earth-planet, universe

Quote of the day

2011-09-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

From popsci.com (emphasis added):

"The US Army [is imbuing its drones] with the ability to recognize you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporize you with a hellfire missile."

Well, with friends like that I'd be better off dead anyway!

Basic math for journalists

2011-09-07T22:03:00.001-07:00

When I first heard about the proposal to reduce the business tax rate “by 10 percent” when this was intended to report a business tax change from 35 percent to 25 percent, I started writing letters to the offending journalists at some of the largest news organizations. Apparently I was not understood, because my correction was ignored by all.

You’re not thinking clearly if you think that this change is a “10% reduction” in business taxes.

For example, assume that $100 is taxable, and the rate is changing from 35% to 25%...

35% tax on $100 = $35.00

25% tax on $100 = $25.00

$10 tax saved = 29% of the $35 original tax

Thus, the total tax in dollars is fully 29% less than it was originally; therefore business in this example will not be saving just 10% but will actually be saving nearly 3-times as much, a very significant difference!

This is the math that should also be applied to such things as sales tax increases. These are often presented as a “half-percent increase” going from 8.0% to 8.5% but going from 8¢ per dollar to 8.5¢ per dollar paid in taxes is actually more than a 6% increase in taxes paid, NOT 0.5% as implied.

I have nothing against paying taxes, since I believe in paying for the goods and services needed for a functional society, but I do think we should understand the math, and should understand the magnitude of changes that are to be made. Would the average person agree to a ~30% tax cut for business as readily as they would agree to a 10% cut? Shouldn't we all clearly understand exactly what is being proposed?

Watching it in slo-mo...

2011-03-27T00:26:00.000-07:00

- modified from http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling

"Tokyo Electric Power Co. spokesman Takashi Kurita told reporters Sunday that leaked water in Unit 2 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant measured at 1,000 millisieverts per hour." - sfgate.com

U.S. nuke workers are allowed exposure of 50 mSv/year, or, 1/20th of what is being emitted each hour from water leaked from Reactor 2.

Therefore, U.S. nuke workers would be limited to total of 3 minutes of work per year in an environment this contaminated.

Because of the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant crisis, Japan's (far poorer) standard for nuke workers has been raised from 100 mSv/year to 250 mSv/year, so Japan's nuke workers should be allowed to work for no more than a total of 15 minutes per year in an environment this contaminated.

15 minutes to get in, work, get out will not allow much work to get done, and they will need to "burn through" a LOT of underpaid, poorly-trained, and ill-equipped temp workers to accomplish anything.

When will someone admit that a full-on catastrophe of Chernobyl-esque magnitude is unfolding?

Evacuations, plumes, and pills, oh my...

2011-03-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

- screen capture, live-streamed NHK-TV, 12:04PDT, 16MAR2011; reactor numbers added, and contrast enhanced

A high-level American official, the Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recommends expanding the Fukushima nuclear disaster's evacuation area to a 50-mile radius, or ~3900 square miles (area of circle divided by 2, to include only land area):

"Mr. Jaczko’s testimony came as the American Embassy in Tokyo, on advice from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Americans to evacuate a radius of 'approximately 50 miles from the Fukushima plant' and that 'the commission believed that all the water in the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station had boiled dry, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation.' As a result, he said, 'We believe that radiation levels are extremely high...'"
- New York Times

When this disaster first began, there was a map of projected nuclear fallout, based on measurements of the Chernobyl plume, at some site that I've forgotten. Interestingly, this map was yanked almost immediately, so it's no longer available, but here's a screen shot:

- screen capture, 18:24PDT, 14MAR2011

I do not vouch for the accuracy of this plume map, and indeed it may be completely bogus as claimed by the government. But, the smoke does have to go somewhere, and if it doesn't reach our homes as smoke particulates, it will bioconcentrate and may end up on our dinner plates instead. The smoke (and smoke to come) may dissipate, but it will not vanish; the radioisotopes being released will do their damage for thousands of years to come. Hopefully for the Japanese, the winds will not shift, because obviously, they are at the greatest risk of all. These winds will rain death; the only question is whose deaths that will be.

- screen capture, live-streamed NHK-TV, 12:06PDT, 16MAR2011

And, a heads-up to those seeking potassium iodide tablets: these may be useful at some point, but not so much for adults. They're more a placebo for most of us. But, check your multi-vitamin container, because you may already be consuming the recommended dose for any applicable catastrophe (150 micrograms, or mcg). It is highly recommended that no one take more than that amount, and no disaster guidelines would recommend taking more. It is certainly not worth wasting your money by buying potassium iodide at inflated prices from disaster-opportunists.

UPDATE 2 - IMPORTANT CORRECTION!

Regarding potassium iodide tablets: There is still not sufficient radioactive iodine reaching California from Japan for anyone to be consuming these tablets.

HOWEVER, I need to correct a big error in what I wrote above, which was based on incorrect information...

The dose of iodine in multi-vitamins is typically 150 mcg, BUT the dose needed for protection in the event of exposure to significant levels of radioactive I-131 is much higher:

The adult dose for such a contamination event would be 130 mg (and 1 mg = 1000 mcg). The dose for children is half or less of what's given to adults.

For complete information, please see the CDC's guidelines:

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp

UPDATE - A map of the travel of a theoretical radioactive plume emitted from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station in Japan, from New York Times, based on data from Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, assuming the weather of this week:

- composite image of 24-hour intervals from the interactive feature provided by the New York Times, with the addition of elapsed time in hours

The model assumes a radioactive source in the middle range, of 0.1-1.0 baseline (without units), to illustrate the logarithmic reduction of intensity over time and distance. For the hypothetical emission of 1 unit, about 1/100 of that intensity would reach California in about six days, according to this model. The model stops at six days, so no further extrapolation can be made. This model does lend credence to the other plume illustration, shown above.

Don't we wish...

2011-03-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

- (unmodified) photo taken at Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant, California, ca. 1978

Well, this is one way for humanity to learn...

2011-03-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

- Reactor buildings #3 and #4 at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station; image captured from live-streamed newscast, 21:10 PDT 15MAR2011, NHK World (contrast and brightness enhanced)

This photo of two of the six crippled nuclear power reactors was shared by a Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) executive, shortly after the announcement that the remaining 50 workers at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan had been evacuated, due to "spiking" radiation levels. [LATER: Workers are being "allowed" back into the site now.]

Among the six reactors, TEPCO remains unable to maintain coolant levels in most of the reactor vessels, and in some the spent fuel storage vessels (located in the "attics" of the reactor containment buildings).

There have been fires and explosions and some of the reactor vessels are assumed by TEPCO to be breached. Cesium-137 and Iodine-131 have been detected in the surrounding atmosphere, supporting the breach assumption.

The roofs of several of the buildings have been blown off, leaving the spent fuel storage vessels exposed to the environment. Spent fuel rods, and fuel rods contained within the reactors, have been left uncovered by coolant and exposed to air for varying periods on the order of hours to days. Temperatures of the fuel, spent and otherwise, is climbing, and at least several of the reactors are assumed by TEPCO to be have already begun experiencing "partial melt-downs."

The Prime Minister of Japan has stated that radiation is leaking from four of the six reactors. An area of roughly 250 square miles (area within 20 km radius, halved) with about 140,000 inhabitants according to NHK-TV has been evacuated, and an additional 300 square miles (the band between 20 and 30 km from the plant, halved) has been issued a shelter-in-place order.

Most nuclear agencies regard the evolving situation as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a Level 6 incident (with Three Mile Island being a 5 and Chernobyl being a 7) and expect it to worsen. Major aftershocks continue to be experienced throughout Japan, both on- and offshore (the second variety making another tsunami possible).

Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen said on CNN today that TEPCO has been trying to deal with decay heat of the spent fuel rods, but that without a supply of cooling water, the spent fuel pool could go into a criticality, a chain reaction, making the situation far worse. "It can boil dry in a day." Then "the fuel catches fire, the steel--the zirc-alloy--begins to burn and the [radioactive fuel within] volatilizes and becomes an aerosol, becomes airborne."

One source said that there are 600,000 pounds of spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station, and another report stated that some or all of the buildings are too radioactive for people to enter.

The workers at this site deserve medals, but I have little confidence that they will accomplish their goal of stabilizing the situation. This may well turn into an all-new nuclear "experiment," the likes of which we've never before seen, or even imagined. The stuff of nightmares.

What’s WRONG with this picture?

2011-03-07T16:43:00.000-08:00

What’s WRONG with this picture?

Well, since he misrepresented his platform during his campaign, I guess it’s IN character for Republican Walker to launch a site of his own for the folks who are looking for the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s site (wisdems.org).

All the more reason to go to wisdems.org to donate whatever you can to the effort to recall eight Wisconsin Republican Senators...

Democrat ASSASSINATED in Arizona

2011-01-08T11:45:00.000-08:00

Who's next, Sarah?

All we need to know...

2010-12-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

...about the Obama-McConnell pact:

"Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, tells National Review Online that a tentative tax deal between President Obama and the GOP is “a much bigger victory than people see” for the Republicans." (emphasis added)

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/254638/norquist-tax-deal-andrew-stiles

Since Mr. Norquist's overriding goal has always been to "starve" the government, in order to force it to obliterate all social safety nets, and since this Obama-McConnell deal includes a partial defunding of Social Security (by lowering FICA from 6.2% of wages up to $106k, to 4.2%) in the face of the already-declared underfunded status of Social Security due to arrive sometime in the next 20-30 years, it is pretty obvious where this pact will take us, if it passes.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no defense for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy for which the original justification was our post-Clinton budget surplus, something that's only a distant memory now. These tax cuts will add to the deficit for no purpose, except as a bargaining chip for the unemployment extension? Sorry, no.

Make the Republicans come out and declare that, against the Democrats' intentions, the Republicans are intent upon throwing these unemployed people under the bus (along with the 99-ers who wouldn't be helped anyway). Make it blindingly obvious who their enemies are! Don't bargain away the future of the country in order to avoid this confrontation! Bundling these two things together is genius on the part of the Republicans, and an utter blunder on the part of Mr. Obama.

This is NOT a case of "the perfect being an enemy of the good"--this is a deal that is flawed at its very core. This Obama tax cut deal trades the "hostage" of 1 million unemployed (for just one year) for a HOSTAGE of our entire country's long-term economic future, making everyone worse off in the long run (except perhaps for the grotesquely wealthy, but even they need to live in a functioning country)!

Let all the Bush tax cuts expire--the cost to those of us at the bottom is trivial in comparison to what it will cost the country to let them ride!

Fight to extend benefits to ALL of the unemployed, but this should include the start up of a WPA-like jobs program, so that we get something for our money!

Strengthen Social Security by raising the cap!

And get us out of ALL of our misbegotten military adventures!

That's a pact I could get behind.

Unsubscribe

2010-12-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

http://my.barackobama.com/page/unsubscribe/

Well, that is the last straw. President Obama has made an unconscionable deal with the Republicans by supporting the extension of ALL of the Bush tax cuts, that will finish the job of "starving the beast" once and for all. Although the support for the original tax cuts derived from there being a budget surplus, that is obviously no longer the case. We can't afford to continue this drain on the Treasury, but since the Republicans know how to blackmail this Administration, that is what will come to pass.

Why does Mr. Obama always give away the store before negotiations even begin?

Why does Mr. Obama think that the rich need such a hand-out?

All of the polls state that the majority would prefer that ALL the tax cuts expire, rather than extend this give-away to the rich, even though it would mean these mostly lower-to-middle class folks (including me) would also have to give up their tax cuts. Who are the real patriots? Who really cares about the future of this country?

I am done with modern "Democrats" if all it means is lip-service to the middle class and poor, while the Republicans get everything they want, and BOTH parties are in place only to serve the wealthy and the transnational (AKA: unAmerican) corporations.

Unsubscribe me, now, in all meanings of the word.

I mourn for my country, and I regret my previous enthusiastic support for President Obama's candidacy. The only thing I have learned is that I must never again trust anything ANY politician says, ever. I deeply regret my naiveté.

Fatal error

2010-06-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

Oops. We killed it. All of it. That is the short version of the BP disaster.

The long version is that they chose to drill deep into the earth, starting a mile under the ocean, without having any back-up plan whatsoever for the event of a catastrophic failure of their equipment or methods. No back-up plan whatsoever, no effective back-up plan in existence, and they did not even choose to use the best available accident-prevention technology that is required to be used in other places, such as in the off-shore waters Brazil and Norway. To save a few bucks ($500,000), BP chose not to install remote-controlled or acoustic-controlled triggers for their ill-fated blow-out preventer. Although this might not have worked either, at least they could then have claimed to be using “best available” technology.

The real question is: Why is such deepwater drilling even allowed, when the catastrophic failure potential is so catastrophic, when there are no effective remedies to mitigate such failures?

BP’s main response to this grotesque debacle of their own creation has been the application of huge quantities of “dispersants” to the monstrous plume of crude, and I would conclude that their motivation in doing this is only to mask the full extent of the “spill” (a word that is vastly too miniscule for use in this context).

Why would we want to “disperse” the plume to cover an even greater area anyway? This just magnifies the extent of the clean-up that must be done, and breaking up the crude oil just makes it more likely to be consumed by wildlife at all depths. The dispersant itself is toxic too, so why would we choose to make the situation even worse? The widespread assumption seems to be that “dispersants” are a good thing, but all they really accomplish is to make the situation look better to overflights.

The figure of 40% has been widely used in news reports as the reduction to the US seafood harvest as a direct and immediate result of this spill. But that is only the beginning. As the oil kills the vegetation on the barrier islands (and any living creatures so unlucky as to be living there), the barrier islands will erode, i.e., disappear forever. As the barrier islands disappear, so will the coastline of the continent be hit. As the coastline marshes disappear due to the death of their vegetation, and erosion ensues, the coastal areas will have lost their main defense against storms, and even more damage (and oil contamination, and vegetation death, and erosion) will take place.

