Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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New Year's Eve is the time for wistful reminiscing, but all in all this has been a very good year for me on pretty much every front and consequently I don't feel much wistfulness. But reading this year-end post from muffybolding about the passing of Fred Rogers left me all choked up at work and wondering why. Read it and see if it has the same effect on you, though it may be specific to those of us below a certain age.
I know a lot of people who considered Mr. Rogers vaguely creepy or at least ample comedy fodder. In my long-ago childhood, though, he held an importance for me that I have only able to make sense of as an adult. It wasn't the calm demeanor, it wasn't the earnest educational values, it wasn't the land of make-believe or any of that. It was hearing these words every day: "Remember - I like you just the way you are."
That sentiment wasn't one with which I was well-acquainted as a child. My parents were quite young when I was born, and I would have been a, shall we say, challenging child to raise even for seasoned child psychologists. "Just the way I was" would have been supremely frustrating even, I suspect, for Fred Rogers. That's not to say I didn't get unconditional love, just that children's eyes see things very differently from adults. All the same, looking back at it from thirty years' perspective, those words had a deep impact. He was just looking into a camera, but at the time he was talking directly to me and saying exactly what I needed to hear the most. Turns out I was hardly alone in that.
I'm not big on New Year's resolutions because I've never quite managed to follow through on any yet. However, making sure that my own son regularly hears those words from me is my only one for this year and I'd heartily recommend it if you have children of your own. The investment is negligible and the long-term profit immeasurable.
Now I'm off to debauch, so the happiest of New Years to all y'all out there who stumble through here. I'll see you in 2004.
Fortune Magazine (that bastion of progressive activism) has awarded its "Worst Technology 2003" honor: Paperless voting. As David at blackboxvoting puts it, "When a right-wing, pro-business publication like Fortune turns on you, you are well and truly screwed."
Relatedly, toss one back tonight for Kevin Shelley, California Secretary of State.
"The core of our American democracy is the right to vote. Implicit in that right is the notion that that vote be private, that vote be secure, and that vote be counted as it was intended when it was cast by the voter. And I think what we're encountering is a pivotal moment in our democracy where all of that is being called into question."
Ya damn skippy it is.
Stardust has entered comet Wild 2's coma.
T-minus 48 hours and counting to a historic rendezvous, NASA's Stardust spacecraft has officially entered a comet's coma, the cloud of dust and gas surrounding the nucleus. Stardust is scheduled to hurtle past comet Wild 2 on January 2, 2004, at approximately 2:40 a.m. EST.
Onboard is a cosmic pooper-scooper that will gather comet debris from the tail and return to Earth with it. Two years from now it will bounce into the Utah desert so we can study it.
Comparatively sparse collection of images associated with this mission, but I did like this one of comet Halley taken by the Giotto spacecraft in 1986.
Britons trust Homer Simpson more than George W. Bush.
Britons who are considering a tandem skydive would trust cartoon character Homer Simpson over American President George Bush, according to research. The public voted the daft dad of hit TV show The Simpsons as their number one choice if they were participating in the daredevil stunt. [...] Homer got 20 percent of the overall vote in the survey while President Bush got only eight percent.
On a similar note, my own personal poll of the surrounding cubes in my office revealed that 100% of those responding would prefer to take a shower with SpongeBob Squarepants than with President Bush. Tune in next week for results on the latest apostropher poll - would you rather huff airplane glue with Meatwad or Dick Cheney?
My Libertarian and Republican friends will likely consider this a sign of progress, but I find it utterly depressing. ABC News lists the changes from 2003 to 2004 in arts funding on a by-state basis, along with figures for DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. Nationally, arts funding dropped 23.1% from last year. Including DC and the five American territories, 36 had declines with 20 of those dropping by more than 10%, 16 had hikes with 4 greater than 10%, and 4 (NC, MA, KY, and American Samoa) stayed the same or shifted less than 1/10 of a percent.
The biggest percentage losers (figures in millions of dollars):
The biggest percentage gainers:
Notice how much smaller in absolute terms the percentage gains are compared to the reductions. I've had the "why should taxpayers subsidize art" argument too many times to completely rehash it now. For me it is simply this: that is what a civilized nation does. Allow the invisible hand to be the sole gatekeeper of culture and you end up with Paris Hilton, professional wrestling, CATS, and Thomas Kincaid defining your cultural landscape.
Of course, most states are in severe budget crunches and arts will obviously get axed before less elective items like schools, roads, law enforcement, and health care. That grim and unavoidable logic still doesn't make the outcome any less regrettable. I know the anti-NEA crusaders love to throw around Robert Mapplethorpe as the exemplar of government-supported art, but the reality is that most of these disappearing dollars go to things like city orchestras, local theater, and arts programs for children. Even if this is largely inevitable, it really is a crying shame.
Screw you, we'll do it ourselves.
A U.S. military energy unit announced on Tuesday that it was taking over the task of providing fuel for Iraq, ending a Pentagon deal with Vice President Dick Cheney's former company Halliburton amid allegations of price gouging by the Texas-based energy services giant.
Halliburton still has lots of rebuilding business in Iraq, but this takes them out of the oil importation business. I doubt even Dubya thought we'd have to be importing oil to Iraq 8 months after conquering it. The Defense Energy Support Center will award and administer new contracts within 2 weeks. The key question I have is who is showing the spine here at DoD, Brass or civilians. Whoever it is, thanks. I'm glad to see that gouging and lying about it are grounds for terminating a contract.
The National Review's Jonah Goldberg, the smarmy patron saint of asinine strawman arguments, has a column that actually makes sense. Granted, said column is on a topic of precisely no importance - namely, whether The Lord of the Rings movies are racist in their portrayal of orcs - but as I say, credit where credit is due. The column is not completely freaking inane.
That makes one.
Well, isn't this interesting. The New York Post, [sarcasm] with its storied commitment to truth and accuracy [/sarcasm], says that the violent crime rate in Baghdad is lower than in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Surprising, isn't it? But wait, at the very end of the article comes the caveat:
[T]hose numbers may be misleading because not all kidnappings and assaults are reported to police. The Army's statistics do not take into account "political" attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel by Ba'athist death squads - or the terrorists showing up in Baghdad morgues after having been killed by the U.S. military in those battles. Experts caution that Iraq's police force is still in the formative stages and it is possible that the Army's statistics might not be as accurate as those reported by police forces in the United States.
Ya think? So, the murder rate is decidedly lower as long as you don't count any of that pesky "political" violence and take at face value the statistics of a still "formative" police force that controls only parts of the city. Mm-hmm. Guess what? I haven't even gotten to the punchline yet. Who put this report together? Why, none other than John Lott, whose adventures in imaginary statistics and falsified identities has reached legendary proportions.
John Lott in the New York Post? You might as well ask the guy at the intersection with the "will work for food" sign. The methodology would be roughly the same.
Update (12:47 am): This was news to me, but Tim Lambert's been all over it for some time. Here's a really comprehensive, extensively sourced smackdown.
Back in August, I wrote about Adrienne Samen, the young woman who went totally apesh*t at her wedding, earning the charming nickname "Bridezilla." Well, she's back in the news. Raining hellfire and fistfuls of wedding cake on her husband apparently didn't release enough steam to soothe her savage breast, and moreover, her sister seems cut from the same cloth.
Police responded to a report of a domestic dispute at 1984 State St. at 3:13 a.m. Sunday The sisters allegedly were arguing over a credit card when the argument got physical, police said. Hoysen-Samen said her sister would not physically let her leave the house. Hoysen told police that her sister punched her, and she punched back. Hoysen also said her sister caused her to fall when Hoysen-Samen backed out of the driveway as Hoysen was holding onto the car door handle. [...] The sisters will be back in court Jan. 21, when Hoysen-Samen also faces three pending larceny cases. The cases involve charges of third-degree larceny and one of forgery that allegedly occurred in January, April and July.
The article gives no indication as to whether the poor sap that married into this lovely family is still hanging around. But it looks like her sister is still single, so bring flowers (and pepper spray) to the New Haven courthouse in three weeks, fellas.
Update: Part III
For about a year in the late eighties, I delivered pizzas to keep my college student self properly armed with beer, cigarettes, and what have you. I've never been a poster child for clean living. Anyhow, the lamest, most insulting tips ("$19.75...Here's a twenty; keep the change.") consistently came from McMansions with Bush/Quayle-stickered BMWs in the driveway. Without fail. Every time. And so little has changed.
According to the survey of 630 drivers, [...] people with "Dean for President" bumper stickers on cars in their driveways tipped 22 percent higher than people with "Bush for President" bumper stickers.
No surprise here. Cheapskate Republicans, should there be any reading this, should heed my words and heed them well. We always remembered those addresses. Trickle-down economics can go both ways, if you catch my meaning. Never, ever insult anybody who might bring you food (or should I say, "food") in the future.
Fa la la la la, stop drop and roll.
A woman unhappy with a Christmas present from her former stepmother was arrested Sunday along with her boyfriend on suspicion of arson for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail into the ex-stepmother's Hermosa Beach home, causing $200,000 in damage, police said. Brandi Nicole Nason, 20, and her boyfriend, Marshal Abram Penna, 24, of Citrus Heights, allegedly tossed a lighted bottle of gasoline through the glass front door of Nason's former stepmother's home about 9 p.m. on Christmas Day, said Hermosa Beach Police Sgt. Paul Wolcott.
