them or selecting carriers as suicide bombers.

Thanks to ambiguous phrasing (which I'm sure is accidental), the implication here is that the spectre of deliberately infected bombers was being raised by doctors themselves, something for which I've found no evidence at all.

The Sunday Mirror provides no source for the documents that are currently being "distributed" to British military bases. But the fact that virtually identical versions of this story were making the rounds three years ago strongly suggests that this "new" finding is fraudulent.

American Psychos

I can't imagine anything more gratifying than the news that Richard Pombo and Charles Hurwitz might be going to jail together.

I've discussed Pombo here more than once. Hurwitz, however, makes Pombo look like Dennis Kucinich. One of his most notable accomplishments was looting United Savings Association of Texas (USAT), a crime that cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. Using his profits, and some junk bonds provided by his pal Michael Milken, he engineered a hostile takeover of a family-owned Northern California firm called Pacific Lumber, and immediately engaged in an orgy of unprincipled, unnecessary, and virtually unregulated clearcutting of old-growth redwoods. When he wasn't losing lawsuits and getting Pacific Lumber's logging license suspended, Hurwitz found time to loot its pension fund, in order to make interest payments on the junk bonds that financed the hostile takeover.

It's almost impossible to describe the complexity and breadth of Pacific Lumber's corruption under Hurwitz, or the number of people - including state and national Democrats - who are implicated in it. (Dianne Feinstein, for instance, shook loose millions of dollars of taxpayer money for Hurwitz at a time when he owed millions of dollars to the government, and then essentially turned the Headwaters Forest over to him in defiance of the Endangered Species Act.) Pacific Lumber racked up almost 250 logging violations in a few short years, from harming federally protected animals like the marbled murrelet, to logging in protected riparian zones, to failing to prevent or mitigate erosion.

Today, the firm hovers near bankruptcy. If it goes down, it'll take a goodly number of Humboldt County workers with it. Sustainable logging practices under Pacific Lumber's previous ownership had translated into sustainable jobs. The company provided subsidized housing for employees, and declined to lay off workers regardless of market conditions. Hurwitz, needless to say, ended these sensible and humane policies as part of his project of looting the company's assets.

Pombo's been a whore for Hurwitz for years. In 2001, after receiving substantial contributions from Hurwitz, Pombo helped to float a remarkably weird conspiracy theory, in which EarthFirst! was supposedly working in concert with the FDIC to defraud Hurwitz of the redwood forest he'd bought with the sweat of his brow (the FDIC was trying to recoup taxpayer losses on the United Savings Association of Texas bailout). As Pombo's partner in crime John Doolittle put it:

[B]ank regulators at the FDIC and OTS deviated from their statutory charge and actually concocted a scheme, in concert with the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, to obtain redwood trees from an owner of the failed bank. The scheme was initiated, promoted, and lobbied by radical EarthFirst! ecoterrorists. It was embraced by FDIC lawyers and facilitated by FDIC's outside counsel, and it was sanctioned at the highest levels of the agency.

Pombo inserted this tall tale into the Congressional Record, and tried to pass it off as an official finding:

Pombo...released the task force's findings after the task force that created it and the Resources Committee itself had dissolved to make way for the new Congress. Rep. Pombo did this by sneaking the "report" into the Congressional Record, rather than calling for a Committee vote, as it the normal procedure. Pombo and MAXXAM, Inc. then to deliberately mislead the media into thinking this was an official Congressional report.

Pombo and John Doolittle also subpoenaed the FDIC's confidential records on Hurwitz, and inserted them into the Congressional Record for the perusal of Hurwitz's lawyers, thereby damaging the FDIC's case against Hurwitz. As the story linked at the top notes:

The documents were so voluminous that Doolittle and Pombo had to pay a total of about $20,000 from their congressional accounts to cover the extra printing costs.

Your tax dollars at work!

Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I see criminals like Hurwitz, Pombo, and Doolittle as a greater danger to the lives and liberties of Americans than just about any "Islamofascist" on earth. Their contempt for the law, and for the well-being of Americans, represents a far greater existential threat to this nation than al-Qaeda does. These monsters of vanity owe us, and it's high time we were repaid. At the very least, their assets should be used to offset the public expense of keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

This is Glossodoris cincta, who "holds himself in the middle of the ocean, quiet and detached; he sweeps away the two worlds, and he draws all creatures to himself without exception."

Friday Hope Blogging

The brightest piece of news I have to report this week is that it's no longer legal to use the pesticide chlorpyrifos - a particularly nasty organophosphate with a high degree of ecotoxicity - to treat residential insect infestations. What I like best about this is that it will restrict chlorpyrifos use by agencies like the New York Housing Authority, which has typically sprayed huge amounts of it in low-income public housing, despite evidence of its persistence on rugs and soft toys (among other things).

In Hawaii, plans are underway to build the world's largest solar-powered community:

The Army Hawaii initiative represents a big step forward in the cost-effectiveness of the technology; it's the first time a grid-connected project has been able to be profitable enough to install PV solar panels without subsidies. Currently, 93 percent of Hawaii's electrical power comes from burning oil, all of which is imported. The new solar power will save approximately 18,000 barrels of oil each year.

Another nice detail:

[N]o old appliance, door or window will be sent to a landfill before first being offered to the low-income residents in the surrounding neighborhoods.

