The Audacity to Agree with This Guy

It's useful that "The Audacity of... [blank]" can be used as a shorthand for talking about (satirizing) Barack Obama.

Rather than belabor the point that I'm not the possible 2009 president's biggest fan, I'm just going to link to a guy that summed up how I feel about Obama pretty succinctly.

Of course, many have pointed out that I'm a radical and so a mainstream candidate (i.e. anyone with any chance whatsoever of winning) is plainly never going to appeal to me. Be that as it may, the point of Professor Marc Lamont Hill still stands: Obama himself is packaging himself as the great bringer of change. He clearly doesn't represent a radical break from the status quo -- and if he's not a radical break (in the general, not necessarily progressive sense) then he can't represent fundamental change, hmm, ahh? It's sort of a logical impossibility. Of course, the continued argument is that one must kowtow to the status quo to be elected, and that the people aren't ready for a radical change -- and more pertinently, that presidents are not usually the instigators of radical change. Which simply makes me think, then:

a) change agents rarely kowtow to the status quo -- as I believe Frederick Douglas said (to paraphrase) -- "You cannot expect to applauded by the same system you are trying to oppose";
b) "the people" are never "ready" for change -- change agents build the movements that create this change that lurches society forward faster than it thought it could go (take your pick -- MLK Jr., Gandhi, Mandela, Castro, Guevara, and any number of other revolutionaries and visionaries you might name);
c) if presidents aren't instigators of radical change, then I can't really get all that excited about Obama -- keeping in mind that getting back to "normal" is still a world where Democrats have been as responsible for US foreign aggression, military intervention, deaths of foreign nationals, and maintaining US imperialism as Republicans -- I'm going to get excited about the next MLK, not JFK (i.e. the same JFK that brought us Vietnam and nearly WW III with the Bay of Pigs, for starters).

This attitude is perhaps that "negative attitude" I was accused of at my old job, when I felt I'd proved that the bodywash we wanted to design was chemically and kinetically impossible. I was told not to be such a pessimist -- but really, is pessimism the best way to describe "I think we're going to hit that mountain if we don't pull up?" Or is the optimism of "Pshaw, all we have to do is slow down a little bit and we'll be fine" really preferable?

With all due respect to Sir David Bowie, I'm afraid of Republicans

Actually, I'm afraid of Democrats as well, as readers of the J Continuum know. (Yes, even Obama. Deal with it.*)

But anyway, a forwarded e-list of Republican beliefs came my way, and I'm sharing it with you (on the presumption that it isn't misattributed copyrighted material):

To be a Republican you need to believe:

1. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton

2. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's Daddy made war on him , a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

3. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

4. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

5. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational drug corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

6. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

7. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

8. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

9. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but providing health care to all Americans is socialism. HMO's and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.

10. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

11. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

12. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet .

13. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.

14. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

15. Supporting "Executive Privilege" for every Republican ever born, who will be born or who might be born (in perpetuity.)

16. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960's is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80's is irrelevant.

17. Support hunters who shoot their friends and blame them for wearing orange vests similar to those worn by the quail.


Friends don't let friends vote Republican.

*(Every time I think, use, or see this phrase, it reminds me of this. Note: We don't hire dirty centaurs.)

This is kind of like working, right? It DOES have to do with the environment...

More on the "Growth is Madness" Population conversation I mentioned in this earlier post.

A HUGE conversation has developed there; here is my latest contribution (out of context, alas, but I think it still makes some points in its own rambling way):

Quite the conversation here!

I'd like to come back to two or three points I may have (unsuccessfully) made in my original comments.

One is that of the Developed Countries' footprint. It is absolutely true that we can't effectively address environmental problems by exclusively focusing on population *or* consumption; it's also true that the Developed Countries, because of (generally) better governance structures and more coherent, stronger non-governmental actors have much more latitude to do both. The relative payoff is great, considering that this, what, 25% of the world uses 40% of the resources? So again, my argument is the effectiveness of focusing resources disproportionately (but not exclusively) on the "Developed" World for a greater payoff.