Ocean creatures over a huge expanse will disappear, even those who normally spend only small parts of their lives in the Gulf during seasonal migrations. Birds, mammals, fish, invertebrates, plankton, protists, plants—every living thing will disappear from these vast expanses of ocean and coastal waters, and with them will go the intricate food webs and normal oxygen production. This is a dead zone that will last for decades, and that will have a vast reach, and that cannot be effectively remediated by humans, no matter how we may wish otherwise. We can, however, make it a lot worse; for that we only need to use dispersants by the hundreds of thousands of gallons, as we are presently doing.

BP has made a fatal error (actually a string of fatal errors). Their actions directly caused the immediate deaths of 11 rig workers, and serious injuries to 17 rig workers (probably severely burned, but where is this ever noted in the news reports?), and toxic exposures to clean-up workers, and uncountable wildlife deaths, and BP has killed a large proportion of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the coastlines of at least three states. BP made this final fatal error based solely on their desire to maximize cost-savings—by ignoring the warnings of rig workers who noted problems with the capping process, and by doing the underwater well technology on the cheap by omitting the acoustic- or remote-controlled triggers for their blow-out preventer (and who knows how many other short-cuts they took along the way).

In making these choices, BP has created a Pandora’s Box situation, where in their efforts to access the riches within, they now cannot get the lid back on no matter how hard they try. BP has loosed death on a incomprehensibly massive scale onto the Gulf, and while this will cost them a pretty penny now, their cost pales in comparison the what the rest of us, and the sea life, and the coastal regions, and the biosphere itself will have to pony up.

Will we learn anything at all from this? Will we learn that some technologies are too big to be allowed to fail, and therefore cannot be used, ever? That is the most doubtful outcome of all, as humanity seems to be hell-bent on rushing headlong to its own demise.

Humanity’s greatest asset, supposedly, is the frontal lobe in our collective cranium, the mass of intertwined neurons that allows us to speculate in any situation: “and then what?” So why is no one in charge of such technologies using this, our unique and immensely valuable talent? Could it be that the structure of corporations simply does not allow it? That the immediate bottom line trumps all else, just like in the “decisions” to be made by a cancerous tumor? The corporation says “I want it all now” and its minions have no choice but to obey or be destroyed.

Indeed, we have created a monster in these amoral corporations, and the monster cares not a whit about life—not ours, not the pelican’s or turtle’s or dolphin’s, not the ocean’s, not the planet's, not even its own life; its only directive is to grow, and consume, and grow, and consume, and grow…ad nauseum…ad infinitum…and so we reap the whirlwind.
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Photo: Charlie Riedel/AP

“Making Work Pay”

2010-02-21T14:01:00.000-08:00

How many moderate-income people (like me) overlooked the fact that the “stimulus” payments they’ve already received, in the form of reduced payroll tax withholding taken from their paychecks since last Spring, will be yanked back out of their wallets unless they are sufficiently alert and astute to file a Schedule M with their 1040 or 1040A tax return?

How much in labor will it cost the IRS to deal with the inevitable 1040X amended returns that will be filed?

Will the IRS ever get a technical writer with the ability to accurately describe such things in their booklets? When I glanced at the “what’s new” section, I had the impression that I had already received my “Making Work Pay” stimulus, and I had no idea that by writing my check to IRS, I was simply giving it all back!

So, crank up the computer and spend an hour on the 1040X + Schedule M, and you’ll receive $400 for your hour of more tax-filing hell (or, $800 for couples): time well-spent (or, Make-Work that Pays)!

Personally, I would prefer a simpler or at least, more transparent, method of being stimulated. Of the college grads I’ve surveyed, not one spotted this issue during their tax-filing ordeal. But of course, we have the chutzpah to believe that being educated folk, we should be able to manage our “simple” tax situations of no itemized deductions.

Don’t get me wrong: I fully support paying taxes, and even believe that I receive a large return for my payments. But, I do believe that a person of average intelligence and literacy ought to be able to fill out an error-free “simple” tax return without great effort. Unless, that is, part of the program is to support full employment of tax specialists…

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(Image: modified from alviman)

The day after

2010-01-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

Hopefully, Coakley’s loss in the MA election might wake up the present-day “Democratic” Party to the reality that, as President Truman said, when given the choice between genuine Republicans and Republicans-in-Democratic-clothing, the voters will usually choose the genuine article.

The Democrats and the Obama administration had better wake up to the fact that people are sick of the focus on the “needs” of corporations, that we demand some policies that will benefit US, not the bankers and corporations. We see the ginormous piles of tax money going to the bankers and their bonuses, while we, our neighbors, our friends, our relatives are losing their homes, their jobs, and going bankrupt or dying due to no health care. Even those who are not following politics clearly understand that the “little people” are being screwed, while the elites just keep gaining all the more. There is an undercurrent of anger that had better be understood and addressed, or there will be hell to pay, even by those in their walled enclaves and flying on their private jets. The MA election is only the beginning.

The Obama administration is run by Rahm Emmanual and other corporate minions/apologists, and their INTENT is to gut the Democratic party’s platforms and redirect the resources of this country to the corporations. I had hope that Obama would be strong enough to resist this inevitable pull, but I’m not that surprised that he has failed. It’s a superhuman task, really.

Maybe now that the Senate Dems don't have their bare-60 supermajority, they’ll learn how to govern like the Republicans always have. The Republicans have not had 60 Senators since ~1923, but they sure managed to ram some legislation through. I for one am sick unto death of the Senate whining about having to go to the middle to gather along the Liebermans, Nelsons, Snowes, et al., who exist only to obstruct any real democratic reforms being put into place. Let the Democrats LEARN how to GOVERN, just like the Republicans always have; they can review the method by which the Bush tax cuts were rammed through, for starters.

If the Democrats refuse to do this, they need to be outed for the LIARS that they are, because it will prove that they never had any interest in pressing for reform, but only in maintaining their job titles. It is about time that they start to show some COURAGE and PRINCIPLES, and that goes for all of them: Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the entire House and Senate. If they prefer not to do so, they should get the hell out of the way.

I do not believe that I am alone in this opinion.

No doubt left (if there ever was any)...

2009-11-11T21:33:00.000-08:00

From the beginning of the globalization frenzy, some of us have been saying that it is nothing more, or less, than a race to the bottom, in terms of wages paid to workers.

Some of us have understood from the beginning that the entire point of all the trade agreements that have been struck has been to reduce the wages paid to American workers, something that business would laud as an increase in efficiency.

Some of us have understood from the beginning that business interests in America have as their primary goal the depression of wages paid to American workers, and view with admiration the kinds of worker oppression seen in other countries—with forced labor only distinguishable as a matter of degree.

Some of us have always understood that if business could get away with paying their workers a bowl of rice a day as payment in full for their labor, as a kind of indentured servitude for the privilege of eating anything at all, that this would be seen as an ideal situation: cheap (nearly free) labor AND a bowed and broken “citizenry”—a real two-fer!

But rarely has it been so brazenly elucidated as it was in today’s New York Times, in American Wages Out of Balance:

“American workers are overpaid, relative to equally productive employees elsewhere doing the same work.”

“The global wage gap has been narrowing, but recent labor market statistics in the United States suggest the adjustment has not gone far enough.”

“the recession shows that many workers are paid more than they’re worth”

“It’s possible to run the numbers to show that American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance.”

When will they admit that this was the goal all along, to depress American wages to the level of those in so-called Third World nations? Or don’t they think we care (or remember) anymore? (Bill Clinton, I’m talking to YOU!)

Any wage-earner who still believes that anyone has their interests first and foremost is sadly deluded. We “little people” are nothing but toast now, as the real players drink deep of their champagne while plotting their next moves. And make no mistake: we are of no consequence; it really is all about them.

By them I mean: those who are calling all the money shots, via their purchased toady politicians; those who would refuse to institute single-payer healthcare for all and who see nothing wrong with making people die for lack of healthcare; those who have been ceaselessly trying to destroy all social safety nets like pensions, Social Security, and unemployment insurance; those who want to “starve the government” of tax revenues, but then suck up all the remaining tax revenues by threatening to otherwise take down the economy with their “too big to fail” gambling enterprises. They will not rest until they bring every one of us to ruin and can scrape up our remains.

The sociopaths are in charge now.

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(Image: modified from sideshowmom)

We’re #37...

2009-09-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

h/t Oliver Willis

You’re invited...

2009-07-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

...to celebrate Independence Day with an old-fashioned (and FREE) band concert in the park, 1:00 - 3:00:

Come enjoy Oakland Munipal Band’s first concert of their 99th season, in the beautiful bandstand by the lake. Guaranteed to make you smile, and maybe you’ll even have to get up and dance.

Bring a low chair or blanket, and a picnic, and the kids (but no dogs are allowed in the park).

Tortured hypocrisy

2009-05-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

President GW Bush:

“War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished, and it will be no defense to say ‘I was just following orders...’ ”

Unless, of course, you were following his orders...

h/t Jonathan Turley

Obstruction of justice at the highest level; the torturers were “just following orders”…

2009-04-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

In modern America, the penalties for swiping a candy bar, or accidentally runnning a red light, are more severe than the penalty for killing a so-called “enemy combatant” prisoner with active torture, or by deliberately baking that prisoner to death in a shipping container in the sunny desert, should you be “ordered” to do so by your bosses. It’s also apparently perfectly OK to order others to do these acts under cover of your authority, words contrived and written by men blinded by obeisance, and then put into motion by the morally lazy (although there is some indication that Spain’s judiciary doesn’t quite agree).

President Obama has made a frightfully immoral error by declaring that we can simply move on from our torturing past, with no accountability, and that all the torturers and their bosses should escape the consequences of their willful actions done in violation of international treaties and laws (not to mention the most basic of moral standards).

Obama: “…those who carried out their duties (sic) relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice […] will not be subject to prosecution [because there is] nothing [to] be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

Well then, why on earth are we wasting so much “time and energy” trying to ship an 89-year old man, John (Ivan) Demjanjuk back to Munich to answer for his WWII “carrying out of his duties”? Shouldn’t we just let bygones be bygones for his long-ago past too?

Obama: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.”

Prosecution for crimes committed is not “retribution”! Do not minimize my opposition to your path as “strong views and emotions”! I am motivated only by my respect for law and my pragmatic notion that laws are meaningless when enforcement is selective, and that such enforcement selectivity creates a tyranny of the worst sort.

Obama: “Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence.”

NO, you have it completely WRONG! Our greatness as a nation is incumbent upon our determination to BE a nation of laws, a nation that operates under the “RULE OF LAW,” which specifically “provides that decisions should be made by the application of […] laws without the intervention of discretion in their application” (Black's Law Dictionary, 1979).

This declaration by President Obama against prosecuting for known crimes harks back to those sorriest of days of the Bush administration, when Bush cited the supposed principle of “unitary executive” power, saying in a signing statement (to McCain’s 2005 torture amendment) that he believed his own adherance to the rule of law to be optional, and that he had the right to ignore laws and treaties at will:

“The executive branch shall construe [the provision] relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President ... of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

James Madison wrote:

“If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty...”

It would indeed be ironic if impeachment proceedings were brought against President Obama for the crimes committed by the Bush administration, simply because President Obama chose to “shelter” those lawbreakers from prosecution.

Bleeding us dry

2009-04-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

“Annuit cœptis”? Not when it comes to usurious interest rates.

Although it is difficult to keep up with (or make sense of) our current financial morass, every so often a beacon of light can illuminate the crux of the issue. For me, that was the recent Harper’s Magazine piece, “Infinite Debt,” by Thomas Geoghegan. His premise is very simple: the whole mess was caused by unregulated interest rates.

As he notes, the profit potential this change generated drew all investment away from manufacturing and into the financial “services” industry, and the money just poured in, from all over the world, because everyone wanted in on a good thing. There was more money than anyone knew what to do with, and thus, the exotic paper was issued, betting on bets that bet on other bets, snowballing to more than $600 trillion in “investments”--a bubble to beat all bubbles, based on nothing but air, and really, a Ponzi scheme to beat all Ponzi schemes (although Geoghegan does not define it so).

It is only the unregulated interest rates that led investors to demand high year-after-year returns on their deposits, and the only place to find those returns was in the banking industry, so manufacturing (and the jobs and towns it sustains) was bled dry. This accounts for the declining real income of wage-earners, who then turned to credit in order to cover living expenses, and who were also subjected to the high interest rates charged by banks (in spite of the lowest Federal Reserve interest rates in history).

I recently let a small balance remain on a credit card for a couple months, as the card has its minimum payment made automatically and I hadn’t gotten around to paying it off, and the interest rate was not horrendous (13.24%). With an excellent credit rating and almost no debt, I recently received a fine-print letter from the bank (Chase) telling me that the interest rate would rise in a month, “in response to market conditions and to maintain profitability on your account.” Boom! I immediately sent payment in full, plus a slight overage, to force them to issue a credit statement monthly for the next six months. No more “profitability” for you!

It’s pretty obvious that the banks are killing us. They are sapping every dime from regular people (in the form of credit card interest and lost wages and rip-off mortgage schemes), and they are draining the lifeblood from all other industries, and now they’re draining the people’s treasury as well. “Too big to fail”? How about “too big to live”? Banks and the entire financial “services” industry are not being operated in the interest of the people, and it is time for the regulators to address that fact.

Usury is not only a sin, but it is the ruination of any economy where it is allowed to reign.

