Dog Food Against Famine

A young lady from New Zealand visited Kenya and was disturbed by what she saw in the way of hunger there.

Her mother's friend, Christine Drummond, who is in the dog food manufacturing business, though it would be helpful to develop a food for the hungry in Kenya by altering the formulation of the food she manufactures for dogs. To make it suitable for human consumption, the vitamin mix was changed and the solid biscuit form was changed to a powder more suitable for small children.

The product is a perfectly adequate food made of corn, various kinds of meat, eggs and several plants including seaweed, cereals and flax. The manufacturer and her children eat the stuff every day. It sounds similar to Incaparina. Perfectly good food.

These kind-hearted Kiwis must be heartbroken that their efforts were shunned as insulting and insensitive by the Kenyans.

That the head of a provicial hospital reacts this way, in an area where people are starving to death, seems incomprehensible to me.

I would expect any deficiencies identified by locally hired experts to result in cooperation to bring about required changes in the formulation or processing of the food, not to feed the perceived sense of insult.

I don't know quite what to make of all this.

I tend to think that the insult reportedly felt by Kenyans is actually the product of demagogic tactics intended to serve the local political interests of certain prominent Kenyans.

On the other hand, maybe those raising their insulted voices are not so much demagogues as products of a culture such as Howard Bloom mentions in "The Lucifer Principle" - a culture in which, against a backdrop of pecking-order competition, unsolicited aid from those more fortunate is automatically resented.

Whatever the case, were I in the shoes of the insulted I would instead be grateful. After all, I eat pig food, dog food and chicken food nearly every day.

If starving I'd happily eat Soylent Green, prions be damned.

People are strange.

Capitalism or a habitable planet

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Robert Newman: It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

...

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it's wise to remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

Denial again.

Hat tip: Energy Bulletin

France enters Muslim cartoon row

BBC NEWS | Europe | France enters Muslim cartoon row:

"Islamic tradition bans depictions of the Prophet Muhammad or Allah."

Who gives a damn?

Sam Harris provided a GREAT answer to Edge's question, "What is your dangerous idea?" Harris thinks science needs to destroy religion. I don't know how that can happen in reasonable time or with any grace, but I agree.

Here, read this, you religious bullies!

Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live. Despite the ecumenical efforts of many well-intentioned people, these irreconcilable religious commitments still inspire an appalling amount of human conflict.

In response to this situation, most sensible people advocate something called "religious tolerance." While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive. It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves — repeatedly and at the highest levels — about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality.

Hear! Hear!

Africa's hunger - a systemic crisis

BBC NEWS | Africa | Africa's hunger - a systemic crisis:

The sub-headline screams: More than half of Africa is now in need of urgent food assistance. It continues:

Unchecked population growth

'Sub-Saharan Africa 's population has grown faster than any region over the past 30 years, despite the millions of deaths from the Aids pandemic,' the UN Population Fund says.

A decline in soil quality makes land less productive
'Between 1975 and 2005, the population more than doubled, rising from 335 to 751 million, and is currently growing at a rate of 2.2% a year.'

In some parts of Africa land is plentiful, and this is not a problem. But in others it has had severe consequences.

It has forced farming families to subdivide their land time and again, leading to tiny plots or families moving onto unsuitable, overworked land.

In the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea some land is now so degraded that there is little prospect that it will ever produce a descent harvest."

It is so rare that an article in any mainstream media states the obvious: that human overpopulation is a big problem. My hat is off to the BBC on this occasion.

The article concludes:

Some campaigners and academics argue that African farmers will only be able to properly feed their families and societies when Western goods stop flooding their markets.

BBC failed to note that some of these campaigners and academics are themselves African.

From 751 million today, at a steady 2.2 percent growth rate, the population will reach a billion and a half in 32 years.

What's the likelihood of a sustained 2.2 percent growth rate? If ever there was a time to read Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons", this might be the time. Here.

Why Do I Blog?

Why do I blog? I don't know.

The most important thing that social psychologists have discovered over the last 50 years is that people are very unreliable informants about why they behaved as they did, made the judgment they did, or liked or disliked something. In short, we don't know nearly as much about what goes on in our heads as we think. In fact, for a shocking range of things, we don't know the answer to "Why did I?" any better than an observer.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

I have always been in favor of complete legalization of all drugs - of getting law enforcement out of the public health business and back to work making the streets safe.

Here is a bunch of cops and ex-cops who agree. See their promotional video here, available in various different formats.

I think I know why we don't legalize drugs in this country. There are two primary reasons. First, prohibition is an industry that serves the commercial and other interests of a lot of people.

The second reason is denial.

Primary (but certainly not sole) among those whose interests are served by prohibition are drug warriors and drug producers. These two supposed opponents are filthy parasites engaged in mutualist symbiotic depredation of society. Without the other each will be greatly harmed, but together they flourish.

In the United States we waste billions of dollars every year, 60 billion or more, arresting a million or two people, incarcerating over 20 percent of the world's prisoners (out of our 5% of global population), among American black males at a rate over five times higher than apartheid-era South Africa, all to accomplish what? NOTHING! The proportion of the American population that is addicted to drugs today is about the same as it was almost a century ago despite the trillion or more dollars sent down the drain, despite the millions behind bars, despite erosion of our civil liberties.

Bloody hell. What a waste.

So when will this change?

I'm sorry to say that my prediction is that it won't change. For one thing, the interests served by the War on Some Drugs benefit powerful people. For another, true believers are in denial. Though Catton was addressing something else when he wrote that denial "seems to be a way of coping with an insufferable contradiction between past convictions and present circumstances, a defense against intolerable anomalous information", the effect is the same in the War on Some Drugs. As a result, we'll just keep on doing what we're doing, reason be damned.

Oh, well... More power to LEAP.

Here's an interview of the founder of LEAP. Here's a piece about one of LEAP's directors.

Omnipotence

That was fun.
Make your own church sign with the Church Sign Generator.

Wow!

The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

Swept by vigilante killings in crime backlash

I caught a bit of flack for claiming in this post that conditions could get as bad as I claimed they could, so here:

Guatemala swept by vigilante killings in crime backlash:

'What is happening is that there is a lot of crime and nobody has confidence in the government's ability to provide security,' said the Casa Alianza's Claudia Rivera. 'Crime is out of control and the state cannot stop it. So people in neighborhoods get together to do it themselves.'

ABC has a variant of the story here. Reuters here.

KILLINGS SEEN AS POSITIVE, NECESSARY
Judging from conversations with Guatemalans in the capital and the poverty-stricken highlands, extra-judicial killings are widely seen as both necessary and positive.
"When those who are killed are 'mareros' (gang members), people are pleased," said Gerardo Petzey, a 20-year-old student in the highland town of Santiago Atitlan. "Good riddance to bad people," said Antonia Flores, 26, a receptionist in the capital's upscale 10th district.
"Eliminate rabies by killing the dogs that carry the disease," said leaflets left on bodies found shot through the head near the city of
Quetzaltenango.

(I put what I think is a fascinating story of extra-judicial killing in the fifth paragraph of an earlier post.)

The vigilantism story doesn't even touch on the subject of lynchings, which in Guatemala do not involve white racists hanging black victims in acts of bigotry. Rather, in Guatemala and elsewhere, lynchings tend to be mob reactions to criminality in the face of law enforcement agency and court system uselessness. The lynching itself frequently involves beatings and gasoline. If you saw the film Cronicas (excellent flick by the way) you got a sense of this type of lynching.

Hand-written notes said, "That's for robbery" and, "This is for breaking into my house."