Two, this would also have effects on consumption in the rest of the world, as per some earlier comments both about the Western "model" of consumptionism and the complex feedbacks between population growth and consumption. Western popular culture and industrial food are not solely to blame for worldwide increases in resource consumption intensity, but they are major contributing factors. Were the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan to seriously change their approach to population and consumption, it would strike everyone as less imperialistic and condescending to address it in the world's poorer countries. To be sure, they are contributing more than their share, but my question is -- what effective means to you propose to address population growth and consumption in Developing Countries? We do all realize here that the reason population growth projections have been decreasing is the growth of female education and political power, especially in Developing Countries, where women with free choice decide much more often to have less children? Clearly, this is an agenda that should be pushed forward with all due haste and focus, but a huge part of the reason for the population taboo are the horrible and misguided things done in its name in the past -- forced sterilization (see especially Puerto Rico's "La Operación) being a notable one. Neither forced sterilization nor handing out prophylactics have noticeable effects on population growth in absence of female political power, thus while we can speak of population growth in the Developing World, it is of utmost importance to *always* pair it with concerns for equity and access to *sufficient* consumption. Those who reproduce most are the poorest and thus many are those who consume *below* their fair share, even in Developing countries consuming net *more* than a sustainble share. (Urbanization and elite consumption no doubt account for the lion's share of this consumption as well; I'd be interested on information of resource consumption from the world's poorest rural subsistence areas - not the factory farms they may work on that consume resources but don't distribute them back to those who are disadvantaged and likely to have "too many" children).

Thus a strategy of population and consumption decrease seems best for "Developed" countries, and a focus on substantive equity, redistribution, and political power and reproductive control seems wises in the Developing countries. Not only does speaking of women's empowerment and reproductive control sound more palatable to those who've been victims of "La Operación"-like schemes in the past, it *is* the vehicle that's been shown to be successful in reduced population growth.

(And one last point -- a great article by Sloan in 2007 in Biotropica and another by Ravnborg in 2003 in World Development show some very good initial proof that local population size isn't necessarily connected to environmental degradation; this connection shows up at the national scale but is weak at the local, at least in terms of deforestation, and they both show that it is not the faster-growing population of poor that consume the most resources on agricultural frontiers, but the relatively small number of medium-and-large landowners and rich farmers, who have the money and resources to, for instance, by a small farmer's farm and expand it further into the forest. Again, equity and elite consumption confound the population issue at a local scale, and empowerment and substantive equity would do much to address it. I suppose this is my overall point -- talk of population without talk of substantive equity isn't just asking to be caricatured as old-style draconianism, but also overlooks the most effective tool we have for reducing population growth.)

Scientists Rediscover that Lead and Carcinogens are bad for you

A fantastic review of two new books on "theories of cancer" by a friend and colleague of my mentor.

Sandra Steingraber discusses the evolution, devolution, and re-evolution of our understanding of environmental factors' role in cancer. (Steingraber is also the author of the fantastic book Living Downstream, a "follow-up" of a kind to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.)

Excerpted:

I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1979, when I was twenty years old and just at the beginning of my career as a biologist. At that time, US newspaper headlines featured Love Canal, the upstate New York community whose residents had been evacuated a year earlier when 20,000 tons of industrial chemicals were discovered buried under their basements. Toxic-waste activism in the United States was in the ascendant...

After breaking the bad news from the pathology lab, my urologist asked me about tyres: automobile tyres. Had I ever vulcanized tyres? His second question was about textile dyes. Any exposure to the colour yellow? And had I ever worked in the aluminium industry?