LA Weekly lists some less obvious sources of alternative energy. Here's my favorite:

New Zealand adventurer Peter Bethune is president and CEO of a biofuels-only speedboat race called Earthrace, and he’s developed a process that uses human fat collected via liposuction to power his own vessel. Bethune’s own lean love handles produced only 100 milliliters of fuel, so he is looking for a well-fed crew to donate their thigh, belly or bum blubber to the cause.

Perhaps our supersized population will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Hell, if we tapped the 101st Fightin' Keyboarders, we could probably achieve energy independence within six months.

The notion of using one national blight to remedy another brings us to an interesting new UCLA paper. It describes twelve diseases that can prevent or mitigate others, and discusses the possibility of finding new treatments by researching the mechanisms involved:

Stiehm proposed that new evidence can be found for using certain viruses to treat diseases such as HIV, which do not respond to other medications.

"There have been several studies indicating that HIV patients co-infected with a virus related to Hepatitis C, called GB virus C, have less severe HIV disease and improved survival," Stiehm said.

Stiehm got the idea for his historical review from cases he saw while a pediatric resident at Babies Hospital in New York City. One case was a kidney disease patient with nephrosis who was unresponsive to medications but went into remission after contracting measles.

And speaking of obesity, the University of Michigan has suspended its business dealings with the Coca-Cola company, thanks to unrelenting pressure from student activists:

The decision, effective January 1, suspends 13 contracts with Coca-Cola worth $1.4 million annually because the company has not agreed to protocols for a third-party review of labor practices in Colombia and has not developed protocols for reviewing environmental concerns in India.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is under further criminal investigation. My prediction: They'll be found guilty.

Last but not least, I think I may have found a new favorite site: Polar Inertia.

Oddly Enough

Over at WhirledView, Cheryl Rofer has made an excellent catch:

As I wandered around the internet yesterday, I happened on a link to an article in a category Reuters calls “Oddly Enough.” This category contains story titles like

Woman poisons trees to improve view
Miffed man pays bank bill a penny at a time
Pets losing battle of the bulge?

Well, okay. Newspapers need fillers for odd spaces left over after most of the layout is done.

The article that caught my eye was titled

Thieves steal another radioactive unit

Wondering what the punchline is? Read the rest.

Facts Are Stupid Things

I usually try to steer clear of intra-blog sniping, but Roger Ailes' takedown of the unconscionably stupid Captain Ed is too good to pass up. Ed claimed that while Patrick Henry may've said "Give me liberty or give me death," he didn't actually back it up with physical action.

"Of course, that slur [chickenhawk] would be ludicrous to use on Patrick Henry. Instead of picking up a gun and commanding an army, Henry relied on his better skills and went into politics and rhetoric [sic] to fight for freedom.

The gag, of course, is that Henry did pick up a gun and command an army. Better yet, the timeline Ed uses for his biographical details on Henry says precisely that:

May 2: Patrick Henry organized 150 men from Hanover County to march on Williamsburg and demand the return of the public gunpowder.

May 6: Dunmore issued a proclamation against “a certain Patrick Henry . . . and a Number of deluded Followers” who had organized “an Independent Company . . . and put themselves in a Posture of War.”

For some odd reason, Ed cites the two entries immediately following these ones, one of which says that Henry had "no military experience." None, that is, beyond leading a citizen's militia against the Royal Governor, an endeavor which involved a great deal of personal risk.

The homunculi in Ed's peanut gallery, needless to say, get right into the spirit of things. Some of 'em administer feeble kicks to Henry's corpse, while others insist that Henry's alleged unwillingness to put himself in harm's way somehow justifies and ennobles Bush's abortive stint in the "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard.

What will Captain Ed's response be, seeing that he's a card-carrying member of the "self-correcting blogosphere"? A story in this week's Onion provides a clue:

Guy Who Just Wiped Out Immediately Claims He's Fine

SOUTH BURLINGTON, VT—A fraction of a second after wiping out on a patch of ice, South Burlington pedestrian Isaac Berkman loudly insisted that he was fine. "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine," Berkman, 24, told concerned onlookers before he even straightened his badly twisted legs and attempted to stand up. "I'm okay." After noticing a deep gash just below his left knee, Berkman instantly assured witnesses that the heavily bleeding wound was "no biggie" and "totally under control."

Human Locusts

Mark Steyn worries that the West is not breeding enough children, and that the world of the future will therefore belong to the Muslim hordes, who - like all caricaturish figures of ethnic menace - breed like sewer rats:

Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries....Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

His argument is astonishingly lengthy and digressive, and I don't have the time to address every error of fact and logic it contains. Accordingly, I may as well target its central proposition:

"Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75.

Notice what those nations have in common?

One thing I notice is that these countries have high rates of infant mortality. Somalia, for instance, loses 119 children out of every 1000 live births, while Niger loses 123, and Afghanistan - that bright new jewel in the diadem of representative democracy - loses 167. The number of children in these countries who die before reaching reproductive age is also quite high.

Fertility rates fluctuate from year to year, of course, as do mortality rates; both are unpredictable. Regarding fertility rate, the general trend is downwards in a number of Islamic countries (for instance, Iran's fertility rate is down by almost 70 percent).

Population dynamics are extremely complicated, and very hard to predict. Steyn spends a lot of time mocking other people's faulty extrapolations from population trends, but he bases his own theory that Western civilization is in a "death spiral" on precisely the same type of projections. Experts are often wrong, of course, but the best of them are at least plausible, and are able to explain how they arrived at their conclusions. Steyn, by contrast, is simply a buffoon. For instance, here's how he interprets the current population trends in Spain:

Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation.