Various pressures will combine in other, presently prosperous countries to yield similar levels of criminality and violent counter-criminality unless means are found to deal death to extreme criminals in a quick, no-nonsense way.

That is to say, unfortunately, that we will probably have similar levels of criminality and violent counter-criminality in our country. A big part of the reason is that the myth of inherent human dignity renders us impotent in the face of what needs to be done. Oh, well...

Potent Mexican Meth Floods In as States Curb Domestic Variety - New York Times

Prohibition keeps making the problem worse, but onward we "stay the course". What's that old cliche about the definition of stupidity? Doing the same old things expecting different results. Something like that.

Potent Mexican Meth Floods In as States Curb Domestic Variety - New York Times: "But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: the drop in home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico."

BULLSHIT: Sabotage probed at Koeberg nuclear station

IOL: Sabotage probed at Koeberg nuclear station

This story was featured in the US Department of Homeland Security's "Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report 23 Jan 2006", which you can download here.

Eskom has not ruled out sabotage as a cause of one of their nuclear reactors at Koeberg in Cape Town, South Africa, having to be shut down. The controlled shutdown occurred on Christmas day after a loose bolt somehow got inside the generator of Koeberg nuclear power station's Unit 1. The bolt was meant to be attached to the outside of the generator. Eskom chief executive, Thulani Gcabashe, said at a briefing on Thursday, January 19, that an investigation was under way. The damage would take at least three months to repair. With only one of Koeberg's reactors working during these three months, the risk of power interruptions in the Cape would increase. Eskom is now shopping around nuclear power stations to try to buy a second−hand rotor and stator to repair the problem. These parts are not kept in stock by nuclear power plant manufacturers, and it would take at least a year for new parts to be made. Koeberg's other nuclear reactor is due to be refueled in March. Gcabashe said the refuelingcould be "stretched" by an extra two months, but this would have to be approved by theNational Nuclear Regulator.

You have to to go the original article and read down a good way before you get to the part where it says

Neither the turbine nor the nuclear reactor of unit 1 was affected.

Had this sort of thing occurred at a coal or gas plant it would never have seen print, but since there's a nuclear reactor several steps upstream of the equipment where the incident occurred, people jump on it. That is stupid, disingenuous or both. Both, probably, and for the DHS infrastructure report to forever be padded with tripe like this is annoying.

The sort of incident described has happened to me personally, and while a big deal in terms of the equipment affected, hardly justifies the breathless headline attached nor inclusion in the DHS infrastructure report, which is full of items that serve as nothing but filler and make the thing seem more substantive than it is.

The incident I was involved in didn't damage a generator, but it could have. I was a new engineer at a coal fired station where one of the generators had just come out of overhaul. The exciter dome was about to be closed up, and I was told to go climb inside and look around for the learning experience. I was well cautioned to remove everything from my pockets and take off anything I might leave behind, which I thought I did. As it turned out, I had forgotten the pager on my belt, and as I was climbing out of the exciter, it snagged on the edge of the access port and fell into the exciter dome. I was lucky in that it happened to land on a narrow ledge that was within reach, and I was able to retrieve it. No big deal in the end.

But a bolt at a nuclear plant: Oh.........my........GOD!

Distraught Father's Rant is Not News

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Out of joint

I usually have great respect for the BBC. This time they give me great pause.

The linked story has been featured on the front of the BBC's top news stories web page. As I type it is featured prominently in the Health section of the BBC News web site. Trouble is, the piece should be in neither place because it is not news and it is not reliable health reporting.

Though this story is compelling and surely heartfelt, it is the mournful rant of a grieving, pissed-off father, and as such it is better suited for an opinion page.

The author's son apparently showed great promise in his father's eyes. Now he is a drug addled basket case. The author found out his son had spent, in one year, £5000 (about US$8,800) on "skunk weed" supposedly far more powerful than anything the hippies used to use, yet he presumes that expert opinions to the effect that his son might have had psychological problems to begin with are total rubbish.

The son, according to the father, started smoking pot when he was just 15 years old. Later on he wound up under psychiatric care, but had compliance issues with his medications. He was sent to the United States, where he wound up taking alcohol and progressing to anger and violence. They wound up committing the son when he barricaded himself in his room, requiring the efforts of 10 riot-equipped policemen to subdue him.

Since then he has not only given up all drugs, but also cigarettes and even alcohol.

That statement is quite revealing. The distinction between alcohol and other drugs is an extremely harmful delusion. That the boy's father harbors this delusion is distressing.

I hope this man's son pulls out of it, and that the father and mother are able to resume some sort of serenity. But I also hope they come to their senses and realize that prohibition does more harm than good by quite a margin, and that it is illogical for him to wish for a reversal of the recent change of status of cannabis in his country.

I hope, also, that the BBC editorial board reconsiders whether they should have published this poor man's sad story as news or in the health sections. I would conclude that the BBC was baldly propagandizing, but I still have a little more respect for the BBC than that.

New Wave in Peer-to-Peer File Storage/Backup?

Who knows what the future will bring, but I tend to agree with people who think that ubiquitous peer-to-peer file storage is coming. And soon.

At least one company, Allmydata, Inc., in Mountain View, California, makes one solution available for early adopters. Looks very interesting. It's free in the sense that if you allocate ten units of storage to the project, you get to use one unit free. How much is up to you. (They say it's unlimited, but I suppose that if nothing else you'll run into a bandwidth limitation somewhere along the way.)

I've looked forward to this for several years, ever since reading a paper by an IBM senior genius whose name I didn't retain. He wrote about distributed, encrypted, online storage of materials in a way that would make them immune to censorship. Repressive governments would be helpless to take down sites hostile to their aims because the materials would not exist on any such site - they'd be distributed. I don't recall the specifics of the IBM paper, and I've not been able to find it online, but it struck me as revolutionary, disruptive and cool. I took my hat off to IBM for being in that vanguard.

Anyway, it seems to me that the age of ubiquitous peer-to-peer secure file storage is just about here. Rather than write any more inadequate words on the topic I'll just point to what some other people have written on the topic here, here and here.

I have not installed the Allmydata offering because of the way I use my XP computer, which would require that my contribution to the project be out of service for long periods. When that changes I'll check it out. By then, I predict, we'll all be hearing plenty about this new wave in storage technology.

Lovelock's Outlook Even Darker Than Sturgill's

Independent Online Edition

Here's a renowned scientist publicly, on the release of his new book The Revenge of Gaia, proclaiming an outlook in some ways even more gloomy than mine. And he's far more qualified to harbor such an outlook!

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

It gets worse, but when he writes, "We [in Great Britain - sls] could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous", I wonder how he thinks that can happen with the thermohaline circulation [1] [2] slowing down in response to freshening of North Atlantic waters due to ice melt.

Nobody knows specifically what's going to happen. It seems likely, though, that we'll wind up wishing it hadn't, and that we'd had more of the foresight James Lovelock represented.

Sure, there are lots of smart optimists who probably think Lovelock is a crank. It seems to me that they are in denial.

Good News Bad News: US judges back assisted suicide

BBC NEWS | Americas | US judges back assisted suicide

Good news is that the Court upheld Oregon law.

Bad news is that the new Justice Roberts was among the dissenters.

Maybe the Democrats should filibuster Judge Alito's confirmation.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the minority, dissenting view, said: "If the term 'legitimate medical purpose' has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death."

Screw you Scalia. How about you leave that to the people of Oregon. And what kind of sadist are you, anyway? "Legitimate medical purpose" surely includes reduction of suffering.

Good Riddance to Clarence Ray Allen

Google Search: Clarence Ray Allen
Oldest Death Row Inmate Executed

The worst thing wrong with this case is that it took 23 years to execute the monster. Administration of capital cases needs to be reformed.