...Indeed, there were data on dyes and bladder cancer going back to the nineteenth century. In fact, there was absolute proof that certain textile dyes caused bladder cancer in humans. And yet, mysteriously, this evidence had not resulted in the abolition of these chemicals from the economy. Other suspected bladder carcinogens, for which the evidence was highly troubling, if not outright damning, were produced and used by the industries in my home town. The National Cancer Institute was generating maps of cancer mortality in an attempt to unveil other possible environmental carcinogens that could explain rising rates of cancer.

And then Ronald Reagan was elected President, and everything changed. No one asked me any more about my possible environmental exposures. In fact, by the mid-1980s, I was hard-pressed to find the word “carcinogen” in any pamphlet on cancer that I collected from my doctors’ various offices. Meanwhile... [t]he new focus of the National Cancer Institute was on “lifestyle” explanations for cancer.

...I was a vegetarian who ran four miles a day. Thus there was no explanation for my situation. “Some kind of fluke”, said one of my doctors. Wherever I lived, I dutifully submitted to cancer check-ups. By the 1990s, the new explanation for cancer was genetic, and I started receiving lots of questions from young intake doctors about my family history. I had fun with this. I would describe in detail my mother, diagnosed with breast cancer, my various uncles with prostate and colon cancers, and – the crowning point – my aunt who died of the same kind of bladder cancer that I had. The young doctors took furious notes. I would always pause a few beats before adding, “Oh yeah. And I’m adopted”.

Today, I’m a forty-eight-year-old professor in Ithaca, New York, and during my last renal ultrasound, the technician asked me casually if I’d ever worked with textile dyes...

After the full introduction that excerpt is taken from, Steingraber goes on to review "Two new books [that] expose and explicate the ongoing social contest that is at the heart of our shifting understanding about cancer":

Devra Davis
SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER
505pp. Basic Books. £16.99.
978 0 465 01566 5

Phil Brown
TOXIC EXPOSURES
Contested illnesses and the environmental health movement
356pp. New York: Columbia University Press. £19 (US $29.50).
978 0 231 12948 0

Read, learn, go. Hurry! Do it now!

James Baldwin: Your Must-Learn-About for Black History Month

Listening to my backlogged Democracy Now! podcast, an excellent hour discussing James Baldwin, gay African-American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. His Wikipedia entry is here.

A boy last week—he was sixteen—told me on television—thank God we got him to talk, maybe somebody was taught to listen—he said, “I’ve got no country, I’ve got no flag.” And he’s only sixteen years old. And I couldn’t say, “You do.” I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does.

And the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country, which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality involved any place for you.

--James Baldwin, in Cambridge debating William Buckley, also seen in the documentary The Price of the Ticket, written and directed by Karen Thorsen.

If the people of this nation are not capable of true self-evaluation, this nation may yet become one of the most distinguished monumental failures in the history of the world. People imagining their history flatters them, as it does indeed, since they wrote it, they are impaled on that history, like a butterfly on a pin, and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. Now, this is the place in which, it seems to me, the most white Americans find themselves: impaled. The do not know how to release themselves from it and suffer enormously, see, from that resulting personal incoherence. See, they are dimly or vividly aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, alright?

Now, the one person who released us all from that suffering—I met on that blood-red soil of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King. He told me, he says, “Jimmy, segregation is dead.” And I replied, “Yes. But just how long and how violent and how expensive of a funeral is it going to be?"

--Calvin Levels, portraying James Baldwin, on Democracy Now!, December 7, 2007.

A fantastic edition of Democracy Now!, a fantastically interesting and important person to learn about, a man with a fantastic cadence, diction, and pose. An incredible early advocate for civil rights, for blacks and homosexuals. A last quote from him that applies as well to the J Continuum:

"Look, I love America more than any country in the world, and it is exactly for that reason that I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that."

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad (overpopulated?) world

My somewhat indignant response to a post at "Growth is Madness" about how environmentalists avoid the "taboo" subject of overpopulation. Considering that some of the most prominent academic and NGO environmentalists have made overpopulation prominent in their discussions at various points (cf. Paul Ehrlich, Garret Hardin, David Pimentel, Sierra Club...) I'm not sure I see overpopulation as a "taboo" subject among environmentalists. Some feel its still neo-Malthusianist bent is problematic, like I do, but that's different than being unwilling to discuss it...