For what it's worth, Spain's fertility rate is closer to 1.3, as of 2005. More to the point, Spain's population isn't "halving every generation"; that's an absolutely insane thing to say. In 2000, a UN study claimed that Spain's population would decrease by 9.4 million by 2050; that would represent a 24-percent net loss. The current UN report claims Spain's population will decrease by 1.2 percent by 2050.

Steyn assumes that immigrants to Western countries will generally be implacably hostile to "Western culture," which is debatable, to say the least. He seems to think that once a critical mass of "Muslim" immigration is reached, the political systems of Europe will simply embrace Sharia en masse. If nothing else, this view is consistent with the standard fascist or racist view of nonwhite immigration as a contagion that eats a country away from within. In this country, of course, the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews were just three of the unassimilable groups who supposedly threatened to destroy the American way of life. The remarks of the Reverend E. Trumbull Lee in 1886 are typical of this school of thought:

[W]hy must the Chinese go? Because they never can become a part of our Nation. The cry against Chinese is not that that they are foreigners, but that they are a race that cannot be taken up and assimilated into our body politic. They have no ambition to become citizens except in very rare instances, and they hug pagan traditions and customs with a tenacity which our better civilization cannot break....John Swinton calls the Chinaman "a human locust," because he stings clean everything he touches, or, to use Swinton's own words: "Where the Chinaman pastures, no other being can live." Now, allow the Chinese population to increase from one sixth to one fourth to one half, and then what measures will Congress be obliged to adopt to stem the tide. Will Congress then be able to stem the tide?"

People like Steyn invariably overstate the fecundity of despised groups, while understating their willingness and ability to be assimilated, or at least to co-exist. That's not to say that demographic transition won't have profound effects on Western countries; it almost certainly will. But there's no good reason to believe that these effects will dovetail neatly with Steyn's paranoid ideological assumptions.

Like a lot of his peers, Steyn ridicules "fear-mongering" and "doomsaying" when it's based on the assiduous research of climatologists:

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about.

But he's perfectly comfortable proclaiming the literal extinction of Western (i.e., white) culture, and the replacement of European democracies with Islamic theocracies. As far as I can tell, his own "doomsday" scenario is based on nothing more compelling than racial animus and an inability to understand statistics.

ADDENDUM: Anyone who's interested in a more realistic and rational assessment of demographic transition - and the uncertainties involved in calculating it - should have a look at Population Bulletin's Transitions in World Population.

Eye Candy

The photo above comes from Overshadowed, a labyrinthine site with a lot of fine work, the best of which suggests an ultra-urban version of William Eggleston.

Bernhard Edmaier's aerial photographs are stunning. Be sure to browse his gallery featuring aerial views of volcanoes! Unfortunately, the site's not set up for direct links, so go to "What" in the navigation bar, and then click "Pictures." (Links via BLDGBLOG.)

Silentium is a lovely study of cavernous building interiors...it's like a somewhat more oneiric version of Bernd and Hilla Becher's Typologies of industrial Buildings. The other galleries are worth a look, too.

Meryl Truett photographs the decaying South, with a focus on roadside attractions and cemetaries. Lord knows that's a fairly common area of specialization these days, but she has a good eye and utilizes some interesting alternative processes. She also has a beautiful gallery of found images. (Link via Coudal Partners).

The Twittering of Sickly Voices

Some months ago, an acquaintance who likes to think of himself as a libertarian explained to me that The Incredibles was a devastating attack on the egalitarian pieties of the Clinton era. Beyond a brief, involuntary reflection on the well-worn parable of the blind men and the elephant, I didn't give it much thought. But now, thanks to Alicublog, I realize that this type of free-associative wishful thinking is central to the project of right-wing cultural criticism, and that the Corner is, in its own sad little way, a sort of conservatarian Frankfurt School.

As Thersites notes, Human Events Online is doing a great deal to advance this important work. Don Feder, for instance, has compiled a list of the best conservative movies of 2005; better yet, he helpfully explains what a "conservative movie" is:

Conservative films celebrate virtue. They tell timeless tales of individuals overcoming all manner of adversity to achieve true greatness. They’re about honesty, loyalty, courage and patriotism. They’re concerned with conservatism’s cardinal values – faith, family and freedom.

One of Feder's cases in point is Memoirs of a Geisha:

The heroine, Sayuri, is sold as a child to a geisha house. Her choices -- to become a menial and spend the rest of her life working off her contract to “mother,” or embrace her destiny. She chooses the latter only when the kindness of a handsome businessman makes her yearn for a way to enter his world.

It's interesting to learn what warms conservative hearts these days: A story in which a poor girl is given a choice between slavery and prostitution, and chooses prostitution in order to land a businessman. I'm not surprised at the sentiment, really...just the public admission of it.

The other day, Roy Edroso compared the conservative view of art to that of Stalinist Social Realism, as formulated by folks like Andrey Zhadanov and Gustav Klutsis. The comparison is a good one. It's also tempting, of course, to bring up Hitler's frolicsome campaign against "degenerate art." But the most obvious wellspring of conservatarian critical theory is Ayn Rand's Screen Guide for Americans, which advised Hollywood producers that "it is the moral...duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists." So much for that I.G. Farben biopic!

Rand also complained about the "glorification" of depravity; no immoral or criminal person was to be portrayed as having any other reason for his or her condition than having made a conscious decision to do evil. There were to be no victims of circumstances, and, apparently, no lunatics. Abuse cannot breed abuse from generation to generation, nor can violence beget violence, for no other reason than that Ms. Rand bade it be so.