The only defense the average person has is to do the hard work to eliminate all use of credit from their lives, except for a reasonable mortgage, and if they can’t get a reasonable mortgage, to forego the purchase of a home. To do otherwise is to enslave yourself, to cast yourself into a debtor’s prison of your own making (thanks to the collusion of the banks and the government).

We also need to demand that our representatives re-regulate the banks, but this is a far tougher matter, given their conflicts of interest (lobbyists and campaign contributions) and their general ignorance of the intricacies of the financial industry. A good start would be a cap on consumer interest rates, but it should not stop there. Re-regulation also needs to be applied to the creative rip-off schemes dreamed up by Wall Streeters, and it needs to be made clear that the U.S. Treasury does not exist for the purpose of bailing out losing bettors.

Will any of this happen in my lifetime? Probably not, in the absence of a complete finanacial melt-down, something I dearly hope does not come to pass. For the rest of us, the regular folks who work for our livings, our only response to current events can be to just say no: no more credit-based purchasing, no more feeding the banks, no more get-rich-quick investments. Get out (and stay out) of debt as best you can. The banks are your enemy! For myself, I would rather live in my car than give the banks another dime.

Torture: It’s illegal, it’s immoral, and it does not work.

2009-03-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

(Composite photo; originals from Wikipedia)

Finally, they admit the obvious, that torture is not effective:

“When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

“The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

“In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.”

[...]

“Abu Zubaida’s revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological ‘dirty bomb’ in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports. ‘We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms,’ one former intelligence official said.”

–Washington Post, 29 March 2009

And finally, someone has taken responsibility to uphold the law:

“A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials [John Yoo; Douglas Feith; Jay Bybee; William Haynes II; Alberto Gonzales; David Addington] violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners...

“The [Spanish Court’s] move represents a step toward ascertaining the legal accountability of top Bush administration officials for allegations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the campaign against terrorism. But some American experts said that even if warrants were issued their significance could be more symbolic than practical, and that it was a near certainty that the warrants would not lead to arrests if the officials did not leave the United States.”

[...]

“[Spanish lawyer] Mr. Boye said that lawyers should be held accountable for the effects of their work. Noting that the association he represents includes many lawyers, he said: ‘This is a case from lawyers against lawyers. Our profession does not allow us to misuse our legal knowledge to create a pseudo-legal frame to justify, stimulate and cover up torture.’ ”

–New York Times, 29 March 2009

Bravo, Mr. Boye! But I think you’ve overlooked a couple more perps...

(Can I be the only one to find it wryly amusing that these fellows are effectively exiled to their country?)

Kids these days...

2009-02-23T19:18:00.000-08:00

Presenting…the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela…

Some say we can no longer afford the luxury of music and art in the schools. Some say that kids these days are lazy and unwilling to excel.

I say: give them a chance, and they will show us what they can do. But first, you have to give them the chance.

h/t onegoodmove

Honor before expedience

2009-01-19T19:10:00.000-08:00

Dear President-Elect Obama,

It is unsettling to hear your recent comments regarding the crimes that have been committed by the Bush Administration, with your focus having drifted to a position of moving “forward,” rather than one of addressing the wrongs that have been committed in our names.

Contrary to House Speaker Pelosi’s well-known position, we do not have as an honorable option the choice to forego prosecution for the war crimes that were committed by those in our employ. We are a nation of laws, but if we do not adhere to those laws, and choose not to prosecute violations of those laws, we are mere pretenders, and our Constitution will be as besmirched by our inaction as it has been by the actions of Bush and his minions.

Would any District Attorney seriously address a crime that was committed with the preference, for expedience sake to let it go, to simply move “forward”? The whole suggestion makes a mockery of the Rule of Law, and I dearly hope that your focus will be at least partly on holding those who committed such abominable acts as torture accountable for their actions. We, and the rest of the world, deserve nothing less. “Moving forward” in willful ignorance simply is not an ethical or lawful option.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Homeward bound

2009-01-10T23:54:00.000-08:00

Riding the rails up the coast from LA to Oakland earlier this month, I was surprised to again see dolphins as we neared Carpenteria during lunch, just like last year, as if on cue. The Coast Starlight is a spectacular way to get an overview of the west coast, and a worthwhile trip for the views alone. What a pleasant way to get from here to there...

Heading inland...

People—of all ages—waved as we passed by just as in days past, yet more proof of the continuing magic of trains. (Do they wave at Greyhounds, or jets, or SUVs?)

A view of the front of the train from the middle of the third sleeper:

Highly recommended! Go AMTRAK!

Torture: What now? The “Rule of Law” perhaps?

2009-01-10T15:35:00.000-08:00

I hope that after the inauguration there will be a bit more attention paid to the issue of torture than there is at present.

I dearly hope that the Obama administration will recognize that it is thoroughly unacceptable to simply move on, and ignore the profound criminality of what has gone on during these past Bush-years. We cannot just say that we are a nation of laws, unless we actually enforce those laws, and that means that those responsible must be held to account. Cheney clearly stated on national television that he approved the so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques, an outright admission of his culpability:

Do we as a nation operate under the “Rule of Law” or is it the “Rule of Expedience”? The whole world is watching…

Joy goes around

2008-12-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

h/t: Patrick

Wishing peace and joy to all beings,
Kathleen

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

2008-11-23T13:52:00.000-08:00

How is it that so many missed all the signs, and that so much money is being lost? The signs have been there all along, showing clearly that something is gravely amiss, that all market sectors have been teetering on the unsustainable for years now, and only the delusional could have believed that such an anomalous upward trend could have continued unabated. Apparently, most of us, at least in the US, can count ourselves as delusional.

Below are compiled some telling figures, of the major stock indices and housing prices and wage trends, going back as far as 1965 in some cases. The x-axis is consistent between the figures, so that years can be more easily compared. Can anyone look at this data and seriously contend that they are surprised at what looks to be only the beginning of a catastrophic financial meltdown? My guess is that anyone who is genuinely surprised is probably routinely filling a prescription for Xanax or Ambien or another similar pharmaceutical.

Those of us in California should pay particular attention to the last graph, of housing prices in Japan, and in particular we should note the similarity of Carlifornia's curve to that of Japan's largest cities.

It is what it is. Ignore reality at your peril.

Under the bus she goes...

2008-11-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

She really didn't know that Africa is a continent? Fox News says so, so it must be true, eh?

Music to mark my ballot by...

2008-11-02T17:59:00.001-08:00

V O T E ! ! !

h/t: LJC

[Original video pulled by YouTube; this one is more recently done by same performers - 17Dec2008]

A brief primer on McCain’s role in Keating 5 and the S&L crisis

2008-10-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

Fast-forwarding to the present debacle…on March 25, 2008 McCain recommended [begins at 10:52 in video] even MORE deregulation to address the current subprime meltdown, while his key advisor, Phil Gramm says this is merely a “mental recession”…

Secessionists started our (so far only) Civil War: Who’s the traitor?

2008-10-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

And, she wants to know: What's in it for Alaskans?

Country first? Who are they trying to kid?

Where the $700,000,000,000 will go

2008-10-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

We should be surprised?

2008-10-11T21:48:00.000-07:00

Look at the plot for 37 years, and tell me that recent Wall Street activity and plummeting Dow Jones Industrial Averages should be considered unusual or unexpected, because I sure don't see it that way.

Graphs of "most recent data" are a composite Dow Jones Industrial Averages derived from Wall Street Journal (wsj.com) on October 9, 2008; note that the values on Y-axis are not constant.

Unfit for command

2008-10-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

For a little perspective...

2008-09-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

Original: http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts

Call it what it is

2008-09-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

21st Century Depression

The Greatest. Misappropriation. Ever.

2008-09-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Channeling Sarah Palin

2008-09-20T12:10:00.001-07:00

In Sarah Palin's own words:

Blogging to the choir

2008-09-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

For quite a while, I’ve been thinking about the difference between 2008 and the 1960s in terms of the effectiveness of dissent, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all about the blogging.

In the 1960s, there was a shared discourse, and people made their opinions known far and wide, while in contrast, we now blog amongst ourselves and spend all of our reasoning and argumentation in the nooks and crannies of the internet. For some time now, I’ve been dutifully following the larger blogs, noting the thousands upon thousands of comments that are made, pages and pages of comments that no one in their right mind could possibly read through to completion. Many of these comments are cogent and even brilliant, filled with effective stand-alone arguments, but they’re all tossed out into the aether, scattershot, and for the most part they remain unread, unnoticed. If an argument falls upon no ears, does that argument exist?

Lewis Lapham has suggested that the pretense of democracy in America exists as a pressure-relief valve, because it allows people to believe that they live in a land of self-rule, when in fact, the deck is stacked grotesquely against their favor. I have finally come to believe that blogging, too, functions as a pressure-relief valve, and that the internet is absorbing the vast bulk of public dissent and attention and thought, and that it may therefore be more functionally damaging to our democracy than opium would be.

What does it mean if we pour our best arguments into one of the billions of web pages and they are never read by more than a few people? How is this different from screaming into the wind?

I started blogging because I liked the exercise of crafting clean prose about topics that interest me, and I thought that perhaps others might share some of those interests, but I’ve gradually realized that I’m really just wasting my time, that this is no more than a personal diary that will never have any effect whatsoever. But more importantly, I’ve come to believe that this describes the vast majority of web communication as well.

Simply put: what is the point in adding to the uncountable verbiage out there that says all the right things but into what’s essentially a void? The internet gives the impression that we’re all connected, but in reality that connection is just a circle-jerk. The energy that we put into reading and writing posts and comments is energy that is squandered, energy that’s not directed toward a tangible goal: futility and nothing more.

And that’s the short version of why this blog has been pretty much abandoned. It’s really pretty pointless to continue it.

Best regards,
kathleen

Breathtaking—literally...

2008-07-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

Look what happens when developed nations “help” those in less-developed nations, by providing International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. The authors of the paper that provides the figure and conclusions, above, were careful to eliminate or minimize confounding factors from their analysis, and the results of their study could not be more stark: the peripheral damage of IMF lending practices kills people, kills the most vulnerable in those nations, kills them without mercy.

The IMF is famous for the “conditionalities” they impose on debtor nations, heavy on privatization (especially of utilities and various government functions), demanding strict austerity measures (including reduced social and healthcare spending), market “liberalization” (AKA: increasing exports at the expense of subsistence farming, thus increasing hunger among the poor), apparently with little thought given to just exactly what so much “austerity” does to a person who lives on less than $1000 per year.

Well here are the results for all to see. Desperate countries take desperate measures to obtain needed funds, and in the process, desperate people are killed.

The authors write:

“Both the duration and amount of IMF lending have an estimated dose-response relationship with tuberculosis mortality rates: each additional year of participation in an IMF program was associated with increases in tuberculosis mortality rates by 4.1%, and each 1% increase in IMF lending was associated with increases in tuberculosis mortality rates by 0.9%.”

And it is not merely that destitute countries have higher rates of TB, because they also note that countries that took on non-IMF debt slightly reduced their rates of TB mortality.

In case you think that TB is “just” a problem in poverty-stricken countries, and not an issue for our comfortable selves, be assured that aside from the moral aspects of treating poor people so shabbily, TB will prove to be a public health menace everywhere, as we “incubate” more and more deadly and drug-resistant strains in populations of destitute people. Even if we were to view this in entirely selfish terms, no good can come of policies that lead to increased rates of TB morbidity and mortality: this will surely arrive on our shores too. Here too, though, the poor will be disproportionately affected, so who cares?

Nothing “sweet and fitting” about it...

2008-05-25T17:38:00.001-07:00

From the battlefield, watching others die, and finally dying there himself, Wilfred Owen* issued the correction to Horace**:

“...you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”

Another Memorial Day, and still we are in Iraq with no end in sight. When will we ever learn?
_____________________________
* from “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, 1918
** “Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” Horace, Odes III.ii.13

Image (modified) from wikipedia

The Great Rip-Off

2008-05-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

To understand our economy, you must first understand what has happened to the “middle class,” and what forces have caused it to shrink, and how tenuous a state it has become. One of the best explanations of the big picture is by Elizabeth Warren, whose lecture here is much worth viewing (but you could omit the first five minutes or so, before she takes the podium):

The short version: Warren addresses part of what I’ve said for years—that family income has not risen in tandem with the number of hours spent in the work force, that the lifestyle that once demanded just one full-time worker (often with only a high school education) now requires two full-time workers (usually with at least some college).

I would take this one step further, and note that the real windfall has come to business, which has managed to extract almost double the working hours from the (better-educated) populace, while holding wages down. (Men’s earnings, corrected for inflation, are about level with what they were in 1970.) Not only have they held wages down, but most pensions have been gutted, so if that were included, total compensation has actually declined over those 35 years.

Most tellingly, listen as Warren describes the data of where we are spending our money now, as compared to then, and ponder for a moment what it WILL mean to our society to drive so many into ruin. You may also gain some sympathy for those who find themselves in bankruptcy, which is not usually due to frivolous spending, but to vastly increased fixed costs in the face of a lost job, or family illness, or family rupture, or some combination of two or three of these factors. It’s not a pretty picture, and there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

Again: consider what it will mean for a society that’s accustomed to having a massive middle class, if large numbers of those people enter poverty, and ours becomes a two-class society. A brief study of two-class societies should include the realization that most of them are police states, to one degree or another. Is this really where we want to head?

(h/t for the video to Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber)

Clarification:
If what I've said above appears internally contradictory—that men’s earnings (corrected for inflation) have remained about constant over time, but are insufficient to support a family, even when augmented by women’s earnings—it is because of the way inflation is calculated: it does not include housing costs, healthcare costs, the additional childcare and transportation costs inherent in the second earner leaving the home, and also does not account for the higher tax hit by moving to the next bracket. Warren makes all of this quite clear, but I realized that I could not leave this out of my comments if I wanted them to make sense.