Brandi-with-an-i failed to knock off her ex-stepmother but, you know, it's the thought that counts, right?
Calpundit and Atrios both link to Money Magazine's list of the best places in the United States to live. A list, I might add, that lines up pretty neatly with my personal list of places in which I would never, ever, ever want to reside. Case in point: the number one - number one - place in the eastern United States is freaking Cary, North Carolina. Having grown up and still living a twenty minute drive down I-40 from Cary (acronym: Containment Area for Relocated Yankees), I had to check the url twice to make sure it wasn't a parody from The Onion.
Cary? CARY? Well sure, it's a great place to live if you can't stand the sight of:
In the Triangle, Durham, Chapel Hill/Carrboro, and Raleigh are all vibrant, friendly, funky cities in their own distinctive ways, and each has a long and interesting history and abundant cultural attractions to recommend them. Cary has, um, er, well, SAS is headquartered there and is a very nice place to work, and the local high school has one of the best marching bands in the state year in and year out. But beyond those, the only real attraction I can pin down is Cary's proximity to Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
Judging from the comments at both of the blog links from the first paragraph of this post, the rest of the cities on the list suffer from the same nouveau-riche, taste-free, ambient blandness. On the other hand, all you in the Money Magazine target demographic please keep moving to overcrowded, artificial, vanilla beautiful Cary. You'll fit right in.
There have been times in my life where I have gone to some (in retrospect) incredibly dumb extremes trying to win back this or that ex-girlfriend. And I like to believe that I'm pretty good at thinking outside the box. But never once did it occur to me to convince a teenager to shoot me in the nuts.
A man in Sicily asked a friend to shoot him in the groin in the hope of making his ex-girlfriend feel sorry for him, police said on Friday. Police in the central Sicilian city of Piazza Armerina said they became suspicious when the 27-year-old went to hospital with wounds from a hunting rifle's pellets in the groin area. At first he said the wounds had been caused in a hunting accident, but later admitted he had asked a friend, 16, to shoot him in an attempt to win back the affection of his girlfriend, who had apparently left him because of his violent character.
You don't say.
In 1997, a guy in Florida named Rick Schwartz paid $15,000 to buy the domain name men.com. Last week, he sold it for $1.3 million. Not too shabby, and he owns another 4,000 or so domain names. He stated that he could have gotten more money by hanging onto it longer, but cashed in now in order to buy . . . more domain names.
Anybody who would like to purchase apostropher.com for $15K, please contact me immediately. First come, first serve, so don't dither.
The D.C. federal appeals court blocked the Bush administration's rollbacks of the Clean Air Act in response to a lawsuit brought by twelve states. The states involved, to whom we should all be grateful (unless we own any old coal-burning plants), were Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, joined by legal officers for New York City, Washington, San Francisco, New Haven and some other cities in Connecticut.
And really, I'm just grateful for any good news because between the earthquake in Iran, the plane crash in Benin, the mudslides in California, the avalanche in Utah, the poison gas leak in China, the spiraling death toll in Iraq, and the daily dose of Israel-Palestine, it was godawfully depressing to watch the news yesterday.
Scientists at Texas A&M University have produced Dewey, the world's first cloned deer because, you know, we are in real danger of running out of deer in this country.
Republicans (and competing Democrats) have been falling all over themselves to declare Howard Dean either traitorous, stupid, or insane for stating that "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer." Shrill, softheaded, intemperate, little man, how could he possibly believe such a thing when everybody kno--
BZZZT. BZZZT. BZZZT. We interrupt this post for an important alert from the Department of Homeland Security.
December 21st, 2003: Today, the United States Government raised the national threat level from an Elevated to High risk of terrorist attack -- or as more commonly known, from a Yellow Code to an Orange Code. [...] The U.S. intelligence community has received a substantial increase in the volume of threat-related intelligence reports. These credible sources suggest the possibility of attacks against the homeland around the holiday season and beyond. The strategic indicators, including al-Qaida's continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland, are perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th, 2001.
But, but, but...
...until we meet again. Time for a quick rundown of snails in the news. Just because.
Researchers at Lehigh University have developed a "vibrating gel that creeps, crawls and slithers just as worms, snails and snakes do," in the form of a two-centimeter tube made out of the polymer acrylamide and water.
At MIT, for purposes apparent only to themselves, the good folks in the Mechanical Engineering department have created RoboSnail.
In California, the tiny, non-native New Zealand mud snail is invading trout streams, leading the state to shut down prime trophy streams to stop the spread of the mollusk, which "rarely grows larger than 5 millimeters in length but can reach concentrations of 700,000 per square meter, driving out much of the native invertebrate population on which fish feed." According to this Napa News article about the battle, it would take ten of them to cover a dime, they pass unharmed through fish digestive systems by folding a membrane around themselves, and were first discovered in Montana "after destroying everything green in hundreds of miles of streams."
American and British researchers have discovered North American snails that, like leafcutter ants, cultivate fungus to eat by chewing up grass then defecating on the plant wound to induce the fungal growth that they return later to eat. This is the first such behavior observed outside of insects.
Cone snails, becoming scarce due to the demand for their ornate shells, are being singled out for protection due to the huge medical potential in the conotoxins contained in their venom.
A snail will defend itself and paralyse its prey - worms, fish, and other molluscs - by injecting a cocktail of these toxins through a proboscis - a hollow, harpoon-like tooth. Each snail species has its own distinct set of around 100 conotoxins. To date, only about 100 of the estimated 50,000 cone snail toxins have been characterised, and a mere handful tested for their medical potential. [...] Most conotoxins are extremely selective about their receptor binding sites.
Conotoxins that block key neurological pathways have been shown to be effective in the diagnosis and possible treatment of small-cell lung cancer, one of the biggest cancer killers. A conotoxin-based compound now in clinical trials also has a powerful anti-epileptic effect. Other research suggests that conotoxins could treat muscle spasticity following spinal cord injury, and prevent cell death when there is inadequate circulation, such as during strokes, head injuries or coronary bypass surgery. Studies indicate they could also be used to treat clinical depression, heart arrhythmias and urinary incontinence. But it is in the field of pain relief that the snail venoms have generated huge excitement.
And just to round out the list, here's a leering look at the twisted, sordid sex lives of snails, including S&M, genital piercing, and hermaphroditism. Enjoy your weekend.
The inimitable Kevin Drum (of CalPundit) went to a gathering last night at the home of the inimitable Mark Kleiman (of... Mark Kleiman) for a house party for Wesley Clark. A video by Linda Bloodworth, the same director who made The Man From Hope for Bill Clinton in 1992, was unveiled: American Son about the General / Candidate. Pretty good production; I can get pretty weepy about this kind of stuff. Go watch it. It's 18 min long and weighs 58 MB.
I'm trying to delay the all-too-important Froz Gobo endorsement as long as possible, but the more I hear and read about this guy, plus especially the testimonials from military colleagues in the video, the more I find myself leaning towards Wes Clark.
I know many of his proposed solutions are campaign talking points, and very similar ones to the other Democratic candidates, but the guy just nails the comprehensive analysis of environmental challenges we face. And I hear no other candidate talking in terms of a 100 year vision. That just impresses me.
I know it's about a lot more than this, and I would never promote a candidate in a contested primary on this basis alone, but can you say: ELECTABILITY?
I really think he could walk over Rove and his radical right-wing machine. And bring honest liberals and conservatives together behind him.
Guinness won't list him in their Book of World Records, but however unofficial it might be, we all know that this fellow from Latvia is the undisputed heavyweight champion of alcoholism.
They say they found the unidentified drinker in an unconscious state, but medics found he was stable and recorded 7.22 parts per million of alcohol in a blood test, police spokeswoman Ieva Zvidre said. An average person would vomit at around 1.2, lose consciousness at 3.0 and stop breathing at a level of about 4.0 parts per million. [...] Emergency ward head Martins Sics said there is no record of anybody having survived such a dose, even in neighbouring Russia which takes pride in its vodka-guzzling traditions.
Nearly twice the lethal blood level and he was "stable?" Holy crap.
Diebold hires felons convicted of stock and computer fraud to run our democracy their company? Crikey! This story just couldn't be getting any uglier.
At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software.
Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions, and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records.
Wait, no, maybe it could.
Digital voting giant Diebold Election Systems took a staggering blow Wednesday as California officials reported that Diebold ran uncertified -- and in some cases untested -- software in all 17 counties where it counted votes in the state's last two elections.
What began as a scandal in Alameda County swept statewide as every county served by Diebold realized its software was not state certified, and three counties, including Los Angeles, found that some of their software never had been tested by a federally designated lab.
Absentee ballots? Sure, we can do that; I know just the guy to design our "Printed Products Department".'
I am pleased to announce that effective today, John Elder will be assuming the role of General Manager of the Printed Products department of Diebold Election Systems, Inc. John brings a wealth of knowledge along with a passion for success to this role which will be essential as we strive to gain market share and improve profitability.
Bev Harris puts it very succinctly, as usual.
We need a temporary moratorium on machine voting. We must count the paper ballots by hand, at least for elections in the very near-term, because we really have no idea how widespread this problem is and we do not have safeguards in place. Remember, we just lucked into the Diebold files. In an audit, when there is an anomaly with your spot check, you pull the whole subset of records for a more careful examination. We just spot-checked Diebold. I’d say we found an anomaly. Now we need to pull the subset of voting system vendors and give everyone a background check, and send an auditor in to check our their records. And perhaps their memos.