The dentist-drill whine of Rand's prose still echoes in today's manifestoes on Der Kulturkampf, though God knows her comparatively meager verbal skills are far beyond those of her descendants. In considering the genealogy of right-wing rhetoric, I'm reminded of Fitz-James O'Brien's From Hand to Mouth (1858), in which a defective magic mirror produces a distorted copy of a green bird:

It was a feathered cripple. It was all hump. It stood on one long attenuated leg. Its neck was tortuous as the wall of Troy.

This rickety, ornithological image produced itself in the mirror, in precisely the same fashion as did its predecessor, and, after gradually growing into substance, detached itself from the polished surface, and came out upon the table....

What the image cast by the third bird was like I cannot at all attempt to portray. It was a chaos of neck and humps and feathers. The reproduction, nevertheless, went on, and the prolific mirror kept sending forth a stream of green abortions, that after a little while were no longer recognizable as belonging to any species of animal in the earth below, or the heavens above, or the caverns that lie under the earth. They filled my room. Swarms of limping, wall-eyed, one-legged, green-feathered things hustled each other on the floor. My bed was alive with a plumed mass of deformity. They filled the air, making lame efforts at flight, and blindly falling to the floor, where they tumbled about in inextricable confusion....The fluttering of embryonic wings, the twittering of sickly voices, the ruffling of lustreless plumages, produced a continuous and vague sound that filled me with horror.

One descends from Ayn Rand to Ann Althouse and her ilk by a similar process. Where Rand prissily objected to those who "glorify failure" and "smear success," Althouse prissily objects to acting itself:

This year, we're supposed to care about Truman Capote and Johnny Cash -- I mean a pretentious actor impersonating Truman Capote or Johnny Cash. Last year, we were supposed to be excited about Liam Neeson pretending to be Alfred Kinsey and Jamie Foxx pretending to be Ray Charles.

Oh, the humanity! Personally, I'm not interested in Capote, but the mere fact that a movie was made about him doesn't convince me that some sinister cabal is trying to induct me into his cult. Nor does the fact that a movie is advertised in my vicinity make me feel that I'm "supposed to care" about it. Ms. Althouse strikes me as a passive, intellectually lazy, not particularly discerning consumer of pop culture, who wants to pass herself off as some endlessly imposed-upon victim every time some product of that culture fails to meet her weird and rather neurotic standards. Like many of her peers, she comes across as a child who's having a temper tantrum at the fair because the cotton candy is the wrong color.

Ms. Althouse objects to "pretentious actors," an odd epithet given the vital role of pretense in that art. Next, one assumes, she'll complain about "imaginative fiction writers." And in fact, she does:

Spare me your made-up characters and stories and tell me whatever you have to say about the world you observe.

Better yet, perhaps artists should restrict themselves to issuing simple declarative statements on the issues of the day, so that conservative consumers can avoid the pitfalls of subjectivity and aesthetics and get straight down to the business of chastising nonconforming thought. It'd be a bit of a blow against human self-expression, sure, but at least we'd be spared the spectacle of Jonah Goldberg wrestling with Spielberg like an egg-eating snake with a football:

[O]ne of the lessons of Saving Private Ryan directly contradicts the lesson [of] Munich. In Ryan, they let one German soldier go and they come to regret it. Similarly, when the young translator freezes with terror, his friend dies at the hands of a Nazi. Most people I know took the lesson of these scenes to be that ignoring or refusing to face up to evil will only lead to greater tragedies down the road. In Munich, the lesson is the reverse. Killing terrorists is foolish because to do so only "creates more terrorists" and replaces the bad guys with worse guys. I don't think these two morals can be reconciled.

That settles that, eh? As Krazy Kat once said of Ignatz Mouse, "Little filossyfer...always he seeks the truth, and always he finds it."

Whining and Dining

If you're one of those querulous old mossbacks who feels that the gospel of renunciation has had no worthy evangelist since Leo Tolstoy cashed in his chips, you really ought to acquaint yourself with Joe Fattorini, a wine reviewer who currently encumbers the Glasgow Herald. Harken, my brethren and cistern, and learn how this sinful man was redeemed:

It's self-indulgent, wasteful and frankly immoral. But you know how it is. I was swept along with the trend, and it felt good at the time. But I don't want to be a hypocrite. So I'm giving up organic food in 2006.

Why this agonizing reappraisal? Well, Fattorini claims that the allegedly lower crop yield from organic farms means that far more land must be used to feed the same number of people:

This year we are set to destroy some 25,000 sq km of Brazilian rainforest, but that will have to increase dramatically.

He goes on to suggest that a global switch to organic farming - a very improbable event - would force us to turn our national parks into farmlands and raze the rainforests. And even then, we'd doom 200 million people to starvation.

In fact, crop yield studies are inconclusive, but some suggest strongly that organic farming is at least competitive. Other studies have shown that organic yields are higher than those of conventional crops under drought conditions, and are less variable in general.

Though Fattorini doesn't see fit to explain where his statistics come from, he does offer this tantalizing hint:

As the distinguished Indian plant biologist CS Prakash put it: "The only thing sustainable about organic farming in the developing world is that it sustains poverty and malnutrition."