The Ford Pinto as a model for medical care

2008-04-06T18:39:00.000-07:00

Remember when Ford’s Pintos were routinely bursting into flame and exploding as the result of very minor collisions?

Remember the outrage when it was learned that Ford was aware of this problem with the gas tanks of those cars, but that they chose to leave them as-is rather than spend a dollar or two per car?

Remember the disbelief that greeted their explanation that they chose this course because their cost-benefit analysis had shown that it was cheaper for Ford to let some cars explode and pay off those lawsuits, rather than to add a couple of dollars to each of the cars?

Well, welcome to the philosophy of modern medicine.

As a case in point, take look at the immunization policy that has been adopted for determining who should receive shots to prevent shingles…

First, you need to know that shingles is due to a reactivation of chicken pox (Varicella zoster) virus that lays dormant in the roots of your spinal nerves for decades, and then emerges to wreak some degree of havoc on your sensory nerves.

If you’ve had chicken pox, you are at major risk for shingles, and the incidence before age 45 is about 1 of 10 getting the disease for both males and females, and after age 45 it is about 1 of 3 for females, and 1 of 4 for males.

Furthermore, HALF of all shingles cases occur in patients younger than 60.

Overall, you clearly have a very good chance of losing in the shingles lottery.

So, what’s in store for you when it happens? Some people get lucky and just have a few months of intense itching followed by weird pain (for me, it felt like I was being chewed on internally), if they catch it in time and take anti-virals and then either anti-convulsants or anti-depressants (both of which often seem to moderate the symptoms somewhat) but all of these drugs have their own side effects. While I was on the anti-convulsant neurontin for more than a year, I found my thinking got quite muddled and I stopped caring about much at all.

Others, though, lose again, and can experience months of agonizing pain that calls for extreme pain meds (like fentanyl, oxycontin, and morphine), and some can even experience blindness, while others can experience itching so severe that they will scratch through bone:

Even having had shingles (twice!), this kind of itching is beyond my comprehension. But perhaps not for my co-worker, who was one of the unlucky: even on massive pain medication, she spent weeks curled into a fetal position, moaning, crying, begging for relief. More than two years later, she still has symptoms, but at least she was not unlucky for a third time; at least she has escaped the worst of it—having pain that is unremitting for years and even decades—but others are not so lucky, and can have their lives completely ruined by years of unspeakable misery.

And yet, the medical establishment has decided to withhold the newly developed and highly effective shingles vaccine (partially paid for by taxpayers like us) from everyone who is younger than 60. Yes, their recommendation, which is what insurance companies base their reimbursement policies on, is that the vaccine “should” only be given to those over 60. Remember, as noted above, half of those who get shingles are younger than 60 (like me and my co-worker…), so a great many people have been, willy-nilly, sentenced to suffer this preventable atrocious disease!

I can only conclude from my research that this is a choice that was made because the health insurance companies do not want to pay the freight for the costly shingles vaccinations ($180 each) for all of their patients. Medicare will pay for those 65 and over, so this leaves only the 60-64 year old cohort to be paid for by the health insurance companies.

But isn’t the big selling point of HMOs and PPOs the superior preventive care that’s given, so that health care costs can be better managed?

Ah, but there’s the rub: a case of shingles doesn’t cost an insurer very much. A few office visits, a few prescriptions, and that’s it. Sure, the patient may be unable to work for years, may require care from family and friends, and may simply end it all through suicide (not that uncommon an outcome of shingles).

None of this ever shows up on the health insurers’ balance sheets, though, so none of this is of any concern to them. The formidable costs—monetary and otherwise—are borne by the patient, the patient’s family, the employer, other insurers (long term care; disability; SSI), but no harm done to the HMO! Obviously, it is far cheaper for the corporation to withhold needed medicine from its patients than to actively prevent the disease! Econ 101!

Ain’t American health care great!

But wait, there’s more! When the manufacturer tested the vaccine, they noted that its efficacy was greatest in the youngest cohort they tested, and then declined in each succeeding cohort. And the age of their youngest cohort was? 60-69 years old. Merck didn’t even test the vaccine on those younger than 60, for some inscrutable reason that I’d love to know about.

Clearly, if the vaccine was more and more effective in each younger cohort, it’s quite possible that it’s even more effective on the next younger group, 50-59 years old, and maybe even more so in folks younger than that, as suggested by simple extrapolation. Sure, there’s no data showing that such extrapolation is valid, but there’s also no evidence that it’s not valid, so why not find out? This seems to be a case of willful ignorance, the motivation for which I have no clue.

The upshot of all this is that it seems I will be requesting the vaccine on my own dime, something I would recommend for anyone who can afford this course. Yes, I am living proof that lightning—shingles—can strike the same person twice, and I have no desire to try for a third bout. The vaccine is “especially recommended” for those who have already had shingles. So even though I supposedly have “great” insurance, I will be paying for this myself. Yea, those corps really do know what they’re doing! And it ain’t health “care.”

Uh, whoops…

2008-03-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

[h/t: Talking Points Memo]

Cultural dementia

2008-03-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

I was deeply dismayed for many reasons when I first heard the story that Obama campaign operatives had told the Canadians that Obama’s NAFTA stance was “just politics,” just for show. But guess what: the story was just that—a story, with no basis in reality. One more lie among many.

It turns out that, in fact, the actual NAFTA conversation that took place with the Canadians involved not Obama’s, but Clinton’s operatives.

And yet, the story about Obama and the Canadians has entered the realm of received wisdom, even though it is pure fabrication!

Has the Clinton campaign morphed into its own bogeyman, and become their own “vast [whatever]-wing conspiracy”? Is the press so willing to promulgate lies, and simply not bother to correct them (regardless of where fault might fall for the original untruth) that lies are given equal standing with truth?

How can there be a functional democracy when the air is filled with nothing but lies? On what basis can a rational person reach their conclusions and make their choices, if there is no way to distinguish truth from lies?

Being faced with innumerable falsehoods is at least partially the cause of the veritable chaos we find ourselves in, as we try to sort truth from fiction, because with so many lies and new ones being spewed every day, there’s simply not enough time or attention to get to the bottom of all of them.

This, then, is what the Bush administration meant when they claimed that they would “make their own reality”—and they have indeed done just that. What we didn’t realize then was that the reality they intended to make was one in which a steady onslaught of lies meant there was simply no way to discern what’s true and what’s not, and that when this is the case, one is free to say anything at all. Because there is no feasible way in which to sort the bits of truth from the chaff of lies.

Analogously, if crime ramps up beyond a certain point, no amount of policing can restore civil order. In the realm of ideas, this is what has come to pass, and it presages the death of rational discourse.

Clinton has behaved abominably in her responses to such lies: instead of disavowing the falsehoods, she basically smiles and shrugs them off as if to say “believe what you want,” whether about Obama’s supposed secret confabs with the Canadians, or his supposed Muslim beliefs, or his supposed refusal to swear his oath of office on anything but a Koran, or his supposed lack of a “record” as a Senator, etc.: all lies, but no one is denouncing them as the lies that they are. And so, they become truth.

Lies are truth.

Truth is irrelevant.

Repeat.

________

[h/t: Mark Kleiman at Reality Based Community]

One more betrayal (in a long series)…

2008-03-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

Now we learn that the Chinese are poisoning us by implanting lead in our dental work:

“In the U.S., four cases of lead poisoning have been linked to Chinese dental fixtures. A laboratory test revealed that some contained 210 times the acceptable amount of the toxic metal.”

So far, they’re known to be deliberately poisoning:

• pharmaceuticals and OTC drugs
• vitamins
• pottery
• toys and teething rings
• lunchboxes and backpacks and bibs
• cosmetics
• toothpaste
• food
• dental crowns and dentures

The only question I have is: Are there any remaining routes of poison administration that they can exploit?

Dentists who have utilized the cut-rate Chinese crowns and dentures should be identified if they did not pass their cost-savings through this practice on to their patients. If patients and insurance companies were billed at the “usual and customary” rates for these procedures, they were ripped off, and the rest of us need to be protected from such corner-cutting practitioners.

Meanwhile, it appears that all of us need to ascertain the origin of every single product we consume or expose ourselves to, or have implanted within us: where did that pacemaker come from? the hip or knee replacement? the cardiac stent? mouthwash? saline solution? cutlery? contrast media for imaging tests? hypodermic needles? glassware? bubble bath? sutures? plastic food containers? The list is endless.

We have grown accustomed to the safety of many things, but should now we know that EVERYTHING from China is poisoned until proven otherwise.

For now the safest course appears to be:

1. Buy nothing at all other than the essentials.

2. Buy nothing from China, if at all possible.

3. Buy nothing from “dollar” stores, and nothing generic, and nothing that’s likely to be counterfeit.

4. Make what you can (e.g., simple toys, curtains, food from scratch) and withdraw from the culture of consumption.

5. Tell your doctor and dentist that you expect them to use top quality materials on you, and specifically, that you demand they use nothing from China in or on your body.

Generations have gotten by quite nicely without the quantity of goods we now consider somehow essential. Kids and adults had far fewer toys, but enjoyed their bikes and the public library and making up their own games. And always, we need to remember that for every dollar we spend, we are sacrificing our time, because time really is money.

Image modified from:
http://www.wpclipart.com/medical/symbols/

Votes for sale—cheap!

2008-03-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

What is one to make of the fact that the Clinton and Obama campaigns have been donating money to the campaigns of the superdelegates, whose votes will in all likelihood determine the outcome of the Democratic Party's nominating process?

This is how they use our campaign contributions?

This is legal?

This is democracy in America?

No, in actuality, this is a mockery. We have completely lost our way.

And, a bozo legislates…

2008-02-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

Still half asleep while listening to Weekend Edition this morning, I heard a brief mention of California legislation that would allow any and all vehicles full access to freeway HOV (“carpool”) lanes, once the owners pay a carbon offset charge.

Huh? Suddenly I was awake. The absurdities never end. Time to fire up the search engine…and there it was:

“A California state senator is proposing legislation that would let the owners of gas-guzzling vehicles drive in the car pool lane, but the lawmaker doesn't expect it to pass. Sen. Jim Battin, R-La Quinta, says his legislation would let ‘polluting, flashy, fuel-sucking’ vehicles drive in car pool lanes if their owners buy carbon offset credits. In a press release Friday, Battin mocked the state's efforts to reduce global warming.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

The state is about to go bankrupt, and this clown is spending his time, and our time, and the press’s time, to make a mockery of the legislative process and the state’s efforts to reduce pollution and fuel use. Whoa, what a funny dude!!

A madman speaks…

2008-02-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

“I don’t think Americans are concerned if we are [in Iraq] for a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years…”

T E N . . . T H O U S A N D . . . Y E A R S . . .

Just listen to him at 1m20s in…

Oh, and don't miss the “bomb, bomb, bomb…bomb bomb Iran…” songfest elsewhere in the clip…

Some folks are beyond scary. McCain is beyond beyond scary.

“We support the troops.”

2008-02-17T14:47:00.000-08:00

President Bush, in Dec. 2004, told families of servicemembers: “we’re doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones.” LIAR.

Pleas from commanders in Iraq since at least Dec. 2003 for blast-resistant vehicles went unheeded, for years, and this inaction cost the lives of an estimated “621 to 742 Americans.” Obviously, thousands more were more badly injured than they otherwise would have been. No one can tell me that this is how we should “support the troops.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon made great efforts to obtain these same vehicles, for Iraqi troops:

“On Dec. 22, 2004—two weeks after President Bush told families of servicemembers that “we’re doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones”—a U.S. Army general solicited ideas for an armored vehicle for the Iraqis. The Army had an “extreme interest” in getting troops better armor, then-brigadier general Roger Nadeau told a subordinate. [Later] Nadeau clarified his request: ‘What I failed to point out in my first message to you folks is that the US Govt is interested not for US use, but for […] the Iraqi military forces.’ ”

Read the whole gruesome and hideous story at USA Today. Read it and weep.

Who inspects China’s drug exports?

2008-02-17T12:46:00.000-08:00

Nobody.

Invasion by stealth

2008-02-16T21:53:00.000-08:00

Tainted heparin from China, killing unfortunate patients who receive it by injection: it’s just the latest in a long string of poisoned, defective, counterfeit, or otherwise bogus and harmful products from our largest trading “partner.” Lead in kids’ toys and lunchboxes and backpacks and jewelry; date-rape drug in children’s craft kits; lead in ceramic pottery; counterfeit anti-malarial drugs; antifreeze-contaminated toothpaste and cough syrup; melamine-contaminated “food grade” gluten; rotted fish sold as food; expired foods repackaged and sold as fresh; foods laced with carcinogens such as formaldehyde, and cosmetics made from the skin of executed prisoners.

China makes:

• 70-80% of toys sold in U.S

• 70% of world’s penicillin

• 80% of world’s ascorbic acid

• 50% of world’s aspirin

• most of world’s vitamins

Chinese pharmaceuticals such as heparin, polio vaccine, anti-malarial drugs, and others have been found to be counterfeit and/or tainted, and glycerine-containing products like cough syrup and toothpaste have been found contaminated with antifreeze.

Keep in mind that many pharmaceuticals are injected, and also consider how many of us take vitamins every day to help stay healthy. None of these substances are tested before you take them into your body.

What does it mean when, “for a growing number of important food products, China has become virtually the only source in the world”? It means that we have no choice but to trust them to provide us with clean and pure food products, but their track record means that if we do place this trust in them, we are simply fools.

China made U.S. tires cheaper by eliminating a key safety feature which caused the tires to fall apart in use, which caused vehicle wrecks.