Anyway, the post is here, my response (here) being:

What I really don’t understand here is the disconnect between intensity of resource use and exactly where population is growing the fastest.

With the exception of the United States, most of the “1st World” has its population growth slowing or leveling off. Meanwhile, many of the areas with highest population growth are the poorest, and are people living well below their means.

Now, clearly, people rich and poor are consuming resources at some rate (both directly and in the form of consuming resources for waste disposal/redemption). However, based on per capita consumption/energy use, the United States and other 1st World countries are using (I’ve seen estimates) 3-5X our “share” of resources. Meanwhile, the poorest millions in Africa and Asia probably use somewhat less than a whole “share” of total human resource use.

Thus on one factor you have, say “4″ for mean per capita resource consumption in the US (or resource use intensity), vs., say, 0.8 in Namibia. This means that resource use intensity is 5X greater in the US. In other words, one “less” US or UK citizen is equivalent to 5 “less” Namibians in terms of resource use; yet we rarely hear the “taboo” subject of overpopulation brought up in terms of a primary emphasis on the 1st World, where growth rates are perhaps not the highest, but where changes in growth rates will have a 5X disproportionate impact on things. This gives us some initial reason to focus on the 1st World — perhaps what is meant here, but one must remember that the anti-growth discussion started with Malthus as an argument for *leaving the poor to their lot, and starving themselves into lower population sizes.* Not only doesn’t this work, it’s a reprehensible method to inefficiently reduce resource use. (Malthus said that the rich would consume “prudently” so as to keep the economy going but not overmuch so as to overtax resources. Poppycock.)

Making the problem all the more complex in poor areas and (technically) simple in the richer Global North, women in poorer countries often/usually have less choice in childbearing, and men still see it as an important sign of virility (plus, if you’re a poor agriculturalist, having more kids is individually rational for you). In the Global North, kids and number of kids is much more voluntary. Add to this the fact that population growth slows most in poor countries not with the introduction of contraceptives or draconian measures, but when women achieve some political equality gains and *increase* resource use somewhat such that they also gain access to education and sufficient health resources.

So taking the factors into account, it seems clear that we should certainly work on bringing both population and use intensity down in the 1st World, but the way to address population in the 3rd World implies “development” with substantive equality — a project involving at least short-term increases in resource use.

THESE are the items that seem taboo to me. When we talk about population problems, our problems in the 1st World start at home; the places where growth is the fastest require more complex solutions than a simple mantra or approach of population reduction or contraception can possibly achieve. Implying that the fast-reproducing food can’t have their fair share of food and water until they have less kids while Bill Gates races around on Lear Jets and procreates little mega-consumers unimpeded is the true madness.

Today's Best Thing Ever: Fun with Atheists and Fag-Haters

Overheard in the pretend virtual café where all the J-friends congregate together, from J-friend SYYS:

Maybe what I like about atheists is that, proportionally speaking, their beliefs are just as shocking as those of the faithful. I wouldn't be surprised if an equal number of believers and atheists would say that God is (or should be), in essence, them, but with virtually limitless power. The temptation to not challenge oneself is rampant on either side. For example, when I see people picketing with signs that say "God hates fags" I have this temptation to run over and say, "Isn't it incredible how you and God just happen to agree on EVERYTHING? That's such an amazing coincidence!" I feel like my beliefs are being challenged in a meaningful way by christians and atheists alike, and it's so rare for atheists to feel like their beliefs are being challenged in a meaningful way. Everyone deserves to have their beliefs challenged, right? It's the best! wunderbar!

Though I have to say, I think atheists have their beliefs challenged all the time, but only in that tiresome abstract way of politicians "WE'RE ALL CHRISTIAN HERE, RIGHT?" pandering. I think they/we are challenged less often in our day-to-day lives.