Fattorini fails to mention that the "distinguished Indian plant biologist CS Prakash" is a rabid biotech zealot whose organization AgBioWorld has interesting ties to Monsanto and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Fattorini's tone, his unsourced "facts," and his heavy-handed deployment of race- and class-based arguments all reek of Prakash, and I'd be amazed if that's not who he's cribbing his facts and figures from. Many of Prakash's arguments have been counted, weighed, and found wanting, and I won't address them here. Instead, I'd like to make a more basic point about how class tensions are exploited - hypocritically, natch - by anti-organic polemicists like Fattorini.

Using a gambit that's increasingly popular among "lifestyle" journalists who cater to upscale readers, Fattorini informs us that buying organic food is a "bourgeois fad" and a "middle-class indulgence." He complains, too, that it's unacceptably prevalent among the lower classes, who have no business paying premium prices for foodstuffs:

This is no better than the parents who splash out on home cinemas and games consoles for themselves, leaving scant money to spend bringing up their children properly.

This sort of puritanical scolding is curious, coming as it does from a man whose calling in life is to write a weekly column on wine appreciation. You probably won't be surprised to learn that when it comes to that heart-gladdening beverage, Fattorini sings a somewhat different tune:

Joe Fattorini, The Herald's wine expert, said: "There is now a new generation of consumers – many of them young professional women who like expensive things, especially Champagne – and they're buying lots of it. Majestic has been very cleverly selling to broader market trends....Broadly, the wine trade has been men who like to look for new, unusual, distinctive things but women don't want to read a load of books to find out about wine, they like to have a brand or something familiar that they can build on. What Majestic have succeeded in doing is getting people to 'walk up the ladder' from brands they know, to more expensive, higher quality products."

It seems that in some cases, Fattorini finds "bourgeois fads" perfectly acceptable, and the people who cater to them worthy of real admiration. Wine is a "middle-class indulgence" if anything is, and the land that produces it could certainly be turned to the production of food crops. Fattorini asks us how we'd go about explaining to the global poor that we must let them starve so that we can have more "natural" foods, but he apparently feels no need to justify growing wine grapes on land that could otherwise provide food to the starving.

Nor should he, given that insufficient production of food isn't actually the cause of global hunger. Organic farming doesn't starve people any more than vineyards do. Fittorani complains about organic farmers' inefficient use of land, but that criticism could be more reasonably leveled against industrial cattle farms, which provide a woefully small return on the required investment of water, land, and energy (and that's before you factor in externalities like water pollution and increased antibiotic resistance).

Further, he refuses to consider that production inputs are often higher in conventional farming, thanks to the use of synthetic fertilizers, for instance:

The manufacture of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer consumes a tremendous amount of fossil fuel, representing about 30% of a conventional farm's energy consumption. University of Kentucky researchers attributed 42% of the energy cost of corn production to nitrogen fertilizer, compared to 29% for drying the grain and only 7% for plowing and disking the field.

All in all, Fattorini's thinking is typical. He scrutinizes products and processes that claim to be "sustainable," and damns them as bourgeois affectations that crucify the poor and wreck the environment. Having done so, he returns complacently to championing a status quo that crucifies the poor and wrecks the environment. Once he's worked himself into a state of righteous wrath by imagining some possible world in which organic farming has destroyed the rainforests, he can shrug off the actual destruction of the rainforests by industrial agriculture. Science, Fattorini claims, will improve conventional agribusiness in years to come; the idea that it could also improve, say, nitrogen management in organic farming, thereby blowing his already dubious objections out of the water, seems not to have occurred to him.

Finally, adding insult to injury, he proposes that his confused thinking constitutes some sort of moral clarion call for the rest of us. Apparently, ignorance loves company even more than misery does.

Sunday Nudibranch Blogging

Here's a gorgeous photo of Ceratosoma trilobatum, which I hope will make up for my malfeasance last Friday.

Happy New Year!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

I may not know which nudibranch this is, but I know what I like!

Friday Hope Blogging

A week in which Ted Stevens claims to have suffered the saddest day of his life hardly needs my help to seem cheery. (Students of pathology, take note: Attaturk mentions one of the sad days in Stevens' life that apparently distressed him quite a bit less.)

Throw in a crushing legal defeat for Wal-Mart, and an annihilating legal defeat for intelligent design, and this week's news starts to seem like the best we've had all year. Do I really need to gild the lily?

Sure I do. Engineer-Poet discusses a couple of important developments in the hybrid-car market. Here's one of them:

Honda has announced hybrid Civic price cuts and the possible withdrawal of non-hybrid Civics from some markets. With the hybrid price premium set to fall to $1700, there are fewer and fewer reasons to buy the conventional drivetrain. Eventually, Honda may no longer build them.

Getting rid of the non-hybrid Civic is a very big shift. A company which is willing to do this is probably open-minded enough to make other bold moves.

WorldChanging reports on the use of iPods as portable medical guides, with instructions on CPR and other emergency medical treatments:

FirstAidPod is an organization that provides emergency instructions as podcasts. The idea is that, while few of us carry around printed medical guides, many of us carry music players; if a medical emergency occurs, users can open up the correct audio file and listen to step-by-step instructions for handling common -- but life-threatening -- problems. Currently-available first aid podcasts include Infant CPR (.m4a) and Child CPR (.m4a), with Adult CPR coming soon.

WorldChanging also describes an interesting form of low-tech water desalinization:

Made of a rugged, transparent plastic, the Watercone is incredibly easy to use: fill up the base plate with salt water, place the cone over the plate, and wait. 24 hours later, a trough around the edge of the cone will contain 1-1.5 liters of fresh water, produced by evaporation/condensation. Pour the water out, and start again. Individual units are expected to cost around $50 apiece, although that will depend in large part on who manufactures them.