Once a special board (not an individual prosecutor subject to re-election pressures) has decided a case is capital, the case should be expedited. There should be special courts to handle capital cases. A major purpose behind these courts should be prompt treatment of the case. Endless delays and appeals need to end. If a lawyer can't fit a case into his busy schedule in order to handle it expeditiously, re-arrange that lawyer's schedule or get another lawyer.

Part of this reform involves reducing the likelihood of improper execution. As in war, though, absolute avoidance of "collateral damage" has to be recognized as impossible. You try like hell to avoid it, but you don't stop what you are doing in order to avoid the unavoidable.

There is no reason why, in the "war" on crime, prisoners should be absolutely exempted from the risk of becoming victims (whether of murder or mistaken execution). Police, judges, lawyers and the general citizenry face this risk. Nobody should become exempt from this risk simply by virtue of being arrested.

One of the improvements that should be made in the administration of capital cases is to make abuse of the capital justice system a capital offense in itself. Framing someone into execution should be a capital offense.

Of course, no reform along these lines is likely to happen any time soon. Instead, we'll continue to have quarter-century stays on death row by ever increasing numbers of the condemned, along with the resulting compromise of the death penalty's deterrent function. This will continue until population density and other pressures deliver us to the state presently seen in some other societies, where we see incredible levels of criminality, extrajudicial execution, private death squads and so on.

The death penalty clearly has a deterrent effect, contrary to what death penalty opponents claim. This deterrent effect, though, deteriorates as a function of the time it takes to execute the condemned.

We should not do away with the death penalty; rather, we should maximize its deterrent effect by optimizing its administration.

Oh, well...

Technorati

This post is part of a little familiarization test. Nothing much to read here, actually, but thanks for stopping by.

Updated (below)

Technorati is, according to Wikipedia, an internet search engine dedicated to blogs.

Part of the idea is that when I make a post, I "ping" Technorati, and then they respond by adding the new post to their index. If one wants, Technorati has functions to add add links to one's blog to make it easier for readers to navigate and search.

Well, as is typical of me, I'm having trouble making it work. I don't know if it's just because I'm older and my brain isn't adequately wired for this ever changing world, or whether I'm just dense, or whether Tainter's complexity is taking its toll. In any event, it hasn't seemed to work.

I was supposed to put a string of text invoking a Technorati script into my blog's template. The script would cause the Technorati stuff to appear. The instructions were not any more explicit than that. So I just pasted the string into a few different places in my template. Nothing seemed to happen, so I finally just left it where there was some effect (the sidespace is now white instead of black).

The idea behind just leaving it there even if it's not working is that maybe things take effect with the first post after adding the Technorati stuff. Well, here we go. I'll post this, then go ping Technorati. There's another script I can use that will automatically ping Technorati when I make a post, but one thing at a time is about my speed.

Update:

Seems I did not need to "ping" Technorati after publishing this post. Apparently, Blogger automatically pings them. But I still don't see the stuff that's supposed to appear as a function of the script inserted into my blog's template. Just the white sidespace. Hmmm...

Scientists Work on 'Trauma Pill' - Yahoo! News

Scientists Work on 'Trauma Pill' - Yahoo! News: "propranolol "

MDMA has been around for years and has been very useful in the treatment of PTSD.

Oh, wait. MDMA is a "recreational" drug. Heaven forbid!

The Church of GDP

What's the dominant religion of the past 100 years? The answer isn't Christianity with its 2.1 billion followers, or Islam with its 1.3 billion. It's the idea of economic growth, the Church of GDP.

Holy moley!! That's Robert J. Samuelson, the bigshot economist, prolific pundit and TV guru.

When I saw Samuelson's words posted towards the top of the EnergyBulletin news clearinghouse's page I nearly had a heart attack. Could Samuelson actually be admitting anything even remotely approaching that his dismal science is nothing but religion?

Rather than continue reading the excerpt on EnergyBulletin, I clicked directly to the Washington Post to read the entire piece.

What a letdown. I should have known better.

Paraphrasing public health blogger Cervantes, Samuelson has set a little honey-trap for people looking for reinforcement of their prejudices. It obviously worked on me. He got me to read his piece. Trouble is, Samuelson's tactic only pissed me off. I now think less of him than I did before.

Samuelson's piece, which is a critique of a book by another economist making the case that economic growth is morally uplifting, does not even mention energy, resources, limits or exponentiation. It's just more of the same old bullshit.

After the disappointment of having read Samuelson's piece at the source, I returned to EnergyBulletin, where I found their take on Samuelson's piece further down the page. I agree completely with their reaction to Samuelson:

A profoundly irresponsible article from the Washington Post. Samuelson casts himself as a skeptic highlighting some counter examples, but is in fact in agreement with Friedman on the moral virtues of endless economic growth. He never mentions unfortunately, within this seemingly hard-questioning review, that we live on a planet with finite natural resources.

This is a classic case of 'fair and balanced' discourse where both parties share the same narrow framework of assumptions. Normally in a publication like the Washington Post 'growth is good' might be one of those shared assumptions. In opening this question up there is opportunity for some timely reflections on a fundamentally self-destructive — one could say completely deranged — thread through our dominant economic ideologies. But the question is opened only to be closed again more tightly. True reflection might be too painful. Endless growth on a finite planet is fundamentally impossible, and its pursuit (while an understandable enough response to the journey up the energy curve) is leading to mass extinctions, including possibly our own if we intend to try pursuing it on the downslope of the energy curve by burning up the Earth's remaining natural resources.

'The truth is so simple the mind is repulsed' to paraphrase Galbraith out of context.

Samuelson resorts to some outright doublethink: "Societies whose politics focus on the gaining and sharing of prosperity can promote their own stability." Sure, but how exactly can a system based on an unsustainable premise, (not to mention one emphasising competition rather than 'sharing') be considered in any way stable?

Peak Oil implies that we will be forced to embark on a period of economic contraction. But that does not have to mean the end of progress (by most definitions), positive social reforms, depth of human experience or moral virtues.

See instead Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, Richard Douthwaite's book The Growth Illusion, Clive Hamilton's Growth Fetish, or perhaps William Catton's writings on Overshoot.
-AJ

I just started reading another economist's 1987 book, Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions - Ideological Origins of Political Struggles". I'm hoping for a little insight into the conflict between Samuelson's claptrap and the words of one of the 2006 Edge Question respondents, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who responded to the question, "What is your dangerous idea?":

The free market

Generally ideas are thought to be dangerous when they threaten an entrenched authority. Galileo was sued not because he claimed that the earth revolved around the sun — a "hypothesis" his chief prosecutor, Cardinal Bellarmine, apparently was quite willing to entertain in private — but because the Church could not afford a fact it claimed to know be reversed by another epistemology, in this case by the scientific method. Similar conflicts arose when Darwin's view of how humans first appeared on the planet challenged religious accounts of creation, or when Mendelian genetics applied to the growth of hardier strains of wheat challenged Leninist doctrine as interpreted by Lysenko.

One of the most dangerous ideas at large in the current culture is that the "free market" is the ultimate arbiter of political decisions, and that there is an "invisible hand" that will direct us to the most desirable future provided the free market is allowed to actualize itself. This mystical faith is based on some reasonable empirical foundations, but when embraced as a final solution to the ills of humankind, it risks destroying both the material resources, and the cultural achievements that our species has so painstakingly developed.

So the dangerous idea on which our culture is based is that the political economy has a silver bullet — the free market — that must take precedence over any other value, and thereby lead to peace and prosperity. It is dangerous because like all silver bullets it is an intellectual and political scam that might benefit some, but ultimately requires the majority to pay for the destruction it causes.