It inexplicably reminds me of a quote I can't find a source for -- from a review of the move "Contact" based on a book by Carl Sagan and starring Jodie Foster. This world body asks Foster why she should represent Earth to aliens, since 75% of the world believes in some kind of God and she doesn't. The reviewer summarized this as: "Inexplicably, all the world's religions got together and got over their differences in order to annoy Jodie Foster."

That's all.

The Clinton Family Fun-Time Minstrel Show

This is my fawning response to a great Slate article here by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton. The title is "The Clinton Fallacy: Black Americans' love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy -- Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s?" (The answer is not really.)

A money quote:

In many ways, the scandal-marred, deeply partisan years of the Clinton administration proved disappointing in the face of such early optimism. Welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier are some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years... But there is evidence that Clinton's unmatched popularity among blacks confused many about the true economic impact of his presidency. In a 2005 article I co-authored in the Journal of Black Studies, I analyzed five national surveys from 1984 through 2000. The data show that nearly a third of black Americans held false understandings of black economic conditions during the Clinton years. By the time Clinton left office, many African-Americans incorrectly believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. In the '80s, barely 5 percent of blacks believed blacks were economically better off than whites. By 2000, nearly 30 percent of African-American respondents believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. This belief is simply wrong. There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic position than whites at any time in American history, including during Clinton's presidency.

Damn straight. I was young during the Clinton presidency -- but even when I liked him, I never got why he was "the first black president" -- other than that he possibly did the best job of pretending/showing that he cared about black people than any other president. JFK's "Boston Brahminism" was never the personal touch that Clinton brought, plus his sax-playing and modest beginnings showed a president a little less... Upper-class white (despite that being what he is now) than we'd seen in a while.

Said another way: Clinton was probably the President least like Richard Pryor's impersonations of white people, which can't but have helped his popularity.

This is my slightly less informal response to the article on Slate's Fray:

It was over-time to start discussing Clinton's honorary "blackness" and what he did to deserve it. Identity politics are misunderstood, misused, and unjustly maligned in today's United States, where there are real and profound racial disparities stemming from past and present circumstances. Beyond the inherited disadvantages of lesser wealth and savings from the African-American slave and then underclass, blacks in the US suffer from a system that's convinced itself it's fair when Jim Crow is still in living memory. Many people are alive today who lived under segregation, yet we pretend that it's a past and best-forgotten phase in the US at that.

All this is to say that there are real disparities between races, and adoration of Clinton, who did nothing real to change this, and abandoned black progressives like Gunier and Elders, is as misplaced as the belief that blacks are equal to or better off than whites -- a perception too common among whites, as well, breeding some of the dissatisfaction with affirmative action and related programs. (After all, if black people are equal or better off, why should they get the breaks?) Eric Alterman rightly pointed this out as, in part, a failing of the media to accurately portray reality in the US, dividing blacks on TV news into criminals and stars. Clinton's stardom is part of this syndrome, and he of course has done nothing to correct it.

One can argue about Clinton v. Obama v. abstention or a third party, but one must do it from the knowledge that neither Clinton can lay claim to honorary blackness outside a bubble of hype and misperception -- they stood for business as usual. Indeed, sadly, these misperceptions are what led people like JFK to be revered, when Nixon and Ford did more substantively for civil rights. They were forced to do it politically, but did it all the same -- while people like the Clintons and JFK and perhaps even Obama get a free pass.

Clinton wasn't the first black president. He was the first BLACKFACE president.

Solidarity, on a belated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day note

Brought to my attention by J-friend Becky:

“It's one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

MLK Christmas Eve Sermon, 1967 .
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/12/276406.shtml

That about says it all.

Obama's Deep Gooey Substance

I've got your audacity, right here.

A GREAT article by Slate's John Dickerson, on Barack Obama: "A Few Inconvenient Truths. Is Obama as much of a straight talker as he claims?"