Trust is critical, so transparency must become a requirement. The Declaration of Independence does not say “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the computer programmers.”
No matter how clever the cryptography, no matter how great the open source program is, unless ordinary citizens with no computer expertise can see with their own eyes that votes are being counted accurately, the audit system fails. In a democracy like ours, you don’t need to be a lawyer to sit on a jury. You shouldn’t need to be a computer programmer to count a vote.
Makes sense to me.
A cow killed by a lightning strike is unlucky. Thirteen cows killed by a single lightning strike probably heralds the coming of Satan. And you know he's coming somewhere, because the Buffalo Sabres are looking to unload him.
Satan is on pace for one of his worst offensive seasons in NHL history. He has nine goals and five assists in 32 games which includes tallying just three points in the month of November. His minus-16 rating is among the NHL's worst and he is on pace to finish at minus-41. After missing most of training camp in a contract dispute, Satan seemed to put the controversy behind him, starting the season with four goals in seven games. His troubles began when he was removed as the team's captain back in early November. He failed to score in 19 of the next 20 games including 12 straight without a goal.
To be fair, though, it's not as if he gets many chances to practice his skating at home during the offseason.
Blast your ashes into the heavens.
Since the time before recorded history people have looked to the sky with wonder. When humanity first mastered flight we knew that our destiny lay in the heavens above. Space travel and exploration is our greatest adventure -- today and in the future.
Celestis makes possible a new choice in truly unforgettable memorial services. Cremated remains can be launched into space; to orbit around the Earth; to fly to the Moon; or to travel into deep space. Celestis is the world leader in providing these unique space memorial services.
For 12 and a half large you can buy the "Voyager Service" that goes deep. Way deep. With a flight capsule imprinted with "personal message", no less.
This is a cool idea if you're into that sort of thing, I suppose. While space exploration excites me, I think I'd rather stay here and have my bits and pieces get put to better use.
Exxon Valdez oil still causing problems.
On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in northern Prince William Sound, spilling 42 million liters of crude oil and contaminating 1,990 kilometers of shoreline. Some 2,000 sea otters, 302 harbor seals and about 250,000 seabirds died in the days immediately following the spill. Now researchers writing in the journal Science caution that more than a decade later, a significant amount of oil still persists and the long-term impacts of oil spills may be more devastating than previously thought.
Ecologists have been hollering this for years. Maybe the story getting some mainstream press has something to do with the fact that a Federal judge is presently entertaining the idea of reducing ExxonMobil's punitive damages by 99.5%?
and hunting. No, seriously.
I know, I know... I promised to stay off this topic. But I ran across Sistani's English language website (tips to grammarpolice) and delved into the Islamic Law section. Whoo-boy.
Not sure how to characterize it other than:
Downright frightening,
Utterly hilarious,
Surprisingly flexible, and
Magnificently beautiful
I highly recommend an extended trip throughout his website.
And, of course, there's a section on "the slaughtering and hunting of animals". You have to use scrolling menu bars to read the content of specific sections. Since I have blathered on about this subject like I know what the hell I'm talking about, I'll just continue the meme. Some quotes for your enjoyment:
2603.1. A person, a man or a woman, who slaughters an animal must be a Muslim. An animal can also be slaughtered by a Muslim child who is mature enough to distinguish between good and bad, but not by non-Muslims other than Ahle Kitab, or a person belonging to those sects who are classified as Kafir, like, Nawasib - the enemies of Ahlul Bait (A.S.). In fact, even if Ahle Kitab non-Muslim slaughters an animal, as per precaution, it will not be halal, even if he utters 'Bismillah'.
Well, Duh.
2612. If an animal is shot with an arrow and, if it falls into water and a person knows that the animal has died because of being shot with an arrow, and falling into water, it will not be halal. In fact, if he is not sure that the animal has died only because of being shot with an arrow, it is not halal.
Um, what if you miss but it falls in the water and drowns?
2610.4.While using the weapon the hunter should recite the name of Allah, and it is sufficient if he utters the name of Allah before the target is hit. But if he does not recite Allah's name intentionally, the animal does not become halal. There is, however, no harm if he fails to do so because of forgetfulness.
At least he gives space cadets a break.
2618.1.The dog should be trained in such a way that when commanded to catch the prey, it goes and when restrained from going, it stops. But if it does not stop after having come closer to the hunted animal and seen it, there is no harm. And it is necessary that it should have a habit of not eating anything of the prey till its master arrives. In fact, if it has the habit of eating bit of the prey before the master arrives, or drinking its blood, there is no objection.
And dogs will be dogs, of course. No biggie.
2631. If a locust is caught alive by hand or by any other contrivance, it will be halal after it dies, and it is not necessary that the person catching it should be a Muslim, or should have uttered the name of Allah while catching it. But, if a non-Muslim is holding a dead locust in his hand, and it is not known whether or not he caught it alive, it will be haraam even if he claims that he had caught it alive.
Flexibility under harsh, insect eating conditions is fine, but only so far when it comes to trusting infidels.
Don't get me started on the Istihaza and Ghusl.
So if David Kay is stepping down from the Iraq Survey Group, they've given up on finding WMD, right? Wrong.
The White House continues to maintain that banned weapons will be found in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters on Tuesday that a hole the size of the one Mr. Hussein was found in could hold enough biological weapons to kill tens of thousands of people, and that it could be some time before the United States gets the help it needs from Iraqis to find the hiding places.
The more that simply not finding WMD is the demonstration that the war was wrong, the more the slightest "find" in Iraq becomes a complete refutation of opposition to it. Look, ISG is going to "find" some bugs or germs. Someone will see to it that they do if none get discovered by next summer. Just getting Saddam, irrelevant as that is strategically, gave a significant boost to public support for the invasion. Imagine the media feeding frenzy that a positive test on one 55 gallon drum would unleash.
What I want to hear is a chorus of "Mr. President, how can you say the threat of a WMD terrorist attack has decreased now that these supposedly huge stockpiles are totally unaccounted for in a thoroughly chaotic country that's supposedly being infiltrated by foreign terrorists a full eight months after the fall of the regime?" Makes him look kinda reckless, doesn't it. Well, he is; and that's the main reason he's unqualified to be president.
To me it sounds like a far tougher question than "Mr. President, (how come) the inspectors have said they can't confirm this, they can't corroborate(?)"
Primarily because it can't be flippantly answered with the word 'yet.' Frigging Lapdogs.
NASA announced the new name of the telescope formerly known as SIRTF and showed off the first photos. Man, are they cool.
A new window to the universe has opened with today's release of the first dazzling images from NASA's newly named Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility.
The first observations, of a glowing stellar nursery; a swirling, dusty galaxy; a disc of planet-forming debris; and organic material in the distant universe, demonstrate the power of the telescope's infrared detectors to capture cosmic features never before seen.
The Spitzer Space Telescope was also officially named today after the late Dr. Lyman Spitzer, Jr. He was one of the 20th century's most influential scientists, and in the mid-1940s, he first proposed placing telescopes in space.
This really creepy one of a stellar nursery and this one of the galaxy "Messier 81" are my favorites.
Spitzer detects infrared radiation, which has a bunch of unique scientific applications, coolest (no pun intended) of which is that since the "red shift" makes all previously emitted radiation in the history of the universe get longer in wavelength over time, the echoes of what happened in the early stages of the universe are resonating at the (really long wavelength) infrared. Spitzer is intended, partly, to explore these echoes.
But the weirdest thing is that since it has to be kept so cold (to avoid cluttering up the images with heat) Spitzer has to stay far away from Earth. The heat from the sun reflecting off us would further foul up the measurements. It follows us around the sun, drifting back at about one Astronomical unit per year.
The world's most mysterious book may be an unusually successful hoax. And over four centuries before James Joyce did the same thing with Ulysses, to boot.
The Voynich manuscript [...] is hand-written in a unique alphabet, about 250 pages long, and contains pictures of unrecognizable flowers, naked nymphs and astrological symbols. The manuscript first appeared in the late 1500s, when Rudolph II bought it in Prague from an unknown seller for 600 ducats - about 3.5 kilograms of gold, worth more than US$50,000 today. The book passed from Rudolph to noblemen and scholars, before disappearing in the late 1600s. It surfaced again around 1912, when US book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought it. The manuscript was donated to Yale University after Voynich's death.
No one has worked out whether Voynichese is a code, an idiosyncratic translation of a known tongue, or gibberish. The text contains some features that are not seen in any language. The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory. On the other hand, some aspects, such as the pattern of word lengths and the ways in which characters and syllables occur with each other, are similar to real languages. "Many people have believed that it is too complicated to be a hoax - that it would have taken some mad alchemist years to get such regularity," says Rugg.
But this complexity could have been produced easily, Rugg demonstrates, with an encryption device invented around 1550 called a Cardan grille. This is a table of characters. Moving a piece of card with holes cut in it over the table makes words. Gaps in the table ensure different-length words.