My dangerous idea is dangerous only to those who support the hegemony of the market. It consists in pointing out that the imperial free market wears no clothes — it does not exist in the first place, and what passes for it is dangerous to the future well being of our species. Scientist need to turn their attention to what the complex system that is human life, will require in the future.

Beginnings like the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, which focus on such central requirements as health, education, infrastructure, environment, human rights, and public safety, need to become part of our social and political agenda. And when their findings come into conflict with the agenda of the prophets of the free market, the conflict should be examined — who is it that benefits from the erosion of the quality of life?

Emphasis mine.

Personal Appeal - Wikimedia Foundation

I use Wikipedia all the time, and I have for quite a while. It's a worthy project despite some growing pains. Wikipedia has a lot of content, and its accuracy can be as good as that of "real" encyclopedias.

If you happen to see these words, please consider reading the appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and consider donating a few bucks.

What is your dangerous idea?

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006

Edge.org poses an interesting yearly question, and draws answers from among some of the brightest minds there are.

Last year the question was: What do you believe is true that you cannot prove? The year before that it was something like: You are the President's science advisor - what do you advise?

This year:

The Edge Annual Question — 2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

There are 117 essays in response to this question occupying about 12 web pages, of which I've only read the first. So far the responses are as interesting as they were last year and the year before.

In the very first essay, Howard Gardner seems to validate my pessimistic outlook (though focusing on a different set of factors than I), while in the last essay on the first page Cliff Pickover points to the likely combination of drugs and flawed simulations to create completely believable virtual realities. Along the way we are treated to thoughts on relativism, naturalism, the character of time, emotional intelligence, radicalized relativity, banality of evil and heroism, the evaporation of the state and doubts over our own existence. Some or much of it flies over my head, frankly, and I'll have to go back and study a few particularly intriguing contributions.

If you want an interesting stretch, check out the responses to the 2006 Edge Annual Question.

They didn't ask me, but my dangerous idea has to do with the necessity of coercion in limiting human population in the face of environmental limits, and the morality of mass culling of the human herd for the same reason if conditions reach that point. I think that qualifies as dangerous stuff. I probably won't write an essay, though. Far better people than me have already done so with respect to the first part, but to little effect.

Moderate Islamists?

A responder to a Volokh Conspiracy post noting the anniversary of the demise of the Soviet Union on this date in 1991 responded (and later responded again with his source) with a citation of an Economist article observing that "Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists...".

Moderate islamist? What the hell is that? Before I'm accused of bigotry, that's "islamIST" not "islamIC" or "Muslim". IslamIST. What the hell is a "moderate islamIST"?

"Moderate islamist" immediately struck me as a contradiction in terms, along the lines of "compassionate nazi" or "thoughtful bully". But this was from the Economist. I'd better go look it up.

So I Googled "moderate islamist" and got lots of hits (of course - Google is awesome that way). The first hit was to Tech Central Station and an interesting article by Michael Vlahos.

But what exactly is a "moderate Islamist?" The moderate Islamist should not be confused with the moderate Muslim. The moderate Muslim is the kind of Muslim America likes. Americans are comfortable with moderate religiosity; so like the quiet churchgoer, we would prefer Muslims who are not above, for example, knocking back an occasional beer. But this is not what we should expect. Islam is a demanding religion -- and a demanding way of life. Islamic renewal will be full of piety and passion.

The moderate Islamist, like the radical Islamist, seeks to renew the Muslim World -- not help it relax. The Islamist is dedicated to the Islamic cause, and he is an active proselyte. Thus moderate Islamists like radical Islamists are dedicated to change within and expansion of the Muslim World. But unlike the radicals they reject the path of aggressive struggle, or Jihad. Moderate Islamists would renew their faith and their world instead through Islamic reinterpretation, or Ijtihad.

Moderate Islamists are thus self-proclaimed leaders -- clerics and scholars -- in the renewal of Islam. The moderate Islamist is highly educated, in contrast to many radical Islamists. The moderate Islamist is also receptive to Western ideas -- but selectively receptive.

OK, so a "moderate islamist" is, like some christian fundies, completely absorbed in his mythology and dedicated to his memeplex's growth and eventual dominance, but not necessarily by the violent upheaval favored by more wild-eyed radical jihadis.

Back to Google. The third hit is to the summary of a policy brief from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which observes that

Political actors or observers who still insist that there is no such thing as a "moderate Islamist" miss the reality that activist organizations in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Yemen have evolved after decades of failed opposition to repressive regimes. Instead of clinging to fantasies of theocratic states, many Islamist movements now see the wisdom of competing peacefully for shares of political power and working within existing institutions to promote gradual democratic openings.

OK, but the cynic in me wants to scream "One man, one vote, one time!" That may be xenophobia, I know, but still... Moving right along...

You know what? I've grown tired of this topic already. I don't have much patience for people of any stripe who wish to impose their mythology on other people. Whether they be "moderate" or radical, to hell with them all.

Is my inner scream of "one man, one vote, one time" a xenophobic reaction? For the time being I think it's more likely to actually represent the reality of islamism, moderate and not.

That's it for now. Maybe I'll revisit this topic, starting with Wikipedia's essay on "islamism".

Silly Insulting Wall

Rigoberta Menchu: US Wall Is an Insult - Prensa Latina

Who am I to criticize a Nobel Peace Prize winner or a head of state, but this business of Latin Americans taking insult at the prospect of the United States building a wall along the border with Mexico is just silly. Worse, it's just pandering.

Insult? The real insult is that humanity thinks it is different from a colony of bacteria in a petri dish. Neither can outgrow its environment, but both are destined to ruin their environment in the rush to outgrow it.

What I hear these insulted ones saying is that people should be free to ruin their neighbors' commons, which is what unfettered illegal immigration will accelerate. What they're really saying is whatever they think their respective constituencies want them to say, whatever serves their political aims.

What is even sillier than the insult these people say they perceive is the very idea of the wall itself. Anything less than a coordinated package of measures, maybe including a wall but certainly including politically impossible sanctions on businesses and individuals who exploit immigrants' cheap labor and facilitate their migration, is as useless as the War on Some Drugs. (Useless with respect to stated aims, that is; the immigration wall and the War on Some Drugs are both very useful to unstated aims.)

So what's the solution?

There is no politically practicable solution to the problem of illegal immigration, but pretending that there is a solution along these lines serves certain political purposes. Get used to it, y aprendan a platicar en Español.

Emergency Contraception: Congratulation Massachusetts

Hear! Hear! I'm so happy to see social conservatives slapped down for once. Twice. Dover and "intelligent design", Massachusetts and emergency contraception... Maybe there's hope after all.

Compassion in the ER

By Dianne Luby | December 25, 2005

THIS MONTH women and sexual assault survivors in Massachusetts marked a major victory when the Commonwealth's new emergency contraception bill went into effect. The new law is a compassionate, common-sense measure that requires hospital emergency room staff to help rape victims avoid pregnancy by providing them with emergency contraception. It also allows specially trained pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription. Full implementation of this law will provide important new protections for women's health by preventing unintended pregnancies. It will also help reduce the need for abortion.

Emergency contraception, also known as the morning-after pill, can be taken up to five days after rape, contraceptive failure, or unprotected sex to reduce the risk of pregnancy. It is most effective if taken within the first 24 hours. A form of progestin, one of the hormones found in regular birth control pills, emergency contraception works most often by inhibiting ovulation and/or fertilization. It is not RU486, the abortion pill, and it will not harm an existing pregnancy.