I enjoyed this article about two couples who created Indiana's Spicer Lake Nature Preserve. Even if you skip the article, click that last link and have a look at the Preserve....it's gorgeous. (Link via Beakspeak.)

The four people who protected the wetlands at Spicer Lake recently received an award for their efforts from the National Audubon Society. By way of contrast, three people who destroyed wetlands in Mississippi have received prison sentences and fines:

Sentenced were Robert J. Lucas Jr. of Lucedale, who developed the Big Hill Acres mobile home park in Vancleave; his daughter, Robbie Lucas Wrigley, an Ocean Springs real estate agent who sold at Big Hill Acres; and engineer M.E. Thompson Jr. of D'Iberville, who designed septic systems for the development.

Lucas received nine years in prison, and Wrigley and Thompson each got seven years and three months. Two corporations, Big Hill Acres Inc. and Consolidated Investments Inc., both run by Lucas, were fined. Big Hill Acres was ordered to pay $4.8 million and Consolidated Investment to pay $500,000. Federal officials hailed the sentences as the largest of their kind in U.S. history.

Here's a story that ought to please everyone:

The European Union (EU) will impose a complete ban on the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed as from Jan. 1, 2006. The last four antibiotics which have been permitted as feed additives to help fatten livestock will no longer be allowed to be marketed or used from this date, said the European Commission on Thursday.

And while we're on the subject of unregenerate socialism, here's an unusual example of consumer activism from the sunny land of Sweden:

On January 1, the EU launched a system that enables companies which have not used up all their "polluting rights" to sell them to companies which have exceeded their limit.

The sale of emission rights is open to the public, a fact which has not escaped SNF. The group is giving the public the chance to buy carbon dioxide rights on its website for 350 kronor (37 euros, 44 dollars) per tonne, thereby depriving companies of those rights to emit the greenhouse gas.

Not a bad haul, eh? I seem to have gotten into the habit of ending this feature with links to aesthetically pleasing sites, so I may as well make it an official tradition. Visual Complexity compiles various graphic representations of complex networks. On a more populist note, Tick Tock Toys has an eye-gouging gallery of food advertising premiums here. For those of a more antiquarian bent, I recommend Robots of the Victorian Era.

7 x 7

CKR at WhirledView has tagged me with a particularly long and involved Internet questionnaire, but you won't hear me grumbling about it. My humble roof may be crumpling under the weight of rodents who've been flooded from their lairs. The children may be coloring in my 1650 edition of The Booke of Pretty Conceits. I may have inadvertantly eaten several large pieces of glass. And I may be right in the middle of writing a post that will hurl the mighty face-first into the dust, and strike the yoke of tyranny from the shoulders of the oppressed. But all of these things can - nay, must - wait. First things first, is my motto.

Seven Things To Do Before I Die

1. Denial and isolation
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
6. Burn those pictures of myself wearing that French maid's outfit
7. Take hostages

Seven Things I Cannot Do

1. Admit my incapacities
2. Play drums
3. Drink Retsina
4. Approve of myself
5. Stop buying books
6. The Australian Crawl (The Australian pub crawl, however, comes naturally to me)
7. Pay parking tickets before the fine increases

Seven Things That Attract Me to...Blogging

1. The money
2. The dames
3. The ability to bring down corrupt officials with a single well-turned phrase
4. Multiple deadlines every day!
5. Promoting the neo-Grindletonian worldview
6. Being put under illegal surveillance by a dozen conflicting government agencies that don't communicate with each other
7. Sententious disapproval from halfwits like George Simpson

Seven Things I Say Most Often

Well, I spend a lot of time in the car, so...

1. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?!"
2. "God damn you!"
3. "Maniac!"
4. "Move it, you crazy old fossil!"
5. "Get your Bush-loving ass over to Iraq, you goddamn chickenshit!"
6. "Hope you're enjoying your 4 miles per gallon, jerk!"
7. "Where are all these assholes going?"

Seven Books That I Love

1. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
2. Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties - Michael Lesy
3. Travels in Arabia Deserta - Charles Doughty
4. Moominpappa at Sea - Tove Jansson
5. Sisters By a River - Barbara Comyns
6. English Eccentrics - Edith Sitwell
7. On Growth and Form - D'Arcy Thompson

Seven Movies That I Watch Over and Over Again

1. The Seventh Victim
2. My Man Godfrey
3. Spirit of the Beehive
4. Caught
5. The Set-Up
6. It's a Gift
7. The Shop Around the Corner

Seven People I Want To Join In Too

Let's see...the wife and I both like that red-headed gal at the coffee shop, so...

Hmmm. I'm thinking I misinterpreted the question. I'll start over.

I don't think I've hit NYMary with one of these things yet, so there's a limit to how irritated she can get. And Juniper Pearl seems way too pleasant and even-tempered to get upset with me. Ditto for Hedwig. My pal Eli, of course, is so hypnotically compelling that he can hardly complain if people feel...well, hypnotically compelled by him. That goes double for Watertiger, who is a riddle inside a mystery, wrapped in an enigma and sprinkled with confectioner's sugar. Then there's Wayne...who among us does not love Wayne?

Last, despite her recent harsh words about me, I guess I'll extend a feeler in the general direction of Ann Altmouse.