Chinese digital picture frames were (and undoubtedly still are) being sold containing extremely malicious viruses that attack computers and steal data once the frames are connected to a computer for the downloading of photos. Where are most (if not all) computers made today? What is being included in those computers from the time of purchase?

China has made it clear that we cannot trust our bodily safety, our physical safety, or our technological safety to their better impulses. What can this be but a stealth assault? How much more effective than terrorism or war would it be to attack one’s enemies through their food supply, their pharmaceuticals, their industrial products, and their information tech devices? First make them stupid, through pernicious drugs and poisons that they purchase and consume voluntarily, and then make them wholly dependent upon you for their manufactured products, and then attack the integrity of their computerized systems of all sorts (and particularly financial), and then you can take them down without much resistance at all. Child’s play.

Are we so stupid, so oblivious, so weakened already that we can’t see what is happening?

“ ‘It is not just that food from China is cheap,’ said William Hubbard, a former associate director of the FDA. ‘For a growing number of important food products, China has become virtually the only source in the world.’ […] So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods.”
- Washington Post, May 20, 2007

Well I think that answers my question.

Why Obama?

2008-02-10T11:26:00.000-08:00

Frank Rich spells it out, putting into words much of my dismay of recent days:

“...you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote ‘is not going to count for anything.’ […]

“Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an ‘arrangement’ if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

“A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment…it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.”

Clinton’s campaign personifies the worst of machine politics, making it impossible for me to trust her to treat the non-machine regular folks like me with fairness and respect. If you like what “free” trade agreements have done to our economy, and if you want a Republican in Democrat’s clothing as your President, and you value ruthlessness in your public servants, and expedience is more important to you than integrity, then Clinton is your candidate.

But if you value forthrightness and courage and fairness to all, not just the moneyed class, and if you are repulsed by backroom deal-making, but want a President who will represent all of our interests and not just those of the favored few, Obama is your candidate.

If Clinton cares about how she is perceived, or would argue that her campaign operatives do not reflect who she is, it is her duty to rein them in, and to demand that their divisive and cut-throat tactics end. Otherwise, she is responsible for all the ugliness that they create, and she must be held to account.

No, nukes are NOT green!

2007-12-01T09:51:00.000-08:00

Please consider signing this petition TODAY!

The House and Senate are finalizing language in the Energy Bill, for a final vote next week. Unbeknownst to most of us (thanks, MSM!) there is a section that provides loan guarantees for the construction of new nuclear power plants...to the tune of $50 billion!

Apparently, an industry that is so risky and unprofitable that it can’t find any financial backers wants us taxpayers to pay for their folly. I can’t say that I’m surprised, but it is disheartening that a Democratic congress would foist this nonsense off on us, with no notice. One more indication of who their masters are, I guess.

Please consider signing a petition for Congress to delete this section from the energy bill, and please consider signing it this weekend. Next week will be too late. An excerpt from the petition:

“The Senate version of the Energy Bill could authorize the Department of Energy to provide virtually unlimited guarantees for backers of new reactors. The industry indicates it wants $25 billion in guarantees for 2008, and another $25 billion for 2009, with untold billions more to come after that.

“The industry wants these subsidies because after fifty years, atomic power has been rejected by the marketplace. The first commercial nuclear reactor opened in 1957. But after fifty years of proven failure, Wall Street will not independently invest in more of them, and still no private insurance company will underwrite the possibility of a major reactor disaster.”

You will, you will...eat this...

2007-11-28T21:18:00.000-08:00

So, now they’re planning to put GMO sugar into the market without any labeling to identify it as GMO, saying:

“ ‘Basically, we have not run into resistance,’ said David Berg, president of American Crystal Sugar, the nation’s largest sugar beet processor. ‘We really think that consumer attitudes have come to accept food from biotechnology.’ ”

Well, Mr. Berg, how can a consumer even act on any resistance they might have to purchasing your GMO crap, if you are not even honest enough to LABEL it as such?

“A Kellogg spokeswoman, Kris Charles, said her company ‘would not have any issues’ buying such sugar for products sold in the United States, where she said ‘most consumers are not concerned about biotech.’ ”

Basically, the food industry does not give a damn about what customers want. The sole intent is to eliminate all choices the consumer might have regarding GMO, organic, whatever. Why? Because the food industry does not think we have the right to spend our money as we wish, eat what we’d like, make our own decisions for ourselves. No, their arguments mostly boil down to consumers being too stupid to make such choices on their own, so the food industry should just dictate from on high that we WILL eat whatever they decide to feed us.

The chutzpah is mind-boggling. If this GMO stuff you’re trying to foist off on us is so great, why not sell it to us on its merits? Tell us the truth, price it appropriately, and let us vote with our dollars. But of course, the food industry has no interest in doing any such thing. Instead, they want to hide their GMOs in UNlabeled products. We’re supposed to just trust them. Because, of course, THEY are sure that they know better than we do! What brazen imperious deceit!

Rescued from the memory hole

2007-11-10T23:12:00.000-08:00

25 April 1960
From: Allen Dulles, Director of CIA
To: J. Edgar Hoover, Director of FBI
In Re: Torture

How is it that we have forgotten this fundamental truth?

Pogo was right.

Howling Bells: best musical surprise of 2007

2007-11-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

I don’t remember how I happened to stumble across this album, but even at $30 import price, it’s worth every cent. Original, well-crafted, and what a voice! You can try it out at http://howlingbells.com/

No spine, no principles, no integrity

2007-11-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

Senators Feinstein and Schumer have today demonstrated that the Democrats are lazy and/or have no guts, and that there is apparently nothing for which they are willing to go to battle.

Torture? ‘Ho hum,’ these Dems apparently believe.

By throwing their support to the Mukasey nomination, they are telling us that it’s OK to have another Gonzales as Attorney General. It’s OK to have another moral relativist and supporter of torture in charge of seeing that this country follows the rule of law. Or not. And most assuredly, the answer is ‘not.’

Mr. Mukasey either LIED to the Senate Judiciary Committee, or proved that he is completely INEPT, when he professed ignorance regarding the specifics of waterboarding as a method of “enhanced interrogation” as the Bush administration likes to call it. Which alternative do we prefer? Speaking for myself, I say none of the above!

And then, listening to Mukasey dance around the question about whether the President has the authority to order any and all acts, legal and illegal, simply on the basis of his authority: my God, what an obfsucator this man is! Which, of course, is exactly his qualification for being chosen by Bush, i.e., no surprise there.

No, in this matter it is the Democrats who disgust me. Spineless, heartless, with no moral center. Is there ANYTHING at all that will make them stand up to Bush riding roughshod over everything this country stands for?

For a while there, it looked like they were going to hold Mukasey’s feet to the fire, and force him to either state that waterboarding IS torture, and ipso facto, Bush is a war criminal; or, declare that waterboarding is NOT torture and demonstrate that he is unsuited for the position by his disrespect for the rule of law. A no-win situation for the poor guy, obviously, but surely he knew what he was wading into.

And surely the Dems also realized that if they persisted and Mukasey declared unequivocally that waterboading is torture, the Dems would then be obligated to follow through and begin impeachment proceedings, something they clearly would prefer to avoid, albeit for unfathomable reasons.

Is there a single politician out there who is willing to fight for what is right? SO DAMN WHAT if they don’t have the 60 votes they “need” for this and every single other vote that they already have or will in the future cave on? Does that mean they give up without even trying? Have they ever considered the filibuster? Do they really think that the way the game is played in Washington is to make nice, always make nice, be polite, and hope that they’re teaching the opposition by example what decorum is? They may think this, but many of us see them for what they really are: a pathetic joke.

If they’re going to roll over before the fight even starts, why should we put them in office as our proxies? I have never been closer to simply throwing in the towel and acknowledging that whole ugly thing is hopeless, that our country is done for, that there is nothing that can be done to save it.

Democrats: I am sick of your empty promises. You were elected you on a specific platform, and you have obviously sold us a bill of goods, because on item after item, you have simply rolled over. There really is no opposition party anymore. This is the last straw (of many) for Feinstein: I will never vote for her again, under any circumstances.

What breathtaking betrayal can we expect next from this crowd?

Suffering fools

2007-10-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

“Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, was tortured by the KGB as a young man [and described] losing the will to resist when deprived of sleep…‘In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.’ ”

- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3376951.stm

“Mr. Giuliani said: ‘Well, I’m not sure [waterboarding is torture] either… It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. [The] Democrats…talk about sleep deprivation. I mean, on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly. That’s silly.’ ’’

- http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/in-his-own-words-giuliani-on-torture/

I am profoundly sick of politicians bloviating about the inconsequentiality of various forms of torture. But Mr. Giuliani takes the prize when he says defining waterboarding as torture “depends on who does it” and when in all seriousness he compares his experience on the campaign trail with that of prisoners deprived of sleep for days on end. What’s “silly,” Mr. Giuliani, is that anyone on earth takes you at all seriously.

Politicians believing that they can be all things to all people apparently also believe that such moral relativism applies to behaviors long ago defined as torture, brutality and inhumanity. Those of us who persist in resisting our extrication from “reality-based” daily life, and its delineation of wrong versus right, have tremendous difficulty even intellectually engaging the ideas of people like Mr. Giuliani. How on earth can one logically respond to delusional rhetoric? Where does one begin? Isn’t any discussion predicated on first abating such complete and utter irrationality?

Maybe* we should arrange a field study for Mr. Giuliani and his politico pals, in which they can experience these self-defined not-really-torture techniques first-hand, since they’ve repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot comprehend what’s involved through the mere verbal description of Mr. McCain. No, I think we need to set up a torture demonstration center on Capitol Hill, so they can all absorb the full flavor of waterboarding, stress postions, sleep deprivation, relentless loud noise, and all the rest, and see how long they can tolerate it before crying “Uncle,” as in Sam. Or maybe we could get even more creative, and “compel” them to give false testimony, such as “I will never accept any money from special interests.” Now that could be interesting…

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniques
_____________________________________
* No, I am not advocating this, other than as a thought experiment. I cannot and will never condone torture, of anyone, not even of the practitioners of torture.

Scariest. Jack-o’-lantern. Ever.

2007-10-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

On newsstands now.

When will we ever learn?

2007-10-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

4.4 % = 1,220,580

2007-09-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

Dead. 1,220,580 dead Iraqis, that is.

This is according to a poll done last month by the British polling organization, O.R.B.

Think about it: Iraq’s population in 2007 is listed as 27,499,638 by CIA World Factbook. One in every 23 people: dead.

In America, the 2006 population was listed as 299,398,484 so if we had a similar death rate here, we would have more than 13 million dead! (13,173,533—unimaginable in its horror!)

Another 4.2 million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees (2.2 million in other countries, mostly Syria and Jordan). Thus, 19.7% of Iraq’s population is either dead, or homeless. Again, a similar rate for America would mean 58,981,501 either dead or displaced: can you imagine?

Obscene beyond imagining, all the direct result of the sheer idiocy and audacity of our leaders. We, and they, should be very ashamed. We had no right and no reason to go to Iraq, and our continued occupation merely guarantees their continued suffering and ever more death and displacement.

But still, our lying President will not admit to any error, but only wants more to die as he lives out his little-boy fantasies, and more dead and more dead and more dead, for his war without reason, his war without purpose, his war without end.

War for the sake of war: evil beyond measure.

Why we’re in Iraq

2007-09-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

That’s right, our proxies are on the ground fighting, killing, losing limbs, and dying for us, so that we can, like little children, get our jollies playing with fire:

Are we juvenile nitwits or what?

(photo and caption: sfgate.com)

Choose one

2007-08-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

In case you are having trouble deciding which candidate for president most suits you, there is a really easy way to find out. You just might be surprised at which candidate this position quiz matches up to your own position, and how the others shake out as well…

For my top candidates, only the positions I disagree with are listed. Rankings are based on my support or opposition of the various positions, and whether I rank them as "Key" or "Important," and the scale runs from +100 to -100 (I think).

The overall data of all respondents is also provided, and various graphs of responses from 115,662 respondents so far are also quite illuminating.

Posted without comment

2007-08-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

The trouble with regulations…

2007-07-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

…is that they rely on assumptions, so regulations can only be as effective as their assumptions are accurate.

Regulations are also mired in verbosity and jargon, and steeped in complexity, making them nearly unapproachable by the average person. And yet, regulations are all that stand between us and the harm that comes from poisoning our air, food, and water. We have little choice but to rely on the expertise of others, who must write effective regulations and see that they’re enforced: a costly, but essential, function of government.

The foundation of all regulations are the assumptions upon which they’re built, so it’s obvious that if the assumptions are flawed, the regulations will likewise be flawed. Environmental chemists in Canada* have been examining the assumptions that underlie regulations addressing a major class of chemical pollutants—“persistent organic pollutants” (POPs)—that are persistent because they are resistant to breakdown, typically tending to accumulate in the food chain, especially in fatty tissue; organic because they are carbon compounds that are the subject of organic chemistry (very different from the “organic” of organic food); and pollutants because they are toxic to living organisms. Some better known POPs are pesticides, solvents, PCBs, and dioxins.

When regulatory agencies began addressing pollutants, it was understood that pollutants that bioaccumulate (by magnifying in concentration as one organism eats another, and is then eaten by another, etc., in increasing trophic levels right on up the food chain) are the most treacherous, because higher level predators (like us) can end up consuming very high amounts of a pollutant that was originally present in the environment at a relatively low level. Thus, the primary regulatory focus has wisely been on such bioaccumulating toxics known as POPs.

The trouble is that in defining POPs, regulators chose to measure their bioaccumulating potential in fish, for reasons that remain unclear to me. After all, we are not fish, and there are many non-fish terrestrial organisms, and we all have very different life circumstances, beginning with the fact that we are air-breathers. Indeed, this turns out to be a very flawed assumption in the regulatory model.