Despite promising to support broader access to emergency contraception when he was a candidate in 2002, Governor Romney blocked passage of this law until the Legislature overrode his veto. Last week he tried again to undermine the law when his administration declared its intention to exempt religious hospitals from the obligation to provide emergency contraception to rape survivors. Confronted by a public outcry, strong opposition from the attorney general, and the advice of his own legal counsel, Romney abruptly reversed course and announced that all hospitals will, in fact, have to comply with the new law.

This political fracas has been widely covered. What gets lost, however, in all of the politics are the real experiences of sexual assault survivors, women and girls who have been traumatized and need access to emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy. An estimated 7,000 women and girls are raped every year in Massachusetts. Rape victims who receive emergency contraception within the first 24 hours reduce their risk of pregnancy by roughly 95 percent. Unfortunately, this does not always happen. Many rape survivors do not seek care, and some who do seek it are denied emergency contraception by their providers.

The patient stories we hear all too often at Planned Parenthood shed light on what it can mean in the life of an individual when she is denied appropriate medical care, whether it is a college student who experiences date rape, but is denied emergency contraception because her college health center does not stock it, or a rape survivor taken to the local emergency room who is not told about emergency contraception because the hospital or individual practitioner is opposed to family planning. When women and girls in this situation become pregnant, they are victims twice.

In the face of this kind of tragedy, it's time for the politics to stop. All hospitals, religious or otherwise, should follow the law and provide the most effective medical care available. That includes providing emergency contraception to rape survivors. The fact is that hospitals enjoy tax-free status and receive substantial amounts of public funding. As a result, taxpayers have the right to expect that all hospitals will adhere to the laws of the Commonwealth and provide high-quality care for patients.

At Planned Parenthood, we hope that all of the debate surrounding this law will help increase public officials' appreciation of the compassionate care that rape victims need and deserve. As Governor Romney finishes the balance of his term, we also hope he will stop using this issue to build his national profile among social conservatives and start putting the interests of women and girls ahead of his own.

Dianne Luby is president and CEO of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.

Impotent disgust

Whenever I see a Hummer I envision it on fire.

When I read that Norway has increased its whaling kill quota or that Japanese whalers are on research expeditions, I visualize the whalers sinking into the cold waters and the bastards who promulgate these policies choking to death on whale meat.

Within a few minutes, though, I'm back to my normally resigned self.

After all, deforestation and loss of biodiversity, fleet fishing and 90 percent of large fish already gone from the oceans, nature preserve drilling in the face of oil depletion and Hummers, melting permafrost already releasing greenhouse methane to the atmosphere, receding Greenland glaciers freshening the ocean and threatening the thermohaline circulation, decreasing sea ice and drowning polar bears, increasing global haze, and so on and on and on, tend to overwhelm.

Impotent disgust succumbs once again to sad resignation. Merry Christmas.

Black Box Voting Forums: 12-13-05: Devastating hack proven - Leon County dumps Diebold

Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail, paper trail, paper trail... BlackBoxVoting.org

UPDATE Dec. 16: Volusia County (FL) joins Leon in dumping Diebold. Due to contractual non-performance and security design issues, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho has announced that he will never again use Diebold in an election. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. On Tuesday, the most serious “hack” demonstration to date took place in Leon County. The Diebold machines succumbed quickly to alteration of the votes. This comes on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, and the announcement that stockholder's class action suits and related actions have been filed against Diebold by four separate law firms. Further “hack” testing on additional vulnerabilities is tentatively scheduled before Christmas in the state of California.

Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, together with Black Box Voting, demonstrated that Diebold made misrepresentations to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the “memory card” (the credit-card-sized ballot box used by computerized voting machines.

A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6

However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the "mother ship" that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.
The results in the central tabulator read:

Yes:7 ; No:1

This videotaped testing session was witnessed by Black Box Voting investigators Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, Florida Fair Elections Coalition Director Susan Pynchon, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and Susan Bernecker, a former candidate for New Orleans city council who videotaped Sequoia-brand touch-screen voting machines in her district recording vote after vote for the wrong candidate.

The Hursti Hack requires a moderate level of inside access. It is, however, accomplished without being given any password and with the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA. It is a particularly dangerous exploit, because it changes votes in a one-step process that will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, it requires only a single a credit-card sized memory card, any single individual with access to the memory cards can do it, and it requires only a small piece of equipment which can be purchased off the Internet for a few hundred dollars.

More.

Siriana (shrug)

I saw Siriana with my son last night. Frankly, I was disappointed. I was hoping that peak oil would somehow shine through as a critical issue, but it didn't.

Aside from that, I thought the movie was worthy of a shrug. I liked it about as much as I liked The Deal, which isn't saying much. Government bad. Oil company bad. Idealistic reformer good. Idealistic reformer dead. Shrug.

Catch it on video.

WorldOil.com - Shaping the peak of world oil production

The bell curve has a sharp crest, and you can't see it coming.
...
SUMMARY

To understand the possible character of the peaking of world conventional oil production, oil peaking in a number of relatively unencumbered regions and countries was considered. All had significant production, and all were certainly or almost certainly past their peak. The data shows that the onset of peaking can occur quite suddenly, peaks can be very sharp, and post-peak production declines can be comparatively steep (3 - 13%). Thus, if historical patterns are appropriate indicators, the task of planning for and managing world conventional oil peaking will indeed be very challenging.

Hat tip: Kurt Cobb - Resource Insights:

Comedian Richard Pryor, who passed away last week, was famous for saying, "Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?" In a way, those who believe that a peak in world oil production is not far away (or possibly already here) are asking the American public the same question.

A somnolent and self-satisfied American citizenry awakens each day to a world with no gas lines, warm homes in winter (or cool homes in summer), an economy which appears to be gaining speed and a gasoline price which has dropped below where it had been before it spiked to record levels.

...

Is our hypothetical speaker not asking the audience to deny the evidence of their senses? Is he not asking them to believe him rather than their lying eyes?

...

Hear! Hear!

Kurt Vonnegut: Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long -- —for all of human experience so far -- —that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

It seems to me that Kurt Vonnegut has had the great good fortune of living his life a couple of minutes before midnight. Too bad there weren't more of him around when it might have done some good.

We must acknowledge, though, that persuasive guessers -- —even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in Russia -- —have given us courage to endure extraordinary ordeals that we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, wars, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead -- —the guessers gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively.

Without that illusion, we would all have surrendered long ago. ...

I did surrender long ago, when it became crystal clear to me that humanity is incapable of behaving sustainably and that, as a result, we would face the consequences of exponentiation against limits.

It is easy to envision scenarios in which I am lucky enough to die realizing my outlook was wrong all along, that faith in seemingly outlandish technologies was justified, that Ehrlich and the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth were all wet.

Optimistic scenarios, though, seem bloody unlikely to materialize in the time required.

Humanity needs a miracle. Unfortunately, I'm not a man of faith. I'm just one who seems to have found a measure of serenity in resignation, like some of the characters in On The Beach.

Monster

I watched Monster, the Charlize Theron film about the life of Aileen Wuornos, the Daytona Beach prostitute and serial killer, for the first time today.

All I can say is that this film richly deserves every bit of praise it has received. It wasn't a fun movie to watch, but it is an awesome film. More power to Charlize Theron and everyone associated with it.

I've had an approach avoidance thing going with this film since it was released, similar to my reactions to Schindler's List, Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Reservoir Dogs and a few others. (Black Hawk Down, this review of which won a Pulitzer Prize, was, for me, especially hard to watch, just as was reading the Philadelphia Inquirer's series when it was published after the Battle of Mogadishu.) All of these films were amazing, though, and I'm glad I've seen them.