Another election year must-read, in my humble opinion.

(Deep gooey substance? What the Eff? This the Eff. Though I'm toying with the alternative descriptive phrase for Obama and (to a lesser extent) Edwards, as having the politics of the "gooey nougat center". Opinions?)

Courage, Audacity -- and the vain hope that the candidates will read this Time article

This is awesome.

I'm quite sure I don't agree with Joe Klein on everything, and indeed, I don't agree with his whole Time article, but I'd so I'm on board for most of it.

Frankly, it's the most intelligent center-progressive agenda I've seen from anyone in the US that I can think of. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by someone, somewhere, writing something sensical about the election, but there you have it.

Go, read.

...a Presidential election would seem a perfect moment for laying out an ambitious new goal or two, especially at a moment when 70% of the public thinks the country is moving in the wrong direction. The problem is, politicians hate having to talk about anything remotely adventurous in the midst of an campaign. They prefer safe recitations of conventional wisdom... The candidates owe us answers, whether they want to give them or not... you can learn a lot from the character of their evasions—how their minds work, how much they know, what their basic principles are. Occasionally, they might even say something courageous. And very occasionally, there comes an election where the ability to be courageous, to tell the public things it may not want to hear, is the most important quality we need in a leader. I suspect 2008 will be that sort of election. [Ok, good luck with that one, Joe-boy -- J] The public has come to understand what market-tested political blather sounds like, and it may be ready to reward a politician who tells some inconvenient truths, to coin a phrase, who asks for the sort of sacrifices, in pursuit of specific goals, that President Bush refused to do. But which sacrifices, which goals?

Energy independence.
Universal health insurance.
Education reform.
Mandatory national service.

Solutions are possible, but they will require drastic changes in the way we go to school, get our health care, serve our country, live our lives. No politician with any sense would attempt to join all these battles, all at once, in the midst of a presidential campaign. But in 2008 a candidate who refuses to show some courage on at least one of these issues probably lacks the character to be President.

True enough, man.

Go, please, read this.

Big Brother is Watching, Listening, and Reading... for Bootlegged Britney

In a potentially light-weight return to blogging, I would like to call your attention to this Slate article about AT&T's apparent desire to start monitoring all their electronic traffic from their customers for illegal content.

In what may end up being nothing or may end up being, as author Prof. Wu calls it, the beginning of a privately-run police state (though likely without a young Red Forman heading Detroit crime syndicates under the table for OCP). He rightly points out:

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

This may be nothing, as I think Wu's right that it would be corporate disaster for AT&T: "AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders." But as the sole poster as of 10 minutes ago points out, AT&T was known as The Death Star among telecom peeps in-the-know in the old days. "Mandycat" goes on to point out: "They persistently and diligently bought up well-run and profitable companies like NCR and proceeded to destroy them. They even took the extra precaution of changing NCR's century-old name to something idiotic like "GIS" just in case there was any residual goodwill left intact. It was like a sickness."

Hmm... a plausible explanation has popped up here, claiming that perhaps this is just a pretext for remaking the internet hierarchically so that they can indeed get around network neutrality and discriminate service quality between high-payers and average joes and joanns (guess who gets higher quality). Seaturnip says: "I don't think AT&T at all wants to analyze HTTP connections for pictures, as you suggest. That would indeed be horrendously inefficient. They are probably mainly interested in stopping bandwidth-guzzling movie piracy via peer-to-peer protocols such as BitTorrent."

What say you, oh people of the internet? Is the idea that AT&T will go through with what it announced last week, that "it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws" indeed, as Wu says, "[A] prospect ...too totalitarian for my tastes"? One would think, but of course, I would've said not too long ago that a different prospect would be too totalitarian for most Americans' taste: "AT&T [is] already accused of spying on our telephone calls."

J. Edgar Hoover, eat your heart out.

(ps: what the hell is "eat your heart out" supposed to actually MEAN, anyway?)