POPs have traditionally been evaluated using a measure called KOW, an indicator of a substance’s solubility in water, roughly:

• High KOW** substances are highly hydrophobic and poorly metabolized and poorly excreted in aquatic organisms, and tend to accumulate in fat, and this is a reliable predictor of which compounds will bioacumulate in fish.

• High KOA*** substances are only moderately hydrophobic, are poorly metabolized, and are poorly excreted, and thus will bioaccumulate, in air-breathing organisms.

Regulations currently address compounds that have a high KOW but not those that have a high KOA and therein lies the problem.

The graph below illustrates what happens in real food webs that are contaminated by a low KOW but high KOA compound, i.e, one that would not be considered bioaccumulative by current regulations:

Kelly, et al., 2007

Note the dotted blue line, that of the piscivorous (water-breather) food web. This data shows a lack of bioaccumulation (with the concentration of the ß-HCH remaining constant all the way up the food chain), and this data would be what current regulation is based upon.

In contrast, note the solid green line, that of the terrestrial (air-breather) food web. This data shows a strong bioaccumulation that occurs in just three trophic levels. Note also that the concentrations measured are on a logarithmic scale, so the concentration in the caribou is about 10 times that found in the lichens it grazes on, while the concentration in the wolf is another 100 times more concentrated than that of the caribou, or a 1000 times higher concentration than that of the organism at the base of the food chain.

Unsurprisingly, the solid blue line, indicating the marine mammal food web which includes both air- and water-breathers, has a slope that is intermediate to that of the other two food webs. However, the resultant concentrations in the top predators of this food web exceed those found in the terrestrial web, simply because there are more intermediate trophic levels. [Humans are included in the “marine mammal” food web because they are consuming both air- and water-breathing marine organisms.]

The key point here is that while the regulators assume that given its low KOW, ß-hexachlorohexane is non-bioaccumulative, and thus regulate it as such, it is actually highly bioaccumulative in the real-world environment that includes terrestrial organisms and marine mammals. The authors of this study estimate that about one-third of organic chemicals currently in commerce fall into this low-KOW / high KOA class of compounds, that may currently be regulated as toxic, but are not regulated as the more hazardous bioaccumulating class of toxic compounds that many of them are.

This is a very big deal, but unfortunately, the topic is sufficiently complex that news coverage is very scant. One hopes the regulators are paying attention in our stead.

____________________________
*2007. Kelly, B., Ikonomou, M., Blair, J. Morin, A., Gobas, F. “Food Web-Specific Biomagnification of Persistent Organic Pollutants.” Science, 317:236-239.

**High KOW compounds are more precisely defined as those substances having a high octanol-water partition coefficient, but a complete understanding of this is not needed for a general understanding of the issue.

***High KOA have a high octanol-air partition coefficient.

Hook, line, and sinker

2007-07-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

Buried at the end of a page C11 New York Times story about the funeral of 17-year-old Pfc. Le Ron Wilson, killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, is the following:

A few blocks away…it was break time at the military recruiting center… Two girls cantered streetward…out into the sunshine… “We go leafleting, we call people up about recruitment… A lot of people say ‘no’ right away because they think they have to go straight to Iraq, but that’s not true, there’s other things they could do.”

She was 14. Her companion was 15. All told, they said, nine teenagers, paid $7.15 an hour by the city’s summer job program, are working at the Jamaica recruiting center. Military recruiting, of course, is the work of professional soldiers, not teenagers in a summer program to learn how to hold a job.

Army recruiters will stop at nothing in their quest to ensnare the unwary. Demonstrably unable to meet their recruitment goals based on the merits of military service and our ongoing adventures in the Middle East, recruiters have resorted to dangling young girls as lures, the better to coax reluctant young men to suspend logical thought and to demonstrate their “manliness” to the young girls who are trained and paid to manipulate them into signing on the bottom line, signing their very lives away.

Very creative, these recruiters! And they get this recruiting assistance for free, by exploiting a city-sponsored summer jobs program, and by exploiting gullible young girls desperate to earn a few dollars and to gain some job experience. But what are they being trained to do? Is it the purpose of a summer jobs program to teach nascent employees how to lie, whether by omission or evasion or simple incomprehension? Just how likely is it that the young recruits will do “other things,” rather than ship out to Iraq? Numerically, what are the odds?

The girl’s wording is interesting too: “there’s other things they could do” and sounds to be straight out of a training video in how to manipulate your “sales” target. Well sure, they could end up being recruited straight out of basic training into the NASA astronaut program, or they could end up in the Presidential honor guard. But the odds of doing anything not involving shipping out to Middle East are what again? Oh, right: between slim and none.

This is an abominable use of a summer jobs program, and an unconscionable means of entrapment via post-pubescent hormonal imbalance. Surely so worthy a cause ought to be salable on its own merits! But if not, perhaps that in itself should be a powerful message sent to those who rule us. The choice that has been made (in OUR name) is instead to use the gullible to recruit the gullible, by manipulation and deceit, just one more example of the immorality of the entire enterprise.

All involved ought to be ashamed.

“Benevolent” child abuse

2007-07-20T12:59:00.000-07:00

A story in today’s New York Times describes a major elbow surgery that parents are paying to have done to their children, solely in order to “improve” their pitching arms. Why is this even legal?

modified from original; color diagram modified from Human Anatomy, by Martini, Timmons, and Tallitsch (5th Ed.), 2006

The phrase “benevolent child abuse” was used in the article, an oxymoron if ever there was one, and I would strongly challenge its supposed benevolence. The pain and trauma and risks involved, and the unknown sequelae to be dealt with later in life should be enough to rule it out, but there are those for whom the lure of possible stardom by proxie is so intoxicating that they would happily subject their own children to pain and risk and trauma—what else could this be but child abuse?

“Although it is highly successful, the surgery may require two years for recovery. Infection, fractures, nerve irritation and numbness are possible. About 20 percent of pitchers do not return… Even when the risks are explained, and parents are told that many young pitchers eventually lose interest in the sport, Dr. Andrews said, ‘It doesn’t seem to faze them.’ ”

The child is not mature enough to make such a choice, and by what justification should the parent be able to order surgical (or chemo- or genetic-) “enhancements” to a child simply to suit their own dreams and desires? Do they have any comprehension of more likely failure of other parts (read: rotator cuff) when additional strength is “engineered” into vulnerable constituents of a system?

It is into this climate that the whole issue of genetic “enhancement” arrives. I find it all so disheartening from the individual autonomy perspective. There are cultures in which a parent retains sole authority over their child’s life in perpetuity, in matters of marriage choices and occupation and dress and freedom of movement and household location and personal relationships and basically every aspect of their daily life, for their entire lives—is this what we are moving toward in America? Do parents own their children? Have we really forgotten what freedom means? Isn’t the autonomy of one’s body pretty much the most fundamental sort of autonomy we have?

Very, very distressing.

The surge continues

2007-07-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

data from globalsecurity.org

Open letter to Speaker Pelosi…

2007-07-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Are we a nation ruled by law, or are we not?

If we are a nation ruled by law, it is time for George Bush and Dick Cheney to be called to account for their many crimes against this country. Their actions are exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they outlined the process of impeachment. To continue to give this administration a free pass literally puts our nation in grave peril. It is your duty as an elected representative to respond to the will of the people. It is your sworn duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States. The impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney follows directly from these two, most fundamental, duties that comprise the primary responsibility of your office. Abdicating this responsibility in the interest of decorum or expedience is not an option. By what logic did you declare that “impeachment is off the table”?

If we are not a nation ruled by law, we might as well dissolve the legislature now, rather than continue with the ruse. At least then we would know where we, the people, stand. To allow this imperial presidency to continue with its grievous abuses, unchecked, is to declare by default that laws do not matter, and that our “checks and balances” are naught but a pretty pretense.

PLEASE: Begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, NOW!

James Madison wrote: “If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty...”

Madison’s words could not be more applicable than to President Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence (that was well within the sentencing guidelines)! President Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence demonstrates to all that Bush has “sheltered” (and will “shelter”) those who would cause real and lasting harm to our nation at his bidding, as Libby so clearly did.

We are suffering under a rogue administration, and until the House of Representatives steps up to the plate, this great nation of ours will be at great risk. This is exactly the purpose of the impeachment proceeding! If you have a reason to evade this most profound responsibility, please state it! It is not acceptable to simply decree that “impeachment is not on the table.” Impeachment is the only remedy at hand!

I am a lifelong Democrat, and have voted in every single election held since I came of age. As dismayed as I am regarding the Bush Administration, I have to say that I am almost equally dismayed with the anemic response of the Congress we elected in November 2006, with a few exceptions such as Henry Waxman and Patrick Leahy and Barbara Lee. There is no more important business for Congress at this moment in history than righting our ship of state (which of necessity includes impeachment proceedings against at least George Bush and Dick Cheney but probably should also include the impeachment of Attorney General Gonzales); returning all civil liberties to the citizenry; and extricating ourselves from the Mideast Follies of Bush-Cheney.

I beseech you: Begin impeachment proceedings as the top priority of business of Congress, immediately!

____________________________________

Send your own letter: http://www.speaker.gov/contact/

If you need further inspiration, listen to Bill Moyers as he discusses impeachment with Bruce Fein and John Nichols.

Mr. Bush, please note…

2007-07-14T11:25:00.001-07:00

Here are three acceptable answers to one of the new naturalization test questions:

from pilot civics naturalization test

Surely, even you can see that yes, this means YOU…

America, Land of Really Big Eaters

2007-07-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Epitomizing for me the state of our nation on this glorious 4th of July:

original by: Reuters / Lucas Jackson (modified)

We just can’t cram it in fast enough.

Billions go hungry, while we support “competitive eating” as a sport. This “winner” crammed in 66 hotdogs, to which I can only say: BFD! This is not a “sport” by any stretch of the imagination! It is merely a uniquely American obscenity.

Billions go hungry, while we convert 27% of U.S. corn into fuel for our SUVs.

“The [corn] required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol [would] feed one person for a year.” Earth Policy Institute

As Michael Pollan so clearly delineates in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, most of what we eat can be traced to corn—meat, poultry, dairy, sweetener, cereal, many additives, beer, soft drinks, farmed fish, cooking oil, etc.—and corn prices have already risen by nearly 70 percent.

And now, while taxpayers and the environment foot the bill for corn production, food prices are already rising. But go ahead, fill up your SUV for a run to the corner market ten blocks away. Swill that corn to your heart’s content. Let’s take competitive eating to an all new level! Ain’t we special…

Oh, and PS: Do enjoy all the additional acetaldehyde that will be included in every breath of air: no extra charge!

Reckless hubris on the road to “perfection”

2007-06-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

This little book does a nice job of laying out many of the arguments that support genetic “enhancement” and then takes them apart piece by piece from a philosophical perspective. But unfortunately, Sandel neglects to highlight some of the strongest arguments against such offspring-engineering:

Designing one’s offspring for “success” makes assumptions about what “success” entails. The unwritten subtext is usually “financial success,” but is it the parent’s job to build cogs for the empire? Is it one’s destiny and obligation to function in as utilitarian a manner as possible? Does this not make a mockery of “the pursuit of happiness”? Can the happiness of one ever be defined by another?

How can autonomy not be lost when one person overlays their values onto another? Sandel discounts the argument that such bioengineering takes autonomy from its object, but in deciding what features to “enhance” in the building of another person, value judgments are inescapable, and making such choices on behalf of another is by definition a violation of that other’s autonomy. What gives anyone the right to instill math and engineering skills into someone whose temperament better suits them for life as a poet or naturalist? Or even to add height to one who might have been more physically coordinated at their natural height?

Is there an implicit ownership of the subject of one’s design? What happens when an offspring subsequently does not meet the parent’s expectations “after all we spent on designing you”?

Will a child have recourse against “parental malpractice”? If the parent’s choices result in harm, or a parent is negligent in opting for available enhancements, will the child be allowed to seek damages?

Changes in a single gene will have multiple effects via such genetic mechanisms as pleiotropy and epistasis, and these secondary effects can be impossible to predict. For example, what if an increase in growth hormone intended to increase the height of one’s child also shortens their lifespan by five years, or increases their odds of developing cancer, or decreases their IQ by 5 percent? Is there any way to discover all possible outcomes, and would the parent have the right to discount such downsides as being of negligible import? Or, what if a genetic manipulation intended to improve an offspring’s math ability resulted in a 5 percent increase in the chances of the child becoming schizophrenic, or dyslexic, or less attractive? Is the parent morally justified in taking the inevitable risks of their intended enhancement creating unforeseen deficits of any sort?

There is a lesson to be taken from our experience with the unintended consequences that have been observed in the development of our chemical industry; we would be well-advised to comprehend that mucking about in genomes has the potential for unintended consequences exceeding those created by the chemists by many orders of magnitude. Do we really want to bestow that legacy onto the generations that follow us, as we selfishly try to give our own children a leg up in the competition they will face? Do we really believe ourselves to be competent “designers”?

A personal injury attorney?!?!!!

2007-05-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

Image: sfgate

Stunning news on the jetsetting XDR-TB front:

Andrew Speaker, the Atlanta man with the drug-resistant TB who chose to expose hundreds of people to his disease, is both a personal injury attorney and the son-in-law of a CDC microbiologist who studies TB.

It is conceivable that his father-in-law knew nothing about his disease or his decision to fly in the face of his knowledge that he had a dangerous infectious disease.