Now I think I'll take a chance on Natural Born Killers, which comes highly recommended.

[Update: Natural Born Killers was a boring, pointless piece of shit not redeemable by some good performances. I wound up turning it off some time before the end, having briefly dozed off and not caring whether I missed some grand finale. I fail to understand how or why a guy like Tarantino (yeah, it's an Oliver Stone flick but the story is by Tarantino) can turn out gems like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction on the one hand, but crap like Natural Born Killers and Kill Bill on the other. Maybe some day I'll get it. Maybe it's just as simple as dollars generated via pointless violence.]

If I'm going to watch a movie for recreation I generally prefer to watch something a little lighter. Among my favorites are Office Space and Paulie, though I'm only slighting many other fine movies by mentioning any at all.

Once in a while, though...

Violence and street drug markets

Mark Kleiman notes that in New York City cocaine dealing has been driven indoors by the felony status of dealing the stuff. Meanwhile, dealing in pot and untaxed cigarettes is a midemeanor and the dealers aren't afraid of the cops. The result, Mr. Kleiman reports, is that violence around cocaine dealing is substantially decreased while violence around pot and untaxed cigarette sales is substantial.

Kleiman says that a nasty, illicit market is facilitated by a high tax, then says the right policy response to the problem is not obvious.

Excuse me?

The right policy response is completely obvious: legalize the stuff and subject it to reasonable taxation, not sin taxation the way cigarettes are being taxed more and more.

How much more obvious can it be? Drug prohibition and the War on Some Drugs produce only ill effects.

Exit Strategy for The War (on Some Drugs)

kingcountyjournal.com - Local attorneys tout exit to war on drugs: "An Exit Strategy for the War on Drugs"

...

Goodman presented the decriminalization message in Seattle this week at a two-day conference titled, ``An Exit Strategy for the War on Drugs: Toward a Legal Framework.''

He hosted many of the country's most outspoken critics of U.S. drug policy, including former Seattle police Chief Norm Stamper, travel writer Rick Steves and Canadian Sen. Pierre Claude Nolin.

Most of those in attendance at this week's conference agreed that locking people up for nonviolent drug offenses simply doesn't work. Where they disagreed was on what should be done instead.

The regulation models offered by the Bar are sketched out in a report called ``Effective Drug Control'' by Goodman's Drug Policy Project. Since he started bringing the blueprint to legal circles across the country, Goodman said, a growing number of legal scholars are taking the ideas seriously.

...

Supporters of the plan -- including the Seattle League of Women Voters, the Washington State Public Health Association and the Washington State Pharmacy Association -- say current drug policy has failed miserably by creating a high-profit black market that's impossible to stop.

Unfortunately, the War on Some Drugs is one of those issues dominated by unreason, propaganda, entrenched power and money interests, and geopolitics.

It's all just nuts - so damned predictable.

I am a conscientious objector in the War on Drugs.

Prometheus: Tom Yulsman on Religion and Science

Here's an interesting thread if your interests include the question of whether or not religion and science are compatible.

Apparently Roger Pielke Jr., Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was impressed by this piece in the Denver Post: "Science and religion face off - The two really aren't incompatible". The author, Tom Yulsman, is co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In a nutshell, in his Denver Post piece Yulsman argues that science and religion are not incompatible. He invokes Stephen J. Gould's nonoverlapping magisteria, then goes on to point out that we don't need Gould to show that science and religion are compatible because millions of people, including many scientists, experience no conflict between the two. He cites the likes of Einstein, Hawking and Primack, Einstein by way of his Spinoza quote, Hawking via his "mind of God" comment, and Primack by his likening of the big-bang afterglow to the "handwriting of God".

Yulsman concludes by noting that the religious views of these distinguished ones differ wildly from those of people who think that humans co-existed with dinosaurs, and with those whose god is a bearded white guy on a cloud. That would include the huge proportion of Americans who say they believe a god created mankind in its present form some six or ten thousand years ago.

So far so good, and I agree completely with Yulsman that Intelligent Design is "motivated not by a desire to seek empirical truth about nature but by a pre-determined Christian agenda."

Then come the thread's comments.

Eli Rabett thinks that Yulsman is taking an easy out and confusing religion with awe. Eric Wilcox agrees, and writes that the greater challenge is in convincing religious people that evolution is not in conflict with the biblical special relationship between God and humanity or the lessons in morality that follow.

Next, Yulsman defends himself against Rabett's charge that he's confused religion and awe by writing that it was Einstein who described his experience as a "cosmic RELIGIOUS experience." At this point I think he's splitting hairs because there clearly is a difference between Einstein's "religious" experience and the religious feelings of American fundies. "Religion" is like any other word - you have to define it. I think the definition relevant here would have Einstein experiencing awe as compared to fundie religion, which "religion" seems more relevant to the discussion. Whatever. Moving right along...

Next comes David Roberts of Grist Magazine, who asks, "So what?", and points out that the beliefs of the majority of US christians are *not* compatible with science, and suggests that Yulsman pick sides.

Next, Pielke responds to Roberts by, essentially, saying that Roberts' thinking is too black and white, and that Yulsman has taken sides by dividing the world into those who think science is compatible with religion and those who do not, and by then placing himself on the side of those who do.

Roberts responds that Pielke and Yulsman are dividing the world alright, but they're doing it along theoretical lines about what is possible rather than by what is actual. Roberts seems to want Pielke and Yulsman to get more "in their face" with fundies and like folk, saying it is they who are thrusting the arguments on science, not the other way around, and asking whether we shouldn't rise to the occasion.

Next, Yulsman responds to Roberts, apparently having taken offense at Roberts' comments about "vaporous" religion, choosing sides and rising to the occasion. Yulsman's apparent offense might have been sparked by Roberts' unfortunate use of the term "vaporous" in describing awe-religion. I don't think Roberts intended to insult; rather, he simply used a descriptive term that can convey negativity. Maybe "ethereal" would have been a better term. Whatever... Yulsman goes on, apparently having interpreted Roberts as implying that he (Yulsman) should give up his religious beliefs and abandon his core values. Yulsman concludes by commenting that his "vaporous" and "theoretical" religion seems pretty real to him when he reads Torah.

At this point, I think Roberts gave up hope of further dialog, as I think I would have, too. No offense, but what more could either of them have written in the moment? That conversation probably needed to move to the bar for a beer.

Finally, Kevin Jones weighed in with a comment that was particularly interesting to me because he apparently doesn't have any use for Richard Dawkins, who is one of my heroes for having sparked memetics. Jones also thought Yulsman's piece was a bit weak. Jones' first paragraph seems to agree with Grist's David Roberts with respect to the nature of awe-religion. Roberts wrote "vaporous" whereas Jones wrote "warm and fuzzy", but I think they mean pretty much the same thing. Jones also seems to not have much use for Stephen Jay Gould's nonoverlapping magisteria, but doesn't seem as hostile to Gould as he is toward Dawkins.

Jones refers the reader to a review of the book, "The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism", by Phillip E. Johnson, the christian lawyer whose book is one of the foundations of the ID movement. The review Jones refers to is by Catholic theologian and priest Edward T. Oakes, who considers some of the people I hold in highest esteem, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, to be sleight-of-hand artists and masters of ledgerdemain who dupe the public with the trick of persuading the world of what is false by urging upon it what is true.

What??

I'll have to go back and try to make more sense of Oakes' review, which concludes with a quote from a contemporary of Darwin, Cardinal Newman, which includes the following: "I believe in design because I believe in God, not in a God because I see design."

So, having spent my morning on this interesting exchange, what do I come away with?