One of the men often suspected of selling the book to Rudolph II (Edward Kelley, "a forger, mystic, alchemist, mercenary and wife-swapper" - just like my Uncle Louie!) was known to use Cardan grilles. Whoever wrote it apparently knew enough about cryptography to make the text look plausible, yet extremely difficult to crack (if, in fact, there exists anything to crack). Since the pictures are of naked nymphs, no attempts at dating the text can be made based on clothing styles.
Sheesh. Next they're going to tell me the two metric tons of soda pop-tops in my toolshed aren't going to buy any dialysis sessions for that poor kid. I have a sneaking suspicion that when they finally do crack the code, the Voynich manuscript will start out: "Dear Sir, I am Mrs. Maryam Abacha, the widow of the late Gen. Sanni Abacha, former Nigerian Military Head of State..."
The introduction of the euro as the common currency of Europe rendered piles and piles of old currency across the continent obsolete. So what to do with the hundreds of thousands of tons of no longer circulating coins? Turns out they are mostly being sold to China, where they are melted down and recycled.
The Asian giant, with booming construction and automobile sectors, is scouring the globe for every piece of scrap metal it can lay its hands on -- and France is one country that has a ready supply of much-sought-after nickel-containing coins.
"The stainless steel producers can just put them (the coins) into their furnaces as nickel feed," said a trader in China, who added the coins are often tendered by French suppliers. "The shipments are usually packed 500 to 1,000 tonnes per lot," another Chinese trader said.
China's stainless steel demand is predicted to rise to four million tonnes next year from 3.4 million in 2003, analysts said. Stainless steel, of which nickel is a key component, is a versatile metal used in construction. It also finds its way into cars, appliances and kitchenware.
The French 50-centime coin, almost 100% nickel, is especially popular. Less demand exists for copper coins, as they are less pure, the process used to separate out the other metals is expensive, and cheaper and easier sources of scrap copper are relatively abundant. Germany, Europe's largest user of coins, had sold off most of its obsolete coins by this past summer, 18 months after the euro's launch in January 2002. The European Copper Institute estimates around 260,000 tons of old European coins would be recycled from 2002-2005.
Since this melt-and-reuse process has been going on for about as long as coins have been used, I wonder if anybody has ever estimated what percentage of the average refrigerator is made up of ancient coins?
More Apostrophic weirdness from the wacky world of recycling:
Recently, The ReUse People deconstructed a large Victorian home in downtown Oakland, Calfornia. When the final wall, the north-side wall in this case, was removed the cat, pictured here, was exposed.
All of us were amazed at how well preserved this guy was. He appeared to be mummified. I say mummified because his skin, fur and claws were still perfectly intact...
How he got there is pure speculation, but a good guess is that one night he was doing what cats do - catting around, and fell between the two buildings. Two large nails protruding from the concrete wall were the only things that stopped his free-fall, and probable escape to freedom. However, with nine lives used up in younger and wilder times, his tenth was not to be.
Meow.
I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but just the thought of being inside one of these makes me feel panicky. The unfortunate resemblance to the styrofoam meat trays at the grocery store only makes it worse. It comes with a lifetime guarantee, though I notice that covers the lifetime of the garment, not the user. No matter how foreshortened the latter might be due to the former. Would you call this a garment?
Yeesh. Makes my skin crawl.
Strangest photo caption, entry #79 from the photo at this Washington Post article: "Journalists view the belonging of what is believed to be Saddam Hussein's shoes in his bedroom."
Because every now and again you just want to see some icebound ass-kickings without all that annoying hockey getting in the way. Sort of like chess boxing without any of the intellectual pretensions.
Why is the State Department blacking out and then censoring Clark's testimony at Milosevic's trial in the Hague? Wouldn't have anything to do with denying him a moment of well-deserved, good press coverage, would it?
Staphylococcus looks fabulous on you. I'm partial to syphilis myself, but the colors are all wrong on me.
(tip: CSOTD)
Saddam Hussein has been captured in Tikrit. The press conference is about to start...
Update (7:20 am): No shots were fired in the raid ("Operation Red Dawn") outside the town of Adwar, about 15 km from Tikrit. Hussein was found in a "spiderhole," a 6-8 foot hole with room enough for a man to lie down. They just showed video of Saddam being examined. Some Arab journalists in the room are very excited. Much shouting at the screen.
Via PRBop, Stunts for Nimrods:
Dawn® dishwashing liquid with new "Lift Action" formula will stage a wash-a-thon of record-breaking proportions. At Irwindale Speedway, Dawn will prove that 10,000 plates can be washed with just one bottle. Then, the dishes will be stacked for Kaptain Robbie Knievel's death-defying motorcross leap.
[...]
Prior to this jump, Team Dawn -- a group of 300 washers, stackers, caterers and runners -- will serve an egg breakfast (leaving a tough food-cleaning residue) to at least 1,000 expected attendees; dirty another 10,000 plates; and wash the more than 10,000 dishes -- all in just one day. Team Dawn will then carefully stack the clean dishes on the pre-assembled jump platform.
Team Dawn will assemble the 9-inch plates in seven 8-foot-high specially-constructed 120-foot-long dish racks -- spanning 150-feet across the parking lot at Irwindale Speedway. Kaptain Knievel's engineering team developed the jump formation to challenge the daredevil's quest for distance records and to ensure his safety.
"I'm always interested in distance jumps with a unique flavor and this one grabbed my attention," said Knievel. "After jumping 18-wheelers, cars and the Grand Canyon, I want to go the distance against a bottle of dishwashing liquid."
Jumping the Snake River Canyon this ain't. But regardless of his son's defiance of death sans dishpan hands ("I can see myself!"), you gotta give props to any 65-year-old "who uses a diamond encrusted walking stick filled with bourbon." As god is my witness, I will be that man thirty years from now.
And just for the hell of it: Evel Bologna. In big chunks.
Keiko, the orca whale of the Free Willy movies, died in a Norwegian fjord yesterday after an unsuccessful, five-year, twenty-million-dollar effort to reintroduce him to the wild.
Tell it what you think about you.
Conservatism gives a reason to fight a fight;
Liberalism gives a something to fight the fight for.
But while Conservatism can only give something to fight against;
Liberalism far too often fights itself.
This might be the most interesting piece on electoral politics I have read all year. The Massachusetts Institute for the Commonwealth has produced a map based on actual district-by-district election returns that does away with the reductionist red/blue map. Instead, they divide the country into ten regions of roughly equal populations that do a much better job of representing the actual demographics of the country. The discussion of the scheme's implications and its interactions with the actual by-state electoral system are fascinating. They note that no candidate has won the presidency without taking at least five regions and lay out electoral strategies for each party based on the map.
The detailed descriptions of each region are pretty interesting, too.
(tip: robertainnc)
After the announcement of the mapping of the Chimpanzee genome, now comes the comparative analysis, of course. Comparative to us.
The two most noticeable genetic differences between humans (Homo sapiens) and Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are those that direct the development of our senses of smell and sound. They're better at the former and we're better at the latter.
Of those human genes (differentiating humans and chimps) that have a known function - about half the total - nearly 50 are linked to smell. Many of them seem to be decaying into uselessness, probably reflecting the lesser importance of smell in our lifestyle relative to that of chimpanzees.
The team also found changes in 21 human genes that are linked to hearing. "It is tantalizing to speculate that this could have to do with language," says Paabo. "People will now analyse hearing in (Froz: "other") apes with greater interest."
Two of the links off the NIH page are particularly good reads. One is the "why do this?" report and the other is an overview of comparative genomic analysis.
I was delighted to find very little of that highly annoying subtle theme I find in lots of primate evolutionary writing, especially when presented in the mainstream media: referring to how much more we have evolved than other primate species. The implication is that other apes and monkeys somehow stagnated in their evolution and we carried the torch, so-to-speak, onward from there to our dominant position today.
People haven't evolved more than chimpanzees (or lemurs or rats or jellyfish, for that matter) any more than the Marlins won the World Series last fall by playing more baseball than the Yankees. Evolution is not measured that way. The chimpanzee has been evolving on this planet just as long as we have. Both of us continue to do so. Our species did not evolve from chimpanzees. We share a common ancestor, and both our lineages adapted to environmental conditions differently ever since our divergence, leading both of us to different forms and different niches today.
Would I say that humans are a more sophisticated form? Sure; you're reading this sentence; that's pretty sophisticated. Have we been more successful? Yeah, take a look around; you can't throw a rock on this planet without hitting another human ape. Do we have a more adaptive strategy? Only time can answer that; we're pretty good at throwing rocks.
Juan Cole reads psychoanalyzes Rummy and Wolfie.
Heh heh. Sometimes a dick is just a dick.
Dwight and Mary Beth at Wampum are, for the second year in a row, accepting nominations for the best blogs, in several categories. Go offer your two cents.
My nominations are:
Best blog: Body and Soul
Best Writing: Billmon
Best Post: Dream Time by Billmon
Best Single Issue Blog: Juan Cole's Informed Comment
Best Group Blog: OS Politics
Funniest Blog: Pandagon
Best New Blog: Steve Gilliard, although only in reading the other nominations did I know he was "new".
They've got a few other categories as well.
The first felony charges for e-mail spam have been filed, and the guys are locals that used the moniker "Gaven Stubberfield" online.
The Virginia indictment alleges that [Raleigh resident Jeremy] Jaynes sent more than 10,000 e-mails a day on three days in July and August, through servers located in Virginia. More than 100,000 messages were sent over a 30-day period, it says. Those amounts are enough to trigger the criminal provisions of Virginia's antispam law. Jaynes faces four felony charges, each of which carries a penalty of one to five years in prison, a fine of up to $2,500, or both.