It is, however, inconceivable that a personal injury attorney would be unfamiliar with the concepts of negligence and personal liability. Given his self-flaunted “well-educated” status and his profession, it must be concluded that he knew exactly what he was doing when he deliberately circumvented the CDC’s no-fly order by flying to Montreal and driving to the U.S. This leads directly to the conclusion that he should be held personally liable for all the costs incurred for his irresponsibility. There is simply no way that he can continue use naïveté as a defense for his choice to deliberately put others at risk of contracting his disease.

Inexcusable.

Breathtaking!

2007-05-29T22:39:00.001-07:00

Image: University of Virginia Health Sciences Library

In today’s news we read that a man chose to fly against medical advice, knowing full well that he has extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), the very worst, most dangerous sort of TB to have, and with the full understanding that he is infectious.

Just what was so all-fired important that he would deliberately put the lives of hundreds of strangers and family members at risk? Why, it was his wedding! And surely, that important social event (and the subsequent honeymoon) had to take precedence over all other considerations!

So, off he sped, to his wedding and honeymoon in Europe. Once there, he was contacted by someone from the CDC who “told him in no uncertain terms not to take a flight back.” But again, this edict interfered with the man’s own plans, so in a deliberate evasion of his CDC-ordered “no fly” status, he modified his itinerary to make Canada his destination, and then drove into the U.S.

What breathtaking disregard for the well-being of others! He took his sorry germs onto those flights and seeded the entire plane with a major life-threatening illness, merely so that he could enjoy the social events he had planned?

Ah, but it gets worse:

‘I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person,’ he told the [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. ‘This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I’ve cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.’

Well, mister, an armed guard is apparently what it takes to force you to behave responsibly.

This little vignette makes clear that voluntary quarantines are a thing of the past. When self-declared “well-educated, successful, intelligent” people take such brazen anti-social actions, and clearly cannot even comprehend that it even matters, it does not bode well for how an epidemic, natural or human-caused, will be controlled in this country. Yet in the event of such an epidemic, short of locking everyone up in “relocation” camps, there will be no way to ensure that quarantines can be effected. And this realization makes me even angrier: Because of idiots like this man, all of us may be made to suffer the consequences, of relocation instead of home quarantine, if or when an epidemic rolls through our midst.

At this point, this man should be treated as the pariah that he is. He should be identified and publicly castigated for his utter selfishness and his deplorable disregard for the safety of others. And if there are not laws forbidding such actions as he took, such laws should be written and passed. No one has the right to deliberately disseminate severe infectious diseases, simply for their own social convenience.

Oh yes: yet one more reason to stay off of airplanes (as if I needed any)…

UPDATE (h/t: commenter crfullmoon at Effect Measure):

In stark contrast to the privacy and accommodations accorded to the mystery XDR-TB patient who chose to fly hither and yon in commercial airliners, is the story of another, presumably less “well-educated” or “successful” man:

“[Robert Daniels] agreed to a voluntary quarantine in residential care. But Daniels violated his agreement when he went outside without a mask. [Therefore] Daniels has been forced to live in a hospital cell in complete isolation. His only visitors are medical staff. Sheriff's deputies have taken away his television, radio, phone and computer. He is under 24-hour surveillance and the light in his room is never turned off, even at night. His only contact to the outside world is a pay-phone.”

He is deprived of hot showers, and receives treatment “as any other prisoner,” and he could be there for the rest of his life. Keep in mind: Daniels has not committed any crime, and has not been convicted, and will not be tried. But he is, nonetheless, in jail, in solitary confinement, possibly for life, simply because he is sick and neglected to wear a mask when he went outside his home.

Breathtaking, is it not, the difference that a little “success” can have in one’s treatment by public health officials…

Bring them home, NOW

2007-05-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

“When [soldiers] searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army. […] ‘What are we doing here? […] We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us,’ said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.”

New York Times, Memorial Day 2007

Salmonella in my pantry?

2007-05-27T07:38:00.000-07:00

The FDA reports a voluntary recall of MaraNatha Organic Sesame Tahini, because of possible Salmonella contamination. (This also applies to the Whole Foods 365 Organic Tahini.)

Vulnerability to biological contamination applies to ALL foods, organic or not, obviously. Perhaps I should start routinely consulting the FDA's website whenever I visit my pantry…

(h/t: RANGERAGAINSTWAR)

Morons with guns

2007-05-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

Not even the goats are safe from being shot down in Oakland.

Who would shoot 15 penned goats for “fun”? Only someone who should be locked up forever. There is no hope that such a “person” could ever be sufficiently civilized to live among us, so why even pretend otherwise.

Meanwhile, crime is up in my neighborhood, as the police succeed in driving it out of other, more typically crime-ridden neighborhoods. No goats nearby, so they just shoot people. And we wonder why more is spent on prisons than on education in this state. What the hell else can you do with those who have so little regard for life? There is no cure for those who would shoot down others, whether goats or people, in cold blood, whether for fun or personal gain. But goats. God almighty, why would anyone shoot a bunch of goats?!?!?

VOTE!

2007-05-21T21:24:00.000-07:00

Add your 2¢ and maybe you’d like to weigh in on Gonzales while you’re at it…

Bought and sold

2007-05-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

Diploma courtesy of: http://www.addletters.com/diploma-generator.htm

“Diablo Valley College on Thursday sent prosecutors the names of 74 students suspected in a cash-for-grades plot… Students paid about $600 per changed grade, police said, and as many as 400 grades were altered during the course of three years.”

When schools become remade as “businesses,” why shouldn’t students think that whatever they can do to get themselves ahead is acceptable? That’s certainly how it works in the business world. Sure, getting caught is a drag, but the savvy ones don’t get caught.

When the emphasis is placed on college degrees being mere tickets into the workforce rather than the traditional view of college being a place to engage in a life of the mind, and to become a scholar, and to be challenged to find the limits of one’s intellectual abilities, what, precisely, do we expect?

The universal lament among those toiling in the fields of higher ed is that the vast majority of students are not engaged, not even interested in the subject matter, but just in pursuit of a diploma that will allow them to get on with their money-earning lives. But again, when everyone is expected to attend college in order to earn a decent living, what other outcome could we expect? Because the fact is and always will be: people are not universally suited for, or interested in, the kind of learning that goes on in traditional colleges. The response among college administrators—most of whom are “Ed Docs” who, in common with most students, have no interest in academic pursuits—has been to demand that professors change their courses to “meet the demands” of this new breed of student. And, with their paychecks dependent upon their compliance, most have capitulated, to their chagrin and subsequent despondency.

So, in this changed institutional environment, where learning is no longer valued for its own sake and intellectual creativity is but a distant memory, the administrators who once facilitated teaching now instead dictate from on high about the need for improvement of “retention” statistics, and demand the same kinds of outcome “measures” that have irretrievably ruined the K-12 system.

The short version: academia is dead.

The shell still exists, and a dispirited shell it is. Teachers grasp at remaining tenuous strands of academic vigor while the enterprise shudders in its death throes, all the while under vicious assault from all who believe that “education” is a standardizable process that is administered to nameless and faceless fodder for the corporate enterprise. Learning is irrelevant. Persistence, and retention, and measured outcomes, and “full-time equivalent students,” and funding formulae, and minimum class sizes, and above all, aiming one’s teaching to the lowest common denominator: that is college today.

It is in this environment that students will buy and sell grades without compunction if provided the opportunity to do so, and will plagiarize at every opportunity, repeatedly, and even after having been chastised for doing so, will do it again. It is in this environment that over 50 percent of graduate students surveyed reported that they had cheated.

It has been a gradual process, but over the course of a generation or two, we have allowed higher education to become so debased that a majority of graduate students prefer to steal their diplomas, and presumably, they will be hired by others who stole theirs too. Can we really claim to be surprised that a group of lower division students at a community college seized the opportunity to “get ahead” when it was thrust into their faces by know-nothing administrators? Those who gave the students access to the computer grade change system are at least as guilty as the students themselves, because like the students in this ethically debauched era, the administrators knew full well the sort of temptations those computers offered, and still they chose to offer them, and to pretend otherwise is to stretch our credulity to the breaking point.

Eat my toxic waste, please!

2007-04-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

Would you buy food, for yourself or your pets, from someone who says:

“ ‘It just saves money if you add melamine scrap,’ said the manager of an animal feed factory here [in China…] ‘People use melamine scrap to boost nitrogen levels for the tests… If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals.’ ”

The New York Times report on the widespread pet food poisoning uses the word “supplemented” when accuracy demands the word “adulterated”:

“For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests… [Few] in agriculture [in Zhangqiu] see any harm in using melamine in small doses; they simply see it as cheating a little on protein, not harming animals or pets.”

Sure, what’s a “little” cheating among trading partners?

This attitude needs to be exposed for what it is: a betrayal of trust. Once that trust is broken, never again can we rely on them to provide food products that are clean and unadulterated and described with honesty. Without trust, what do you have? Why would you knowingly consume foods produced by those who see nothing wrong with a “little” cheating if it brings them more money? What other toxic waste will they offload into your dinner?

Many are blaming the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for lax oversight in the melamine case, but can they be expected to reliably test every food product that the manufacturer may have deliberately contaminated with some substance chosen because it’s not among those things checked by the testing? This is not the first food scandal in China, and the readiness of those involved to admit they were merely trying to fake out the tests for protein concentration, as if this were simply a reasonable means of cost-cutting competition, suggests a pervasive attitude of disrespect for their customers.

From the same NY Times article:

“Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional.”

This recommends a flawed policy. We in the U.S. cannot rely on the Chinese government to guarantee our food safety! There is no reason that we should trust the Chinese government to diligently oversee our safety, and many potential reasons that we should not trust them. What better way could there be to weaken one’s adversaries than to attack them in their food supply? Will we expect USFDA to test all imported foods for every possible neurotoxin and heavy metal and carcinogen and all toxic substances known to man? That is an impossibility!

Chinese agricultural exporters have violated our trust, and have contaminated our food. We U.S. consumers need to take notice, and avoid consuming other suspect products, like their Hongshuai soy sauce and the “amino acid powder” added to breads, both of which were found to be made from human hair processed with carcinogenic chemicals.

Melamine is only the tip of the iceberg. We ignore it at our peril.

Progress marches ever onward

2007-04-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

“ ‘Day by day, block by block, Iraqi and American forces are making incremental gains in Baghdad,’ said Mr. Bush [April 20, 2007].”

data from: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties-months.htm

Glorifying EVIL

2007-04-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

NBC did it. The New York Times did it. Probably every media outlet on earth did it. All of them chose to give the Virginia Tech gunman the forum that he wanted so badly that 32 innocents had to pay with their lives.

When will the press ever learn? They can report on the story without playing into the hands of a perpetrator of such evil. We can know all we need to know without ever seeing a photo of the monster, or hearing his/her name, or reading or listening to his/her demented rantings.

Sure, being the curiosity-driven creatures we are will lead us to leave the TV on, or read all the print stories, or study a photo of the face of hatred and evil with intensity and puzzlement. But what do we gain by it? Does it help us to avoid a repeat event? Sadly, the answer is just the opposite.

Every time there is a spectacularly vicious slaughter, we shower the murderer with attention and awe, saturating the air and print media with all manner of portrayal of mindset, history, crime specifics, images, and twisted philosophical spewage, effectively glorifying the act and the actor. And the result is utterly predictable: an immediate batch of imitators who want to share in such attention, and inspiration for others who will fester along until they can manage a suitable sequel.

Why do we tolerate this? Why is there not a law, or at least a general agreement, to withhold ALL attention from these nastiest specimens of humanity? They do not deserve our attention and indeed, by providing it we feed the forces of evil that spawn their imitators. Yes, attend to their victims and tell their tragic tales, but as if they’ve had their lives dashed by a meteor or accidental gas explosion, which in a way is a more accurate depiction of their experience. Because clearly, what has hit them was merely a loose cannon from our midst. Their lives have been lost, but by a random act (even as it was intentional).

Even worse is the suggestion of sympathy toward the madman—about his being taunted as a child or whatever. NO!!! It simply does not matter, is not explanatory, and does not in the least exonerate him from his grotesque massacre.

And finally, can we lose the stupidity of describing such people as “loners”? Those who commit evil but who are NOT loners are not thusly described but instead are described: “but he seemed so normal...” Being a (so-called) loner does not predispose one to such acts! And in fact, since domestic violence claims so many more lives, it could be argued that living in close proximity to others is the greater predictor of pathology.

What corporations call “food”

2007-04-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

The poisoned gluten in pet food that is killing people’s cats and dogs is merely the tip of a very large iceberg named Corporatized Food and we owe it to ourselves and our health to examine what we are choosing to consume in the guise of “food.” Believe it or not, the act of defining a substance as food does not make it so. Globalization and its absence of universal food safety standards only worsens the situation.

The well-named ChemNutra Corporation is the importer of the poisoned gluten which, according to reports is manufactured in less than pristine conditions:

“CNN’s John Vause traced it back [to…] a dusty, rural and rundown warehouse in Xuzhou, China, with no walls, no pavement and sacks and sacks of locally made gluten (9,000 tons a year)…”

Gluten is not only used in pet foods, but is also in many human foods as well, and the poisoned gluten was classed as human food grade, so it may well have entered the food supply somewhere.

This poisoned gluten episode brings to mind the recall of nearly twenty years ago, of L-tryptophan supplements that had resulted in the serious illness eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome when consumed, due to production changes that were made by the manufacturer.

What is unclear is why these various substances that are more chemical- than food-like continue to be consumed by people, and even more puzzling is why the items on the following list of ChemNutra’s products would be defined as “food” in the first place:

People (and their pets) are not simple chemo-mechanical bioreactors. We evolved to consume food, not the adulterated chemicals that go into the processed concoctions sold from supermarket shelves today. It should be obvious that it is not wise to rely on factory manufacture of our food products but apparently, there are few among us anymore who are able to accurately distinguish food from non-food. It really doesn’t get any more basic than that, when considering how best to provide sustenance for our selves.