I've reinforced my belief that there is a possibly infinite variety of ways in which the necktop computer can be configured with internally self-consistent programming, and that frequently such configurations are externally incompatible, sometimes violently so, with those of others. (There's no violence in this thread, of course, but just look around for many examples of physical violence associated with incompatible worldviews.)

I've also reinforced my confidence in the relevance of the quote at the top of my blog, "For every expert there's an equal and opposite reexpert."

I've learned some things from this thread, too, which is why I read Promethius from time to time. Thanks Roger!

WSJ vs. MXC

Stephen Moore [1][2] and I do not think alike. I suppose I should defer to him, though, on the basis of all his credentials and accomplishments. Who am I to question the sanity and morality of a man with titles such as CEO, President, Senior Fellow, Senior Research Fellow, "member of the Board of Scholars", "adjunct scholar" and so on? Hell, I'm just an aging engineer who can't even punctuate correctly. What do I know?

Moore recently published a piece in the WSJ, "The War Against the Car". You have to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to access the source, but others have cached it as you'll see on the link to Google in the title of this post. (I was a WSJ subscriber for a while, but I came to regard their editorial stance as insane so I left. I assume the caches I've seen of Moore's screed are accurate.)

Moore compares second-graders' "indoctrination" with the arguments of "presumably educated adults", calls those adults Luddites, paints global warming and peak oil worriers and their "tirades" with the "Malthusian" label.

He actually writes that if all those poor people had just had cars they wouldn't have had to be warehoused in the New Orleans Superdome. As if that weren't enough, he invokes the memory of Rosa Parks and credits the hundreds of cars owned by black voluneers ferrying people around the city with the success of the bus boycot Ms. Parks sparked so few years ago.

Moore refers to the call to conserve energy as a "maniacal obsession", and ridicules recent oil company ad campaigns, comparing them to a MacDonald's campaign to promote less beef on the basis that cows are terrible things to lose. He writes that "simplistic notions" regarding the car reflect ignorance of the history of masses of horse shit in the streets. Ewwww!

And so on. What an ass.

Moore concludes:

Americans are rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses and subways. We want more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from serfdom and the car is what will take us there.

Moore's "rugged individualist" is a myth, proof of which is readily apparent in areas as diverse as fashion, suburban architecture, media preferences, marketing maleability, you name it. That we want this, want that and want the other is undeniable; we behave like the second-graders he considers some of us to be. His statement that the car will deliver us from serfdom, though, is a dangerous delusion at best, a flat-out lie at worst.

Moore is one of the founders of something called the "Club for Growth". The hard place this rock runs into lies in the exponential consequences of steady growth, something to which Mr. Moore seems oblivious.

So what does the MXC have to do with this? MXC is a hilarious (if you like that sort of humor) adaptation of a Japanese show called Takeshi's Castle. One of the games in the show is called Wallbangers, and features contestants whose success lies in racing through a number of walls, each with several doors, one of them of paper, the rest solidly closed. Contestants run headlong into the doors they select, passing through paper if they selected correctly or crashing violently if not. Funny as hell!

Moore reminds me of a Wallbangers contestant. Skanky's about to get him.

Seriously though, I don't know much about Wolfgang Sachs, but this quote seems spot on: "The world will no longer be divided by the ideologies of 'left' and 'right,' but by those who accept ecological limits and those who don't." That seems exactly right for Stephen Moore and yours truly.

Hat tip: Energy Bulletin. AF is correct about Moore's piece almost reading like parody.

Evolution is a fact.

In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists—and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design—always know what evidence it would take to change their minds. One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact.
--Richard Dawkins

So there.

Explain me this

Update Nov 22 2005:

Well, that was a waste of good bile. I guess I am too sensitive to the impossibility of achieving confidence in my computer security.

My friend Ken wondered whether there might be some function in Firefox or the Adobe Acrobat software that would interpret the text, "www.shadowcrew.com" as a link even though it is not set up as, and did not appear to be, a link.

It seems that the version of Adobe Acrobat that I'm using on this Linux box does that, or maybe the text was actually set up as a non-apparent link when the pdf was composed. Why they would do that escapes me, especially when there were plenty of other links in the document that were plainly identifiable as links. I tend to think it's a function of Acrobat to interpret text like that as a link. Maybe I'll test that some time.

What remains unexplained is why there were two browser windows open to that site when I closed the Adobe Acrobat window. I don't know about that part, but it could be that my finger was resting too heavily on the mouse button when I happened to pass the mouse over the text of interest, though it certainly seems unlikely after I've checked my mouse's condition, which is just fine.

Whatevuhrrrr...

--------------------------------------

Goddamn it! Maybe I'm just too sensitive to the impossibility of achieving reasonable confidence in my computer security, but explain me this:

A couple of minutes ago I was reading the Department of Homeland Security's "DHS Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report 21 Nov 2005", which I receive from them via email as a pdf attachment. The pdf report can also be downloaded at the link in the title of this post.

In the report was the item below (the formatting below is fucked up but I'll leave it as it came across from the Adobe copy to the Firefox paste):

7. November 18, Associated Press — Website operators admit role in phishing ring. Six more
people pleaded guilty Thursday, November 17, to operating a Website that investigators
claimed was one of the largest online centers for trafficking in stolen identity information and
credit cards. With others who pleaded guilty in recent weeks, that brings to 12 people who
acknowledged roles with the site, www.shadowcrew.com, which had about 4,000 members
who dealt with at least 1.5 million stolen credit card numbers and caused more than $4 million
in losses, federal prosecutors said. "The losses incurred were to the issuing banks and
3
MasterCard, Visa, American Express, who reimbursed those who were victimized by these
crimes," Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Dowd said. The site used techniques such as phishing
and spamming to illegally obtain credit and bank card information, which were used to buy
goods on the Internet.
Source: http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=
L5OTYLHXHJJ02QSNDBOCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=174400097

So, why the hell, when I closed the Acrobat window where I was viewing the DHS daily report, were there TWO browser windows open to the shadowcrew.com web site?

Nothing like this has ever happened before. I did NOT click on any links while I was viewing the DHS pdf, on top of which there is no link to that site in the DHS report. Nothing that looks like a link, anyway.

I'm running Firefox 1.0.7 (the latest version), on a Linux (Linspire 5) machine with no other OS on board. I am not running as root.

This just pisses me off. First, what caused those windows to open to that site? Next, if the site is an ID theft site, why the hell is it still on line?

Then there's that Sony rootkit shit (from what I'm able to tell is not on my Windows machine, which may be because I just don't buy CD's any more, and I'm certainly not going to buy any CD's any time soon, especially bearing any brand I can associate with Sony, and I'll not buy anything at all from Sony (or that even smells like their horse) any time soon. Rant rant rant!).

Well, that's off my chest. NOT!

Irreconcilable Difference With Buckley

... whatever one feels about the right of a woman to put in for an abortion, that right is not asserted in the Constitution of the United States, nor is it implicit in any reasonably argued defense of individual privacy.

Buckley's piece is actually about the distinction between a judge's allegiance to the law vs. a judge's political philosophy, and I can go along with him on that. I suppose Alito is as good a candidate as is likely to be nominated by the Republican administration or approved by the Senate. The Senate should confirm the man and get on to other vitally important matters presently being ill addressed if addressed at all.

However, I disagree vehemently with Mr. Buckley's opinions about the lack of a Constitutional foundation for abortion and privacy.

Thirty years ago, when I was in Army counterintelligence agent training, one of the most important training topics was the law. I don't recall the trainer's name, but he impressed me greatly. One of the things I recall was that lawyer's opinion that the Soviet constitution was a beautiful document but that it was just pretty window dressing - not applicable to real life.