Here's betting this case goes at least as high as the Virginia Supreme Court.
The world's oldest marsupial fossil has been found in northeast China, dated to about 125 million years ago - about 50 million years older than the previous recordholder. The fossil of the mouse-sized Sinodelphys szalayi, a sort of protopossum, if you will, was found in the same rock formation that last year yielded the earliest known placental mammal.
Unless it's all just a big conspiracy of the secular humanists to lead children to Satan.
I get replaced and I have to find it out from Yahoo News?
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has named James Brown, the so-called "Godfather of Soul," to a new and unusual, but apparently fictitious, senior diplomatic position, the State Department said. Spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed Monday that Powell had indeed appointed Brown to be the first US "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk" but said the job description for the post had not yet been drawn up. In addition, he told reporters that it was uncertain whether the new title carried with it any salary or if Brown would be entitled to an office at the State Department.
What am I going to do with all my Foreign Minister of Funk business cards? Sigh. I clearly need that diplomatic immunity worse than he does.
Remember this dog who I named the toughest dog on the planet back in April after she survived being hit by a car, shot in the head, and stored in a freezer? Well, she's got competition for the title.
The dog found in the Edgeboro Landfill in East Brunswick last week survived not only an attempt to euthanize her but also a trash compactor, an officer for the Middlesex County SPCA said yesterday. "Obviously, it's a miracle," said SPCA Officer Michael Iovine. "The dog was euthanized with drugs, presumed dead, put into a plastic bag and then a trash compactor and compressed, and survived that. It's just amazing it lived through that whole mess."
San Diego pays Diebold $30M to decide tabulate their elections.
Despite criticism that touch-screen voting machines are flawed and threaten democracy, county supervisors yesterday approved investing $30.8 million in what election officials say is state-of-the-art technology.
Federal and state elections officials have certified Diebold's machines, but computer scientists and others remain skeptical of their reliability.
but...
David Bear, a Diebold spokesman, said the company has enhanced its security features to address the flaws.
Flashforward November 9, 2006: In a stunning electoral surprise, Alberto Fujimori has been declared winner in yesterday's San Diego Mayoral race.
Last month, I wrote about Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was kidnapped by the American government and flown to Syria for a year of torture, only to be returned without ever being charged with a crime by the US, Canada, or Syria. The entire affair is horrific and shameful and somebody in the American government ought to be behind bars for the rest of their life over it (preferably in Syria). Unsurprisingly, there hasn't been a peep out of the administration, either to apologize or announce an investigation. Think I'm being overwrought? Read Arar's op-ed in yesterday's LA Times, "Delivered Into Hell by U.S. War on Terror" describing his ordeal.
Harvard Physicists stop light in its tracks.
Harvard University researchers have now topped that (a previous "storing" of light) feat by truly holding light and its energy in its tracks - if only for a few hundred-thousandths of a second.
"We have succeeded in holding a light pulse still without taking all the energy away from it," said Mikhail Lukin, a Harvard physicist.
Nature article due out today; I'll provide an update as soon as I receive it.
In other news, researchers have succeeded in melting soundwaves. The chemical catalysts for this reaction are not being disclosed until the breakthrough can be discussed with counsel.
Bit of a meme here. But my point exactly.
The horns of some bighorn sheep are getting smaller, because hunters are picking off the most impressive rams before they reach their breeding peak.
[...]
One reason for the change is that hunters prefer rams with large horns, as they make for more impressive trophies. [Froz: And this is what pisses me off about the polaroids in the gas station down the road] But it could also be an accidental side effect of some hunting regulations. Restricting hunting to males with large horns is meant to limit the killing of animals that are not old enough to breed, but it also encourages the culling of animals that grow large horns early in life. "You force every hunter to harvest the very animal that you're trying to grow," says Kevin Hurley, a wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Fish and Game Department and executive director of the Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council.
So, I dunno... Hunt ewes and does instead? And quit hunting for trophies, Sheesh; for what kind of complexes are you trying to compensate.
OK - I promise to try to stay off this topic for a while.
To the corpse behind the curtain.
Iraq's Health Ministry has ordered a halt to a count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics department not to release figures compiled so far, the official who oversaw the count told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The health minister, Dr. Khodeir Abbas, denied in an email that he had anything to do with the order, saying he didn't even know about the study.
Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry's statistics department, said the order was relayed to her by the ministry's director of planning, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, who said it came on behalf of Abbas. She said the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversees the ministry, also wanted the counting to stop.
"We have stopped the collection of this information because our minister didn't agree with it," she said, adding: "The CPA doesn't want this to be done."
Regarding the Palestinian - Israeli conflict.
Here are five good reads that can shed some light on the much ballyhooed and recently signed Geneva Accord.
One is this thoughtful article by Ibrahim Nafie in Al Ahram.
The second is this "Pocket Guide" to Mideast peace bids (gotta love the way it's titled) by Bradley Burston in Ha'aretz.
But third is this article by Khaled Amayreh (also in Al Ahram) that shows how intractable the problems are by exposing how unpalatable specific compromising steps are to vocal and powerful constituencies on the Palestinian side of the conflict.
And, for fairness and balance, this by David Meir-Levi in Israeli Insider about why it's intolerable to many Israelis.
I chose these four to share because they focus on the who-what-and-why in a complicated conflict. To avoid always ending my Mideast Conflict posts on a purely sour note, however, let me forward this hopeful but realistic OpEd by Dr. Mohamed Mosaad in the MidEastWeb Opinion Forum.
An Apostrophic triple crown!
Although rings around planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are relatively short-lived, new evidence implies that the recycling of orbiting debris can lengthen the lifetime of such rings, according to University of Colorado researchers.
Strong evidence now implies small moons near the giant planets like Saturn and Jupiter are essentially piles of rubble, said Larry Esposito, a professor at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. These re-constituted small bodies are the source of material for planetary rings.
Previous calculations by Esposito and LASP Research Associate Joshua Colwell showed the short lifetimes for such moons imply that the solar system is nearly at the end of the age of rings. "These philosophically unappealing results may not truly describe our solar system and the rings that may surround giant extra-solar planets," said Esposito. "Our new calculations of models explain how inclusion of recycling can lengthen the lifetime of rings and moons."
Ah, yes...
"The answer now likely seems to be cosmic recycling," said Esposito.
Indeed it does.
And what, anatomically speaking, is my 'yin-yang'?
ANNAPOLIS -- An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased.
The e-mail from "Ken," dated Jan. 3, 2003, discusses a (Baltimore) Sun article about a University of Maryland study of the Diebold system: "There is an important point that seems to be missed by all these articles: they already bought the system. At this point they are just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin (later he clarified to have meant yin-yang) if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts."
And there are more lovely emails from Diebold staff regarding bad press the company gets related to complaints about their "product".
"Linda Lamone (Maryland State Board of Elections chief), on the other hand, makes public statements airing dirty laundry and casting doubt. She's about power and control. She feels powerful when she makes negative comments. What she misses is that her negative comments reflect negatively on her. She should be proud of and support her initiative of a state wide voting change, rather than casting doubt on her own decision.
The outreach effort that was subcontracted to Chris Hood was micromanaged by the SBE. Mark Radke's and Chris Hood's professional advice about dealing with media fell on deaf ears. There's not much that we can do, other than hope that a new Republican Governor will effect change."
Hope isn't all you've got at your disposal, my dear; you work for Diebold. As soon as you get the bugs out, you'll be able to install Republican Governors wherever you like.
Well, not so much anymore, as it turns out.
Ozzy Osbourne broke his collarbone, six ribs, and a vertebra in his neck in an all-terrain vehicle accident at his Buckinghamshire estate Monday. While the injuries are not life-threatening, he did undergo emergency surgery last night to restore blood flow to his arm and stem bleeding in his lungs. How many bags of anaesthetic do you figure it takes to put Ozzy under?
Let's say you're the Republican district attorney in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and you have just been elected a county judge. You have a lot on your plate, what with changing offices and getting fitted for robes and all that, so you sit down to make a to-do list. Just for argument's sake, let's assume it's fifteen items long. How far down the list would you place fondling a 10-year-old girl in front of 1800 people at a Hillary Duff concert? Higher or lower than getting arrested outside the stadium for public drunkenness and checking yourself into a rehab clinic?
Last month, he won a hard-fought three-way race to become Monroe County's sixth judge. On the eve of the May primary, members of the Monroe County Bar Association gave Pazuhanich generally low marks for integrity, compared to the ratings they gave to his two opponents.
Imagine that. But my favorite quote from the article is from the attorney's attorney:
''He checked himself in not because of the pending charge, but because of the stress,'' Anders said. ''It was a preventive measure. It's preventive medicine.''
Anders, in an interview with The Associated Press, said Pazuhanich went into rehabilitation ''so he doesn't have a relapse. When do you drink? When you are under stress. He wanted to prevent that,'' Anders said. ''The last thing he needs now is to lose that control.''
Am I nitpicking to point out that it might have been a little more legitimately "preventive" to enter rehab before you get arrested for public drunkenness?
November 7, 2003: "Plagued by allegations of past sexual harassment, California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Thursday he was hiring investigators to look into the charges that dogged his election campaign."