White House and EPA solve pesky hazmat problem

2007-03-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

Composite image; photo credits to:
Pablo Gonzalez Varga and Doug Mills/The New York Times

From the March 2007 issue of The Scientist:

“In February of 2006, the White House proposed cutting $2 million of the $2.5 million budget for EPA libraries. It is a huge cut to the libraries, but a blip against the $8 billion EPA budget.”

That is a budget cut of fully 80 percent, which can only be intended to destroy EPA’s ability to gather and store the information it needs to fulfill its legislated mandate. The destruction of library holdings has already commenced, which means that first we taxpayers paid for the collection of all this data, and now we’re paying for it to be destroyed.

Although it is always risky to speculate on the motivations of others, this seems to be a clear case of destroying inconvenient evidence in order to prevent that evidence from becoming troublesome, and it is also a way to gut the agency from within, surreptitiously. Because without its institutional memory, and without the evidence it needs in order to act, the EPA becomes nothing more than a stooge as it pretends to carry out its mission. This will prove to be mighty convenient to the Bush administration.

Another privatization success story

2007-03-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

Cerberus, guarding Hades, allowing entry but not exit.
Watercolor by William Blake (from Wikipedia)

“In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante encounters Cerberus in the third circle of Hell where he guards the souls of the Gluttonous as he ‘barks over them with his three fold throat,’ ‘rendering them piecemeal.’ The text describes Cerberus as often flaying the cursed with his claws and barking very loudly with all three heads. As for the afflicted, they must live under Cerberus’s cruel actions while they continually lie in a mire with ice, hail, and discoloured water ceaselessly raining down upon them.” - Wikipedia

Washington Post, 10 March 2007:

“Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned the decision to hire IAP Worldwide Services, a contractor with connections to the Bush administration and to KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary…

“IAP is owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, an asset-management firm chaired by former Treasury secretary John W. Snow…

“IAP won a $120 million contract to maintain and operate Walter Reed facilities. The decision reversed a 2004 finding by the Army that it would be more cost-effective to keep the work in-house.”

Silly Army. They surely knew that cost-effectiveness was never the issue, and that this finding would never pass muster with the White House OMB. How can the White House’s favored corporations skim their billions in profits off of people’s labors when people are paid directly by the government for their labor?

The only problem is that Cerberus is directing his guarding duties in the wrong direction. It’s the folks at IAP and Halliburton and KBR and the White House who are the gluttons whose appetites ought to be the issue. This is the perversion that has resulted in the abysmal treatment of our wounded veterans at Walter Reed. Of course, the Pentagon’s solution to this problem is simply to close Walter Reed—by 2011 according to the same Washington Post article. No telling where they plan to warehouse the wounded then.

In case you weren’t sure…

2007-03-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

…where their loyalties lie:
“Halliburton Will Move HQ to Dubai”

Leadership and discourse and hobgoblins

2007-02-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

Although I believe it is still far too early to choose a presidential candidate for 2008, the contrast between Senator Obama and Senator Clinton could not be more striking.

Senator Clinton cannot seem to parse the difference between admitting a mistake and making an apology, and has said that she believes “firmness” to be the all-important distinguishing feature of a successful candidate. No, Senator, it’s merely the “hobgoblin of little minds.”

Senator Obama understood the dimensions of our Iraq choices from the very beginning:

Senator Obama recognized that the post-war stabilization would be the critical problem in Iraq, and chose a “nay” position on the Iraq war authorization before the fact, when it was still unpopular to do so, and provided sound reasons for his choice.

The hallmark of an independent thinker rests in their ability to evaluate the available evidence on its merits, and address the “what if’s” before they come to pass.

To try to defend oneself ex post facto by whining about having been misled by those with a history of deliberately misrepresenting reality, is not only weak but is pathetic, and certainly not the mark of a skilled diplomat, let alone President of the United States.

If the election were to be held next Tuesday, I have no doubt that Obama would have my vote.

When can I try one?

2007-02-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

I think I may see my new commute vehicle on the horizon…

Now that’s what I call a hybrid!

VentureOne

Yet more reasons to take the train

2007-02-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

With family in Arizona, Sky Harbor Airport has been a frequent destination, but no more. Their introduction of the backscattering scanners is, for me, the last straw. I will not submit myself to the added indignity of being visually stripped of my clothing, on top of all the other discomforts and inconveniences of using their airport. I am done with it.

Strip-searched in public by a backscatter scanner
Photo credit: epic.org
In concert with the appalling behavior of grounded airlines in recent months—and their literal imprisonment of passengers on the ground for ten hours at a time, without benefit of food, water, bathroom facilities, air, or room to move—there is nearly nothing that could motivate me to book a flight to anywhere for any reason. Whatever adjustments to my travel plans I have to make to avoid commercial flights, I will do. There is nothing on earth that is worth the treatment now accorded to airline passengers.

On the ground in Baghdad

2007-02-19T21:07:00.000-08:00

An Iraqi blogger states the obvious:

“It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.”

The contrast she observes between Oprah advising women on how to control their luxury spending, and an Iraqi woman’s televised description of her gang rape by security forces is beyond chilling:

“As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks.”

While we fixate on Britney’s baldness or a four-legged duck or the tumbling housing market or the lucky Wall Streeters and their obscene bonuses, Sabrine and other Iraqi women are being raped and beaten and killed by henchmen that we have trained, for no reason at all other than that they are females.

This is what we have wrought, and every one of us is complicit in the suffering that’s been dealt in our name. While our President cracks jokes and blusters about like a jackass, and our Congress takes baby-steps in passing non-binding resolutions, the suffering of Sabrine and others continues unabated. What have we wrought…

ALL gimmick and no substance

2007-02-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that [2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq] or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”
- Hillary Clinton (17 Feb 2007, Dover, N.H.)

Personally, I am mighty tired of politicians who make mistakes, and then refuse to state forthrightly that they did indeed make a mistake. Too much like Mr. High-and-Mighty occupying the seat at present.

More on Hillary, from her “advisors, friends and donors”:

“Mrs. Clinton […] never wanted to apologize—even if she viewed the war as a mistake—arguing that an apology would be a gimmick.”

Not only does she view the war as a mistake, but she refuses to acknowledge her active participation in its inception, and worse, sees this as a strength, according to another (unnamed) advisor:

“[Mrs. Clinton] doesn’t want to be […] the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ’04. She wants to maintain a firmness… That’s what people will want in 2008.”

“Firmness” in the absence of humility and in the face of massive error? I don’t think so. We are not 10-year-olds and the President is not our parent.

Leadership is what we want. Choosing to defend an obvious-from-the-start ill-advised hand-off of Congressional responsibility to a President whose intel was being questioned from the beginning, and then refusing to acknowledge the base stupidity of that action does not qualify as leadership, and does not qualify one for the highest office in the land.

I am very tired of those covering their butts with “if I knew then what I know now” BS. How is it that so many of us without their privileged access knew from the very beginning that this was a bogus war begun on bogus premises and fought by bogus means? We’re not psychic, but only careful readers of readily available documents.

It takes no courage to go along with the crowd. It does take courage to independently assess the evidence and then disagree with the crowd, and it takes courage to be a leader. Hillary Clinton does not have what it takes, if she does not even have the iota of courage needed to admit her mistakes.

Politics is all about image now, with the big argument in her campaign over how such an apology would play with the voters. Give me a break. And take some lessons from Barbara Lee.

Not ready for the Oval Office

2007-01-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

Frank Rich, NYTimes, 1/28/2007:

“Mrs. Clinton has always been a follower of public opinion on the war, not a leader.”

This is nearly correct, except that she has been a follower not just on the war, but on nearly every issue to come before her.

Being a follower is the occupational hazard that comes of consciously positioning yourself as a centrist, rather than choosing your actions on the basis of principled stands.

A centrist, by definition, is aiming for affirmation from those in the center of the bell curve* on every issue in the crass attempt to maximize their support. In contrast, a leader’s appeal stems from their supporters’ perception of the leader’s underlying philosophy that resonates with their own, encompassing things like integrity and core values and respect for the intelligence of the populace.

A centrist tries to be all things to all people, but is reduced to being merely an empty shell to be filled with polling data. If that’s what we want for a President, we’d be better off building an automaton to crunch the numbers and spew forth policy based on consensus of polling data.

When we think of the great leaders in our history, did any of them cast themselves as centrists? Can anyone imagine Lincoln basing his Emancipation Proclamation on polling data?

Senator Clinton has not emerged as a leader, but only as a follower, particularly as regards Mideast policy. She was unwilling to take an unpopular position until the vast majority of the populace had adopted it on its own. She had ample opportunity to speak out against the war, but chose to remain silent, in what can only reflect either a willful ignorance of the reality of the situation, or an abysmal lack of courage to speak the truth. Either alternative demonstrates a profound lack of leadership.

______________________________________
*Correction: Supporters of most issues are not described by bell curves, but by bimodal curves.

A “centrist” seeks out whatever region represents the most people, and so would be better described as an opportunist. There is rarely a true “center” ground to be found between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes to be cast, and to portray oneself as a centrist is both disingenuous and an attempt to oversimplify complex issues.

Elections have been degraded into mere popularity contests, but I am sufficiently idealistic to believe that voters can still recognize true leaders (as opposed to poll-driven followers), if only they would appear.

Defying all common sense…yet again…

2007-01-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

“…the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.”

Does this guy have the slightest acquaintance with elementary logic?

The Constitution says:

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

It does not say “Those who have the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not have it suspended,” and “the privilege…shall not be suspended” would be utter nonsense if such privilege were not universal.

This is beyond mere parsing. With this single statement, Mr. Gonzales has demonstrated that he is not fit to be an attorney, let alone Attorney General. Such illiteracy ought to prevent one from graduating eighth grade.

h/t: Crooks and Liars blog

It’s all about extortion

2006-12-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

Once again, Libya has sentenced six foreign medical workers to death, for allegedly infecting 426 children with HIV. It does not matter that there is no evidence to support these charges, and ample scientific evidence to refute the charges. To the Libyans it is enough that (1) the children are infected with HIV, and (2) there must be a scapegoat. Further, given Libya’s suggestion that blood money be paid so that the defendants may be spared, it appears that the ill children are mere pawns in Libya’s attempt to extort $4.26 billion (yes, Billion) from countries supporting the six medical workers.

For this Libya deserves to be completely isolated—from foreign aid of all sorts, and from all trade. Every government must order their medical workers to leave Libya at once, and all companies must be ordered to cease doing business with Libya. There can be no tolerance for a government that demands money in order not to execute those who are in their country for humanitarian purposes. Libya’s behavior defies all norms of human behavior, and must be condemned in the strongest possible way. All aid of any sort to Libya should cease immmediately.

Like it’s finals week

2006-12-10T13:59:00.000-08:00

Continuing with my much-needed respite from all things war and politics, a few more diversions:

No surprise here:

Click here for CIA personality quiz

No surprise here either:

But, I find this rather startling…(hey, Mom, look at this!)…

How evil are you?

On the lighter side

2006-12-06T22:25:00.000-08:00

Showing the possibilities when minds and hands work together…

From unknown source:

“This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa [and] 97% of the […] components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft Iowa […]

“It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video…

“It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is […] slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.”

UPDATE: Oops, I've been spoofed…but, it’s a great video…

From Urban Legends website:

“False. The video is amazing, no question, but the “fantastic machine” depicted therein wasn’t built out of farm equipment parts at the University of Iowa. It’s an example, rather, of the incredible 3D computer animation created by Wayne Lytle and his team at Animusic in Austin, Texas. No such machine exists in the real world. Nor, for the record, is there a “Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory,” a “Sharon Wick School of Engineering,” nor a “Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall” at the University of Iowa. The caption accompanying the video in emails circulating since November 2006 is entirely fictitious, authored by an anonymous prankster. You can view a clip from the original video, entitled “Pipe Dream,” in its proper context here.”

For many thousands of reasons

2006-12-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

Yes, this means what you think it does: IMPEACH!

Much ado about……what?

2006-11-17T21:39:00.000-08:00

Click to VOTE!

It never ceases to amaze me how the MSM will lunge into the tiniest of crevices to try to show the Democrats as hopelessly divided, inept, corrupt, and unethical, while they seem not to even notice the other side of the aisle as it slips into any number of Dante's inner circles. Even the New York Times trips over their own hyperbole on this one. One exception, Keith Olbermann, has it right:

Evolution in reverse

2006-11-11T20:34:00.000-08:00

A report in the October 2006 issue of Journal of Marketing provides evidence that human beings are no longer are capable of making rational food choices.

The study authors report that simply by labeling a food “unhealthy,” consumers will rate it more highly in taste tests than the identical item if it’s labeled “healthy.” It seems that for most people, a total disconnect has developed between food and the purpose it serves. What a perplexing notion, in the face of our superior intellectual acuity.

Most notably:

“The authors obtain these effects both among consumers who report that they believe that healthiness and tastiness are negatively correlated and, to a lesser degree, among those who do not report such a belief.”

This could not be an instinctive failing, but must arise from what we are taught, and it suggests that perhaps the worst thing our parents can do during our upbringing, nutritionally speaking, is to encourage us to eat any particular foodstuff that we’re resisting, on the grounds that it’s good for us…

My party and welcome to it!

2006-11-11T15:23:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a wonderful interactive graphic that allows the viewer to see the quantitative shift that has taken place in any given Congressional district, by moving the cursor over the district’s geographical location, as was done below for Kentucky’s 6th District:

(modified from the original)

Of note is that more than 81% of all directional shifts among all districts moved toward the Democratic side of the divide…