Well, that's how I'm coming to view the US Constitution.

Mr. Buckley says above that the US Constitution does not contain the foundations of an abortion right.

I'm no lawyuh, but I say Bullshit.

The Ninth amendment says, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." As far as I'm concerned, THAT's where the foundation of the right to privacy lies, and by extension where the right of a woman to make her own choices about abortion is established.

Unfortunately, it seems to me the Ninth Amendment has been turned around such that the lack of enumeration of certain rights is construed to disparage them. That's exactly what Buckley is doing when he writes that the "right is not asserted in the Constitution of the United States". It doesn't need to be explicitly asserted, Bill. That's the whole purpose behind the Ninth Amendment.

I guess it's a question of picking your trumps.

Going To Prison

My favorite scumbag is going to prison.

This is the one who caused me a fair measure of grief a couple of years ago. I am suppressing the urge to wish upon him some awful things I wouldn't wish on anyone if I believed in the myth of inherent human dignity. Let's just say I hope Peter Francis-Macrae dies in prison.

My favorite Tool song, "Jerk-Off", is going through my head as I type.

Here:
The scam I fell for and what I tried to do about it
The retaliation I suffered for trying to stand up to the scam

Moving along now...

BBC NEWS | Americas | Drugs charges for Guatemala tsar

Mr Castillo [the head anti-drug official in Guatemala - sls] was in the US state of Virginia for a training course on how to fight drug trafficking through ports when he was arrested, Guatemalan Interior Minister Carlos Vielman said.

It gets tiresome to again and again write about the so-called drug war and the folly of prohibition. Over and over and over again the clear case is made by better people than me against this national stupidity, and yet it goes on.

Here's an illustration of one of the many reasons to end prohibition and the war on some drugs: corruption of officialdom.

Whether it be a dirty cop or a dirty drug czar/tsar, the facilitating element is prohibition. Prohibition, in addition to doing this kind of harm, does no good.

Oh, well... There's always another crook where the previous one came from.

UPDATE: Pete Guither is wondering what else might be going on. He's got some good questions.

Such Nonsense: "Planned Parenthood Sanctifying Murder: Who Would Jesus Kill?" by Brian Melton

If the baby should be considered human at conception then all other questions must be framed in light of that one fact. And yet it is that one fact that Planned Parenthood is most desperate to avoid.

Well, I don't speak for Planned Parenthood, but I do support them with my money. One of the ways I chose to donate to charities is through my employer's yearly United Way drive, from which contributions are disbursed according to donors' wishes. I generally split my payday deduction between the Red Cross and Planned Parenthood. It irritates me that Planned Parenthood is not included among the standard charities from which one can select. Every year I have to write them in.

The reason Planned Parenthood is not included in the United Way program is similar to the reason Flemming Rose has to test taboo: religious bullying. One can easily imagine the uproar should the United Way solicit funds for Planned Parenthood!

Mr. Melton thinks that a fertilized egg is a person. He believes in a soul that exists separate from the brain. This idea leads some to think Terri Schiavo was murdered by her husband and the state. It makes them think Susan Torres died after the feeding tube prolonging the functions of her vital organs (which were kept going in a failed attempt to rescue the child she was carrying) were withdrawn.

Both of these unfortunate women died long before the feeding tubes were removed. They died when their brains were no longer capable of generating their souls.

There is no soul separate from the brain. When you're brain dead, you're dead. You no longer exist. Until someone can prove otherwise, assertions to the contrary are simply religious dogma.

The same Truth (I'll capitalize it, too) holds at the beginning of life. Insisting that abortion is murder on the basis of an immortal soul independent of the brain, and driving that religious position down the throats of other people, is the same sort of nonsense that Flemming Rose is reacting to in Denmark: religious bullying.

The piece I object to asks whether "the baby should be considered human at conception". The answer is clearly "No". If he wants to believe the answer is "Yes" then so be it, as long as he doesn't shove it down other peoples' throats.

Unfortunately, he writes that "Christians, in America and elsewhere, must understand that it really is an all or nothing issue; it allows no [...] wiggle room[.]" Islamic prohibition of images of their religion's founder also allows no wiggle room. Religious bullies don't like wiggle room.

Unlike fertilized eggs, the American slaves and Hitler-victims Mr. Melton refers to were all living human beings defined by the souls emergent from their brains. Invoking their memory in opposition to abortion is nonsensical.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Guatemala faces hunger 'timebomb'

This is not the first time starvation has loomed over the less fortunate in Guatemala. Guatemala currently has the highest rate of chronic malnutrition in Latin America, affecting 47 percent of children under five.

The current crisis, subject of the BBC story, was precipitated by the recent hurricane. Hunger and malnutrition, though, have been a big problem all along.

I remember being 9 or 10 years old, growing up in Guatemala where, at the time, my Mother worked for the Instituto de Nutrición de Centro América y Panamá, INCAP. (Translation hardly seem necessary, but that's the Nutrition Institute of Central America and Panama.) I learned very early in life what kwashiorkor is and how lucky I was.

The founding director of INCAP was Dr. Nevin Scrimshaw, whom my Mother admired very much. Under Dr. Skrimshaw INCAP developed a low-cost high-protein food called Incaparina, which is sold today in parts of the United States, while variants are used to help the hungry elsewhere. The most striking success of Incaparina-type weaning food is in India,

where a formula utilizing the Incaparina principle and named Bal-Ahar (literally "nutritious child food") has played an important role in Government nutrition programmes. It is produced today in plants in several different parts of India. It is noteworthy that Bal-Ahar is provided by the Government of India without cost to the consumer, whereas Incaparina in Guatemala has received no Government subsidy and only sporadic Government purchases. Bal-Amul, a pre-cooked version at a higher price, has been commercially successful and largely displaced imported weaning foods sold by foreign companies.

My recollections are from more than 40 years ago. It seems little has changed, except that the population of Guatemala has increased from about four million souls to today's level, which approaches 15 million.

Depressed Bushie Reaganite

Peggy Noonan seems depressed. She says that America is in trouble and that our elites are merely resigned. She writes that things are broken and that tough history is coming. Her piece in the Wall Street Journal, "A Separate Peace," is an interesting read. If you can't find it at the link there's a Fair Use copy in the first comment to this post.

Noonan thinks things have gotten too complicated, that the presidency and the government are overwhelmed, and that the people know it. Half the people won't trust the president and federal government, whe writes, to do what has to be done or to tell the truth in the face of something major like a terrorist event.

She cites an event from Christopher Lawford's book, "Symptoms of Withdrawal," in which Lawford quotes his uncle, Ted Kennedy, who, at a family affair of some sort reflected to the effect that he was glad he would not be around when the rest of the assembled group reached his age because "the whole thing is going to fall apart." Noonan's reaction: "If even Teddy knows..."

So Noonan is depressed, but she's not sure why. She opens her piece: "It is not hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It's harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes."

That's what strikes me the most. I think there's plenty of reason for depression if you pay attention to the world, but she's focused on things that don't really matter in the grand scheme. So the US takes a fall, so what? The Soviet Union did and the world went on. The United States could follow suit and the world would go on. I would not want that, but it would not be the end of civilization.

Unlike Noonan, who regrets that she can't back up her funk with numbers and data and has only hunches, my depression is backed up by the simple arithmetic of steady growth and its exponential implications (which are right there for anybody to see if they pay attention).

You're right Peggy. We're almost certainly fucked, but your blues-triggers are for nothing in comparison with the consequences of exponentiation against limits (to which you and your economist/capitalist/religionist ilk are blind).