December 9, 2003: "Arnold Schwarzenegger has dropped a plan to conduct his own investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against him."
In related news: "The hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq received a big boost today as former football great O.J. Simpson landed in Baghdad to join in the so far fruitless search. Mr. Simpson said that he was taking a 'much-needed break' from his ongoing search for the 'real killers' of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson."
Then again, perhaps Schwarzenegger has some very good reasons for not wanting any investigations to go forward:
The announcement that Mr. Schwarzenegger would not pursue his own investigation came hours after a woman who claimed she was groped a decade ago sued the governor for libel. Rhonda Miller's lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, alleges that Mr. Schwarzenegger's campaign staff falsely suggested in an e-mail that she was a convicted felon. Ms. Miller made her allegations in a news conference Oct. 7 — the day before the recall election. Within hours, the Schwarzenegger campaign sent an e-mail to reporters directing them to the Los Angeles Superior Court Web site and instructing them to type in the name "Rhonda Miller." That produced court records for another woman named Rhonda Miller, whose history included prostitution and disorderly conduct.
Classy.
Unless industry puts its Seal of Approval ™ on it.
Now President Bush's Office of Management and Budget has crafted a far more subtle way to assure that policies that serve the president's political donors will move forward, while those less favored will suffer endless delay.
The dangerous proposal is buried in an OMB Bulletin on peer review dated Aug. 29, 2003 -- not something scientists usually peruse. The Bulletin, if finally adopted, would place the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the position of approving the scientific peer review used by all executive branch agencies for "all significant regulatory-science documents."
Peer review not bad in and of itself; but rule states reviewers must be "independent of the agency". Op Ed goes on:
To grasp the implications of this radical departure, one must recognize that in the United States there are effectively two pots of money that support science: one from government and one from industry. (A much smaller contribution comes from charitable foundations.) If one excludes scientists supported by the government, including most scientists based at universities, the remaining pool of reviewers will be largely from industry -- corporate political supporters of George W. Bush.
Hence the goal of the proposed peer review rules is chillingly similar to this administration's earlier efforts to stack Federal Advisory Committees with industry scientists. Where interests of the public and of industry conflict, the scientific advice our government receives will be far more likely to serve the interests of industry than the interests of the whole population.
Scientific study is THE way to see environmental and health (at least) dangers as they appear on the horizon. Always has been. The sort of sweeping-under-the-rug delays that this rule would cause will seriously hamper our ability to know what the problems are, much less actually get about to solving them.
Chillling indeed. Chris Mooney has more analysis and promises more, via Calpundit.
Use a bungee cord, 20-watt.
The impact knocked him unconscious and he was rescued by the bungee jump staff before being flown to nearby Taupo hospital, Haggart said in a statement. His condition was not immediately available. [...] Haggart said police had no plans to charge the man, who had consumed "a small amount of alcohol."
Fishing would be outlawed on one-third of Australia's Great Barrier Reef in a bid to protect its fragile marine environment and the multibillion dollar tourism industry it supports, the government announced Wednesday.
"It is based on the best science from Australia and internationally and will become an important insurance policy for environmental protection as well as security for industries and communities that depend on the reef," Environment Minister David Kemp said in a statement.
Kemp's proposal would increase so-called high protection green zones from 4.5 percent to 33.3 percent of the reef, or from 16,000 square kilometers to 114,000 square kilometers (6,200 square miles to 44,000 square miles). In these areas tourism would be the only industry allowed, and all fishing would be banned.
Good move, generally. I'm sure there are some sustainable fishing practices that can be developed down the line - probably extremely low tech. And Reefs generally have not been effected by human activity in a manner that has made their health dependent on our intervention, like many terrestrial systems such as forests.
But protection can't be the whole solution. Radical changes in energy use (see climate change) and farming practices (see runoff - primarily agricultural) are also critical.
I'm not much of a fan of Dennis Kucinich, but this is one pretty powerful ad he's running.
As their slogan says, KFC does chicken right. But this guy does chicken wrong. Very, very wrong.
This guy sure has a sophisticated understanding of religious groups in this country. This link is to an online chat with Jim Towey, the President's Director of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. About halfway through comes this truly insightful exchange:
Colby, from Centralia MO writes: Do you feel that Pagan faith based groups should be given the same considerations as any other group that seeks aid?
Jim Towey: I haven't run into a pagan faith-based group yet, much less a pagan group that cares for the poor! Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can't be used to promote ideology, the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it.
Enlightened. Truly.
Tips to uggabugga.
And we must be protected from the free flow of ideas that cultivates it.
The Bush administration says the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, with more than 350,000 members worldwide, must stop editing scholarly papers submitted by researchers living in countries under a U.S. trade embargo, or apply for a special license to do so.
On Oct. 1 the Treasury Department informed the Institute that editing a research paper is equivalent to providing a service to authors and therefore violates U.S. trade restrictions that prevent U.S.-based organizations from doing business with countries such as Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Sudan.
But that's not a restriction of information, Froz. It's just that they can't edit papers from these countries. Ahhh, I see...
In the meantime, however, IEEE members in the four affected countries are prohibited from being elevated to a higher-grade membership; using IEEE e-mail alias and Web accounts; accessing online job listings; and conducting conferences under the IEEE name [see "Services in Dispute"]. They still receive printed journals and other publications. In January 2002, when the IEEE first imposed its restrictions, it had over 1700 members in the embargoed countries, nearly all of them in Iran; only about 200 are still members. IEEE has about 380 000 members worldwide.
Mission accomplished.
Look, I'm not an academic (if my atrocious grammar hadn't tipped you off) and I'm certainly not an electrical engineer (although I can install a ceiling fan without frying myself), but could someone with a little more knowledge about these things than me please explain how this:
In other words, other U.S. scholarly organizations that plan to publish papers by researchers in Iran, Cuba, and the like will need to seek their own OFAC exemptions.
is a helpful step for national security or foreign relations.
More tips to Extrapolator.
Along the way to check this out this story, I ran across this marvelous, if not a bit lengthy, article by Tom Engelhardt at Mother Jones about this administration's desperation to "shut down the public imagination." Good read.
...but not your sublime sense of irony.
A man whose tattoos made him an easy target for witnesses and police has pleaded guilty to an armed robbery attempt at the Sav-A-Center in Long Beach. [...] The three tattoos that made him easy to identify include a picture of a gun on his neck and the words "not guilty."
You couldn't make this stuff up.
British scientists have discovered the oldest fossil known that shows definite male genitalia. The 425 million year old fossil is of a 5-millimeter waterflea-like proto-shrimp, which they named Colymbosathon ecplecticos, Greek for "amazing swimmer with a large penis." Fossils as old as 520 million have shown sexual dimorphism, but it has been unclear which gender was which. This discovery pushes back the first known johnsons about 200 million years.
From Harper's Index:
Last year in which a quarterly rise in U.S. military spending was greater than the one last spring: 1951
Total U.S. military spending the Bush Administration projects it will have spent by the end of 2008: $3,200,000,000,000
Total U.S. military spending between 1941 and 1948: $3,100,000,000,000
Percentage by which the Defense Department proposed cutting its budget this year by closing its Peacekeeping Institute: 0.001
Looks like Rush is in serious trouble.
"Mr. Limbaugh's actions violate the letter, and spirit" of the law that relates to doctor shopping, stated one of warrants, signed by Asim Brown, a law enforcement agent assigned to the state attorney's office anti-money laundering task force. Doctor shopping refers to looking for a doctor willing to prescribe drugs illegally.
I figured this was coming sooner or later, so no big surprise there, but then this: "The records seized include prescriptions for Norco, Niacin, OxyContin, Xanax, Lorcet and other medications." Niacin? Vitamin B3? It has a prescription form that's used to decrease HDL cholesterol, but it hardly seems like you'd need to resort to the gray market for it. Seems like going downtown to score some really primo inhalers. Is there some dual-use property here of which I'm unaware?
This has got to be the single funniest thing I've read all year. Pandagon's "Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives 2003." Oh my god.
(thanks, Gene)
Apparently, Kevin Drum wants a piece of me. Bring it on, big fella. I ain't afraid of you.
Go give Steve Gilliard some beer money.
He had an inspiring post at 2:30 AM on Wednesday that made me feel like picking myself up off the floor, dusting my boots, and charging forward. He doesn't link to individual posts in his archives so either go to his blog or, to read the Fighting Liberal rant, copied and pasted below,
I'm a fighting liberal
You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?
Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.
For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.
Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.
Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.
It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
-so said Steve at 2:30:17 AM
Oh man, do I want to send these guys money.
An Austrian trade union has claimed the repetitive playing of Christmas carols in department stores is "psycho-terrorism" for salespeople. From morning to night, week after week, the same Christmas music was played in department stores over and over again, Gottfried Rieser, of the Union of Private Employees, said. "Many staff in the retail sector suffer psychologically from it. They get aggressions and aversions against Christmas music. On Christmas Eve, with their families, they can't stand Silent Night or Jingle Bells any more," he said.
It isn't just retail employees. Just a week after Thanksgiving and I already feel so bludgeoned by "Walking Through a Winter Wonderland" and "Silver Bells" that I'm teetering on the edge of a berserker rampage. And the end is nowhere in sight. Fa la la la... BLAM!