Fish in a Barrel

Most sane people are justifiably contemptuous of "hunters" who frequent facilities where tame, drugged, or stunned animals can be gunned down at close range. What you may not know is that these lazy, cowardly buffoons can reward themselves for their ugly behavior by exploiting a loophole in the tax code, as can hunters who prey upon rare and endangered species:

[W]ealthy hunters have been killing a few "extra" animals, donating the trophies to pseudo-museums, inflating the value of these trophies and then taking a huge tax deduction for their "charitable" contribution (to "museums" that are sometimes in someone's basement or even abandoned railroad cars).

In his fine book Dominion, former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully dissects a statement by R. Bruce Duncan, author of "Secrets of Tax-Deductible Hunting":

[The tax break] is needed, according to Mr. Duncan, because "hunting costs double every ten years." Why are costs rising? Because availability is declining. Why is availability falling? Because demand has overtaken supply. Why is demand so overwhelming? In large part because of these very tax techniques which have put endangered big game animals within the means of more hunters than ever before. It is a vicious cycle of depletion and depredation, leaving fewer (and younger) animals at ever higher prices, the barriers on the hunters' appetite artificially removed by political lobbying and creative manipulations of the tax code.

Wherever there's a confluence of tax evasion, pointless brutality, wildly unequal power relations, and lurid displays of pseudo-masculinity, you're bound to stumble upon a heavily armed camp of GOP extremists. "Tax-deductible hunting," of course, is no exception. R. Bruce Duncan works closely with Safari Club International (SCI), an utterly corrupt anti-environmental organization with close ties to the Bush administration. Bush, in fact, recently put SCI's former chief lobbyist in charge of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Much to his credit, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is trying to end this taxpayer-subsidized reward for sociopathy and perversion. You can click here to sign a petition supporting his efforts.

State of Exception

The "freedom-loving," "small-government" Right's insistence that George W. Bush can amend or ignore American law at will is becoming increasingly shrill and defiant, and increasingly bizarre. William Kristol, for instance, concocts an outlandish terra-related scenario in which Bush's illegal actions would supposedly be justified:

A U.S. president has just received word that American counterterrorist operatives have captured a senior al Qaeda operative in Pakistan. Among his possessions are a couple of cell phones -- phones that contain several American phone numbers. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, what's a president to do?

If the president were taking the advice offered by some politicians and pundits in recent days, he would order the attorney general to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The attorney general would ask that panel of federal judges for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to begin eavesdropping on those telephone numbers, to determine whether any individual associated with those numbers was involved in terrorist activities.

But the attorney general might have to tell the president he might well not be able to get that warrant. FISA requires the attorney general to convince the panel that there is "probable cause to believe" that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist.

As ever, Kristol is too cute for words. 9/11 changed everything; in its wake, the president may flout our laws at his discretion. But we're not to assume that any post-9/11 alarmism has percolated down to the FISC, despite the fact that in 2004, the FISC approved - as per usual - every single application that came its way. Instead, we're invited to believe that Bush might not be able to get a legal wiretap of phone numbers found in the possession of "a senior al Qaeda operative." As evidence for this absurd proposition, Kristol invokes the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, "the French Moroccan who came to the FBI's attention before Sept. 11."

In making this illogical claim, Kristol conscientiously ignores the fact that the mishandling of the Moussaoui case had to do primarily with mistakes - to take the most optimistic view - at the FBI and DoJ, not at the always-obliging FISC. According to the Interim Report on FBI Oversight in the 107th Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Our review suggests that the same fundamental problems within the FBI that have plagued the agency in other contexts also prevented both the FBI and DOJ from aggressively pursuing FISA applications in the period before the 9/11 attacks. Such problems caused the submission of key FISA applications to the FISA Court to have been significantly delayed or not made.

This bipartisan report also addresses the question of domestic surveillance:

We are also conscious of the extraordinary power FISA confers on the Executive branch. FISA contains safeguards, including judicial review by the FISA Court and certain limited reporting requirements to congressional intelligence committees, to ensure that this power is not abused. Such safeguards are no substitute, however, for the watchful eye of the public and the Judiciary Committees, which have broader oversight responsibilities for DOJ and the FBI.

In an earlier post, I discussed the relevance of the German jurist Carl Schmitt's theories on the "state of exception" to the Right's current view of executive power:

In a "state of exception" - which might be caused by a terrorist attack, a pandemic, political unrest, or any number of other things - the sovereign must go beyond the legal system in order to preserve (one hopes) the preconstitutional spirit of the law; this dictatorial figure assesses the law from a point outside its boundaries, and modifies or annuls it as necessary....Schmitt argues that the possibility - or rather, inevitability - of the state of exception can best be addressed by a quasi-divine sovereign with broad extralegal powers, which must be available whenever the sovereign deems them necessary: "the law cannot protect itself."

Kristol makes an argument uncomfortably similar to Schmitt's:

[T]he Founders intended the executive to have -- believed the executive needed to have -- some powers in the national security area that were extralegal but constitutional.

"Some powers" is conveniently vague, of course. To invoke the Founders in defense of George W. Bush's specific, unnecessary extralegal maneuverings requires considerable insolence, and a remarkable amount of contempt for the public. James Madison said, “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." And Thomas Jefferson said, "It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape." There's no intelligent reason to assume that these men, or any other Founders, would've applauded BushCo's assault on their own system of checks and balances. More likely, they would've recognized Bush as a larval despot (at best), and Kristol as his shameless, cynical courtier.

Meanwhile, Adventus informs me that Dana Rohrabacher (R-Taliban) has been elucidating his own idiosyncratic take on constitutional law:

I'll tell you something, if a nuclear weapon goes off in Washington, DC, or New York or Los Angeles, it'll burn the Constitution as it does.

No Straw Left Ungrasped

Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation apparently fancies himself a deadly ironist.

You can do a lot of things when December rolls around and temperatures plunge. But would you hold an international conference on global warming? The United Nations did.

How about that, folks? It was cold in Montreal, but the UN held a conference on "global warming" anyway. What hypocrisy, eh?

This daft non sequitur leads to an equally daft complaint about the "contradictory" science of climate change:

[T]he speakers could never quite agree what we're up against. While most Kyoto enthusiasts have long argued the planet is getting warmer, a recent report in the journal Nature hints that a new Ice Age may be on the way. The report says the ocean current that keeps Europe warm may be shifting, which could make the continent cooler.

Before continuing, let's note Feulner's prejudicial use of the term "Ice Age" to refer to what he himself identifies as an example of regional climate change within an unsettled global system.

[N]o matter what, the worrywarts have the future covered. Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace explained, "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter; that's what we're dealing with." No wonder humanity is having trouble addressing the problems -- we can't even decide what the problems are.

Of course, scientists can agree on what the problems are, by and large. What they can't completely agree on is the full spectrum of possible results...which is not very surprising when you're talking about a problem in nonlinear dynamics. This is a point Feulner himself makes the moment it suits his purpose:

With all our scientific advances, we can barely predict what the weather will be tomorrow, let alone forecast what will happen 50 years from now.

Thus, Feulner acknowledges that scientists can't be expected to predict the precise results of climate change, while pretending that their lack of unanimity somehow renders them ridiculous. He uses a similar sleight of hand to "discredit" Guilbeaut, who's actually pointing out that global warming can have "contradictory" effects simultaneously (e.g., more rain in one region, and more drought in another).

The notion that a warming earth could lead to colder regional temperatures is widely accepted, and it's really not hard to grasp when you picture, say, melting ice caps. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution explains the process in terms just about anyone can undertstand:

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

Simple enough, unless you're a loony-libertarian dead-ender in utter thrall to Richard Mellon Scaife.

It's funny that Feulner sees fit to upbraid scientists for their intellectual sins, while making bizarre pronouncements like this one:

What we do know is that as a country becomes more affluent, it becomes cleaner.

To the miniscule extent that this is even arguably true, it ignores the fact that pollution control is usually achieved over the deafening protests of industry-funded Chicken Littles like Fuelner, who screech that it will destroy economic or scientific progress. I suppose you could argue that Britain's industrial revolution eventually resulted in some controls on industry, but its initial effect was to increase pollution, and I'll bet that this was its net effect, too. If anyone needs another example, the automobile contributed a great deal to the economic growth of the United States, while contaminating the environment with, among other things, millions of metric tons of lead. You can argue that the economic benefits outweigh the environmental costs, if you wish, but you can't coherently argue that economic growth leads reliably to a cleaner environment, unless your definition of "cleaner" is so idiosyncratic or dishonest as to be incomprehensible.

But of course, shills like Feulner aren't looking for coherent arguments; they're looking for sophistries with which to baffle an already confused public.

A Deep, Emotional Commitment

Ted Stevens (R-AK) claims to be clinically depressed over his ongoing inability to turn ANWR over to big oil:

"I'm seriously depressed, unfortunately, clinically depressed," he said. "And I've been told that's because I've been at this too long."

Stevens' self-diagnosis of mental illness does a great deal to explain his obsessive, unethical bullying on ANWR, though I suspect that depression is actually the least of his problems.

The media love to portray Stevens as "wily" and "shrewd"; these are perhaps not the best words to describe a man who's spent most of his career trying unsuccessfully to force a wildly unpopular and costly act of ecological vandalism down the public's throat. "Sociopathic" would be more appropriate, as would "criminal."

Stevens' current strategy, which ties ANWR drilling to defense appropriations, is a typical symptom of this unpleasant old man's monomania, to which he's willing to sacrifice anything and everything. In describing Stevens' derangement, however, the WaPo finds itself getting a bit dewy-eyed:

Known for his "Incredible Hulk" necktie, Stevens famously described himself as a "mean, miserable SOB." But his growling delivery masks a deep, emotional commitment to Alaska -- a vast, distant and sparsely populated state that typically leads the nation in federal pork.

I don't know what sort of telepathy WP staff writer Shailagh Murray used to ascertain that Stevens' "deep, emotional commitment" is to Alaska itself, rather than to the money he's made for himself and his cronies by sucking with vampiric fixity at the federal teat. Stevens' willingness to buy votes in Alaska with money extorted from taxpayers in other states requires nothing more noble than greed and immorality, and one suspects that strutting vanity and callous self-enrichment would be his métier no matter which state were unfortunate enough to be encumbered with him.

As regards ANWR, Stevens isn't just greedy and immoral; he's also a hypocrite. Courtesy of Gristmill, here's a 1977 quote from Stevens:

These people would snake a pipeline across one of the great landscapes of the world, the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Some have appropriately compared splitting the Arctic National Wildlife Range by a 48-inch pipeline and haul road with slicing a razor blade across the face of the Mona Lisa.

Regardless of how one feels about drilling in ANWR, the anti-democratic maneuvers that Stevens and Frist have cooked up in order to make it "legal" should be opposed on principle.

Write or call your congresspeople, and make sure that Stevens remains clinically depressed until he's relieved of office by the one term limit that even Republicans can't override.