...got to be good-looking to be the nom-i-nee.
The first presidential primaries/caucuses are appearing on the horizon and the once unwieldy group of ten Democratic candidates has been winnowed all the way down to nine. The group divides cleanly into thirds: Kucinich, Sharpton, and Moseley-Braun are sideshow, vanity candidacies, while Gephardt, Kerry, and Lieberman are the party old lions whose sole reason for running seems to be a sense that it is their turn (see: Dole, Robert for the likely outcome of such candidacies). That leaves the final third, the three "idea" candidates: Dean, Clark, and Edwards. I don't label them idea candidates because of any particularly clever or novel policy ideas - there exists remarkably wide policy agreement among all of the candidates - but rather political ideas.
Each candidate has latched onto an important piece of electoral strategy. With Howard Dean, it's the notion of harnessing the internet to match Republican big money with Democratic small money. John Edwards has the brilliant and populist work versus wealth argument. Wesley Clark is laying the groundwork to demolish the notion that patriotism is the exclusive purview of the GOP. All three of these are powerful and essential parts of a national Democratic gameplan.
I suspect that neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is particularly important this time around. The first vital set of contests will happen on February 3rd, when Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina go to the polls. Either Edwards or Clark will likely emerge from the cluster as the Southern candidate to compete with Dean's dominance in the North and West.
My personal preferences run Clark, Edwards, Dean in that order, and anybody who has already written off Edwards' chances are sorely underestimating him. Nonetheless, whichever candidate eventually emerges as the nominee (and I can't see any of the old lion candidates pulling an upset in more than a state or two of the 50) needs to focus on integrating the three ideas into a coherent gameplan. Taken together, they form a potent offensive line behind which a candidate can grind out a punishing, smashmouth running game, which is the only way we'll pull this one out.
On a related note, I've come to the conclusion that, contrary to the common wisdom, the Massachusetts Supreme Court's elevation of gay marriage into a probably major campaign issue actually benefits the Democrats. Not because it's popular with a majority of Americans - I suspect it's rather the opposite - but because most people just don't want to think about such things. In a sense, the gay marriage issue is less of its own issue than it is a stand-in for the larger culture wars, and when the culture war issues get pushed to the forefront (as with Buchanan in '96), swing voters get very uncomfortable. The ugliest and wackiest sector of the Republican alliance gets all energized and noisy and the largely apolitical middle gets a vivid reminder that Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafley, and Bob Jones call the GOP home and have some very specific ideas about how they'd like to decorate it.
Many have speculated that this election will be more about energizing the base than about wooing the ever-slimmer swing vote. I understand the logic, but think it's slightly off. Both bases are fully energized - Bush is just that polarizing. His partisans would walk a plank for him and ours would gladly risk drowning to push him off of one. The two camps are pretty even numerically, and the remainder, while still up for grabs, philosophically leans Democratic, while simultaneously retaining a certain distrust of the Democratic Party proper.
That instinctive distrust is the weak link that is sinking the candidacies of Lieberman, Kerry, and Gephardt. It's no coincidence that the three men who still have a decent shot at the nomination are outsiders - a doctor that governed Vermont as a quasi-libertarian, a maverick retired general, and a lawyer who hasn't yet completed his first stint in office and isn't running for re-election. And one of them will face an incumbent president who only reached the office by dint of belonging to one of America's oldest, richest, and most powerful political families.
The contrast is stark and the landscape is promising, if Democrats can overcome their powerful instincts toward circular firing squads and fashion a coherent message and strategy from the three individual threads. Here's hoping...
The fossil energy interests and the executive branch of the US government, that is. But you probably knew that already. But this really makes it clear.
The Bush administration is proposing that mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants should not be regulated in the same way as some of the most toxic air pollutants, reversing a stance on air pollution control taken by the Clinton administration in 2000.
Here's the deal:
In 2000, the EPA ruled power plants must meet the MACT standard (maximum achievable control technology) for mercury because the pollutant was so dangerous to human health. One in twelve women of chilbearing age have more mercury in their systems than the EPA itself says is safe. Most states also now have fish eating warnings because of mercury contamination. Power plants are the largest source of it.
But the coal and power industries are crying that it would be too costly to implement MACT, so they want the regulation overturned - or rather just distorted - because the Clean Air Act can be creatively interpreted to give regulatory flexibility. They want a cap and trade system that would not require older facilities to update, just buy emission credits from newer facilities or facilities that use coal that's lower in mercury content. So, in effect, you're playing a shell game that allows plants that didn't produce mercury emissions in significant quantities to start doing it indirectly, by letting them sell their emissions credits to another plant so that they won't have to reduce their emissions by investing in cleaner technologies. The rule also postpones and reduces the reduction targets.
The industry also claims that general reductions in emissions forecast over the next few decades will reduce the amount of mercury anyway. I'll let that stand on its own merits; you decide.
Mercury is bad, bad stuff for you, folks. Eight states have already passed bans on selling or manufacturing mercury thermometers; and more are on the way to doing so.
The main cry is that it will put a burden on the fossil energy industry. Well, yeah, it will. Damnit, it needs to!
Long extinct but newly discovered.
The fossils help fill a huge gap in the evolutionary history of African mammals known as the "missing years," shedding light on the origin and distribution of the famed beasts that roam Africa today[...]
"Everything people think they know about African mammals—giraffes, antelopes, lions, cheetahs, rhinos—they all are newcomers," said Tab Rasmussen, an anthropologist at Washington University in St[...] Louis.
This (Oligocene/Miocene boundary) knowledge gap, known as the "missing years," extends from 24 million to 32 million years ago. At that time, the Red Sea had not yet begun to rift open and Africa and Arabia were still joined as a single continent that was isolated from the rest of the world.
To paraphrase MC Rumsfeld, "The more known knowns we know, the more unknown unknowns become known; this we know."
"We are down to two maybe three million years to when we first get Eurasian forms coming in [to Africa]," said Kappelman. "Did some go extinct before the influx, or was it head-on competition that drove them to extinction? That is what we don't know yet."
Maybe the modern African mammals came over on boats. Either way, though, exotic invasives are nothing new.
Several species of exotic ants have shown up on islands off Australia and are threatening to destroy aboriginal communities there, forming enormous and destructive supercolonies.
[One community] has spent more than $70,000 in the past 12 months fixing electrical problems due to the Singapore ant. "I have never seen an infestation of Singapore ants like this before, the magnitude of damage is really overwhelming." [...] Ginger ants are notorious for their painful sting, which can cause allergic reactions in people. [...] Many houses were totally surrounded by ginger ants, preventing people from using their yards. [...] Dr. Hoffmann says pest ants, particularly the African Big-headed ant and the Yellow Crazy ant, can form huge colonies, totally displacing native animals and seriously disrupting ecological processes.
Yikes. And what's scarier than hundreds of thousands of chaotic, swarming insects is hundreds of thousands of highly organized, swarming insects. Biologists have just figured out the simple traffic rules that army ants use to create "multiple freeway-like trails that are up to 20 meters (65 feet) wide and 100 meters (330 feet) long" during their rampages. For some reason, though, I find that mental picture less disturbing than hundreds of thousands of army ants, which do not build true nests, forming a living nest out of their very bodies.
Creepy.
One of the most tiresome refrains offered up by the apologists for the bungled invasion and occupation of Iraq is that "most of the attacks are confined to the Sunni Triangle." Of course, the fact that nearly 80% of the population of Iraq lives there does tend to reduce the meaningfulness of that statement pretty sharply. However, Juan Cole links to a Brookings Institute report that estimates 60% of attacks on Coalition military forces are occurring in the Sunni Triangle, leaving 40% taking place elsewhere. In other words, proportional to the population, attacks are happening at a rather higher rate outside the Sunni Triangle than within it.
Oops.
The trial is underway in Germany for the mutually-consented cannibalism case I mentioned last week. Apparently Arwin Meiwes received between 280 and 430 responses (depending on your news source) to the ad he posted looking for young men to be slaughtered and eaten, which does seem a surprisingly high response rate. Among the many other strange details emerging:
So, is this is qualitatively different from what Jack Kevorkian was doing? Granted, it's several thick layers of icky beyond the strange doctor's career, and the question of the consumed's mental stability looms large over the entire proceeding, as he wasn't moribund at the time of the killing. Prosecutors are pushing to convict Meiwes on charges of "murder for sexual satisfaction," but it isn't quite murder with a willing victim, is it? His defense attorneys are trying to bargain down to a conviction for ''killing on request,'' an illegal euthanasia that carries a six months to five years sentence.
Somehow, after reading about this case, Michael Jackson doesn't seem quite as strange any more. This bizarre quasi-defense of him by World Socialist comparing him to John Walker Lindh, however, is about as odd as it comes.
Lost.
OK, maybe some of you, including the Extrapolator, author of the Declaration below, won't get the musical reference, but I've always liked it. Even if it probably wasn't the songwriter's intent.
Anyway, a nice play on the Declaration of Independence that shouldn't wait until next July to get posted. Have fun.
Bonus: A somewhat open thread...
Declaration of In...? Leave a comment.
There have been three U.S. Presidents named George: Washington, Bush the
elder, and the incumbent Bush. The actions of this Third George have been such that true patriots should emulate Thomas Jefferson and the other founding
fathers of this great nation:
When in the course of human events, a sovereign people finds that there has
been imposed upon them a duplicitous, self-serving and oppressive government, ironically under a president who received the endorsement of fewer citizens than his opponent, a rational and enlightened self-interest impels them to bring his administration to a prompt and orderly end.
A decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the reasons for their action. To justify it, let Facts be submitted to a
candid world:
This Third George has sent our army to invade another country, based upon
contrived arguments and fabricated evidence, and without due respect for
international opinion and our historic allies.
He has conspired with his wealthy friends and associates, to obtain their
political contributions and has in return rewarded them with a tax system
designed to their advantage.
He has sought to despoil our land, our water and our air by weakening our
protective covenants and regulations at every opportunity.
He has squandered the world-wide sympathy and good will evoked by the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
He has intentionally proposed and implemented federal budget deficits
dwarfing any in our history, accumulating to an enormous national debt, the interest upon which shall impoverish our children and our grandchildren.
He has embroiled us in an unending crisis of nation-building in the Middle
East, with myopic vision, poor planning, and escalating costs in treasure and
human life.
He has concealed his actions and his purposes at every opportunity, often
invoking without justification national security or executive privilege, and has
consistently evaded the opportunity to defend his positions to journalists
responsible for reporting to the citizenry.
At the urging of his handlers, he has appeared in public exclusively in the
presence of selected supporters who mindlessly applaud his every statement and thus encourage his persistent slogging along errant policy paths.
He has repeatedly nominated and appointed judges and administrators
possessing narrow minds and harboring extreme philosophies remote from the mainstream beliefs of the American people.
He has habitually described his critics as lacking in patriotism, or seeking
to foment class warfare, or insensitive to the needs of national security.
He is, in short, unworthy to be re-elected president of this great nation.
This last entry looked rather odd when viewed with fresh eyes. I suppose I shouldn’t present a term, announce the novelty of two independent coinings of it – one being mine, and then link to an essay, albeit an interesting one, that seems to be the other without providing some more explanation.
What in the hell is Froz Gobo talking about.
RealEcologik, inspired - obviously, but not particularly accurately - by the term RealPolitik, is a philosophy of decision making based, as much as possible, on ecological realities. It is both (1) keenly aware that human transactions with and within the world often have extremely destructive consequences that are far removed and difficult to assess, but (2) particularly skeptical of touchy-feely, save-the-snail-darter tree hugging.
It presupposes that unbridled industrialism, notably the capitalist flavor of it, and the consumerism it fosters and needs are ecologically destructive to the point that the planet’s health, and thus (and more immediately) ours, are in jeopardy. If you disagree with that, you won’t get anything else from the rest of this… um… apostrophization (apostrophication? help me out here, Russ) except the raising of your hackles. Drop me a line and we can debate that elsewhere.
First, the awareness of ecologically destructive habits and what to do about them. To set the stage, call up your conception of “The Environment.” Got it? Now get out a big fat dry-eraser and obliterate that image. The plastic trim around your monitor screen is just as much a part of our environment as the creek a half-mile away and the thousand-year-old Redwoods along the California coast. It exists in an environmental context, has both an ecological history and future, and its manifestation into its present form had ripple effects throughout the world effecting water quality, people’s livelihoods, and animal habitats, among other things.
For the sake of clarity, I’ll call it part of the ‘built environment’. The distinction is artificial, but necessary to make a point. Our built environment includes our homes, farms, convenience marts, soda bottles, pingpong balls, welcome mats, and all the other material stuff of civilization. These are inextricably connected, in time and space, to the environment as traditionally defined. Together they form one Ecology.
Merging with this idea from an on-ramp to our right is an awareness that human beings are members of the animal kingdom, as much as any creature is. Specifically we’re of the Phylum Chordata (with fish, frogs, and lizards), Class Mammalia (with lions, and tigers, and bears), Order Primates (with lemurs), Family Hominoidea (with gorillas), Genus Homo (with a few extinct cousins) and, of course, species sapiens (with each other, including the French).
Six billion plus balding apes running around this Garden-of-Eden has-been; growing food – what a novelty, figuring out ingenious ways to protect ourselves from wind, weather, and discomfort, working each other literally to death, and doing anything, but an-y-thing, to find a body to be close to. Boy, we are an impressive lot; but never… never before has one species on this planet had such a massive impact on the health of the ecological matrix which for eons was the forum we and all other creatures used to keep each other in check. The important question is whether our impressive technological abilities can be turned towards healing this matrix instead of consuming it.
So there is one ecology, and it includes the entirety of our economic system. And humans are an animal player within that system, by far most influential among many. And that system shows signs of stress that are potentially debilitating to our ability to coax sustenance from our ecological dance-partners. As individuals and as groups (our social nature as an animal is particularly sophisticated), RealEcologik dictates the assessment of the ecological consequences first and foremost when deciding on courses of action. And that means ahead of the free-profiteering and individual property rights ideologies.
Conversely, however, protection and conservation are active practices. They are interventionist. Since our behavior has transformed the landscape so dramatically, I find the false belief that somehow leaving nature to heal itself and refraining from playing a role in ecologic interactions out of a misguided version of respect for other creatures is akin to faith healing.
The forest fires in California this year (and throughout the North American west throughout the last several decades) are the most poignant examples. While forest health is extremely dependent on lowering the potential for devastating mega-inflammations by thinning and removing underbrush, wholesale expansion of harvesting is highly counterproductive. Especially because this economy (within the ecology, remember) is already awash in forest products and insane amounts of paper and wood are disposed in landfills every day. Scientific, not financial interests should play the central role in developing policy and practice. But simply cordoning off previously disrupted forest ecosystems is as unhelpful as clearcutting.
As another example, for roughly the last 300 years, humans have decimated the population of large predators in my neck of the woods. As a result, there is no species in a position to provide the critical ecological service of culling the deer population other than us. It is grossly shortsighted to think refraining from hunting these mammals somehow does them a service. If an ecosystem is out of balance, as the heaviest weight on the complicated network of scales we can’t just leave part alone and assume it will come back into balance. Homeostasis is a result of myriad forces moving in contrary directions, not of some natural predisposition towards a steady-state ideal.
As much as I find a walk and a quiet moment deep in the woods spiritually calming, reinvigorating my deep sub-emotions by an acknowledgement of a living force present in a creature, seeing that creature as valuable in its own right and respected as prerequisite, I am as much a part of nature as the rest and have a role to play by nature’s (often violent) rules. It’s like cultivating a vineyard and refusing to commit the violence of pruning out of an erroneous brand of reverence for the plant. I’m not doing any favors for the vine and I won’t have much of a crop.
What distinguishes humanity is not language or culture or technology, although we have an immensely sophisticated knack for them compared to our animal cousins. The building blocks for the development of all three were being selected for long before our branch on the evolutionary tree stretched out in its current direction. Other creatures show tendencies for the same tricks and most arguments on these matters just highlight semantic differences rather than land on solid conclusions. Like nature versus nurture spats, they’re largely unproductive. The thing that distinguishes us (and I always use the word distinguish as opposed to separate) from other (and I ALWAYS use the word other) animals is that we possess an ability to use the three to have a dramatic course-changing impact on the evolution of life on planet Earth (and maybe others?). We have demonstrated it.
Now our language needs to be used to investigate and disseminate ecological understanding, our culture needs to be used develop fulfillment for our members, and our technology needs to be used carefully to intervene and mend the ecology, all parts of it.
That is RealEcologik
For years I thought I had coined this phrase (word, actually). While I did think it up independently, a Google of it turns up this 7-year-old article (only) from the Interhemispheric Resource Center.
It is a highly recommended read, weaving together sustainability, international conservation treaties in their historical and economic context (green imperialism), and US national security, among other concepts. Unfortunately it dates from 1996 and concludes thusly:
The U.S. government's new commitment to environmental aid deserves support since it represents an enlightened view of U.S. national security. Yet unless the United States addresses its own disproportionate responsibility for the world's environmental crisis by enforcing environmentally sustainable patterns of consumption and production at home, its international environmental initiatives will lack credibility and do little to protect global ecology.
Skeptically agreed on the former. As for the latter, well...
Still, take the time if you have it.
Criminy, people. What twisted sensibilities make you think this is OK?
The return of fur to the world's fashion catwalks has spelled death to thousands of endangered animals with a boom in demand for their skins, a top wildlife protection officer said Friday. John Sellar, senior enforcement officer for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), said there had been a surge in seizures of tiger and leopard skins as the fashion industry embraced fur once again.
Look, I enjoy hunting as much as the next redneck. But what I enjoy about it is knowing that I'm hunting sustainably, consuming VERY low on the food chain, and eating extremely healthfully. We are animals and animals kill to provide - not even always for food; get used to it. But like I posted below: be familiar with your relationship to the rest of the ecosystem and know the impact of your consumption.
Say what you will about the Chinese Government, I'm of very similar thinking when it comes to flagrant crimes against nature such as killing endangered big cats for the sake of a fashion. And that goes, even moreso, for the idiots who wear the skins.
But the threat of violence aside, in most cases enforcement officers were hugely overstretched just trying to catch the poachers, he said, let alone tracking down the merchandise. [...]
And even when caught, the penalties were in most cases too feeble to act as a deterrent — except in China, which had executed 28 wildlife smugglers in the past 14 years.
Haven't we moved beyond this as a species?