The Hindu: A Brief History of US Imperialism

A great summary of the problems of US Imperialism -- which abroad has arguably been just as bad under Democrats and Republicans:

The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky

For The Hindu, Arundhati Roy recounts a brief history of US foreign aggression, adventurism, neocolonialism, and cruelty, through the prism of Chomsky's excellent construction (based on a term from influential journalist Walter Lippman's book in 1922) of Manufactured Consent: the sleight of hand that makes us think we really know what's going on in the world, and give our tacit and explicit consent to US policies that we would likely recoil from if we knew the truth of it.

Ask yourself this, in this holiday season: would you really, eyes wide open, happily and merrily trust a government that looked to "save" the Vietnamese while being so gleeful about their demise:

Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.

So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.

And lest we forget, sadly forget: we've used Napalm, or perhaps more accurately, Napalm II in Iraq. As Marx said, History repeats itself, 1st as tragedy, 2nd as farce: We still have to melt the people to save the people, apparently. And do they thank us for it? Sheesh.

Merry Christmas, and an anti-imperialist New Year...

Grow up!

A nice piece from Herman Daly (a founder of ecological economics) can be found at an exciting blog discovery, here at Growth madness (though the top blogpost right now is about how environmental writers do a fundamental disservice by avoiding the problem of population; it's a statement I don't disagree with, but don't agree with; population is part of the problem but with 4% of the world population consuming 23% of its resources, the actual number of people, especially the vast majority who consume far less yet in general reproduce at higher levels than that 4% -- with that in mind, it seems the 4% and those like it are the most significant element of the problem at present, not just the number of people more generally).

Daly talks about growth & development & what they mean, in language that I pretty near 100% agree with (and have "independently derived" if you will - I haven't read this by him before, but have used pretty similar definitions for growth and development as he does).

And in other, more important news: Antonio Taguba, of the famous (infamous?) Taguba Report (aka the ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE) retired this year and is now talking more about what happened. He says there's more that's not being released, and pretty much flatly contradicts the idea that the torture at Abu Ghraib didn't come from higher up -- not earth-shatteringly surprising news, but news that deserves to be told and retold nonetheless. I, for one, had certainly not heard about this:

… descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son… Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts… a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee… photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties…

“Sodomizing a female detainee”? That is rape, folks… anal rape. I really wish the media would call these things a little more bluntly. “Sodomize” just sounds so Playboy Channel. “Oohhh… kinky fun fun.”

(from Hell's Handmaiden).

See the links for more on Taguba's revelations and his poor treatment ("You and your report will be investigated,") in return for doing his duty -- making sure the US does its best to live up to its ideals. (Wow, is that an idealistically patriotic sentiment, especially coming from me! But I mean it here...)

The New York Times: General Says Prison Inquiry Led to His Forced Retirement, June 17, 2007

The WaPo: Abu Ghraib Investigator Points to Pentagon

and The New Yorker again: Annals of National Security: The General's Report

We owe Gen. Antonio Taguba a debt that only history will fully realize.

Oooo... Good quote!

From today's Slate's Human Nature column (of which I'm a very begrudging fan):

Human Nature's view: The problem with libertarianism is that the first thing people do with freedom is take away the freedom of others.

(Human Nature is written by Bill Saletan.)

My other favorite quote for the day/week/month/year: Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment."

Barack Obama -- Meh.

I had a recent conversation with a new friend that in part focused on Barack Obama and whether he really does represent a new kind of politics and/or a step in the right direction.

Being a bit of a radical malcontent, but with strong pragmatist and idealist roots, I conceded that he might be "the real deal" in that he might mean what he says about new politics and blahedy blah. Certainly, a number of my very astute friends believes he's on the level. I, personally, have my doubts, which I have had some trouble enunciating. I also haven't done extensive research on the man yet, so I can't completely rule him out.

In terms of superficial research, however, I seem to recall that he did say he wouldn't rule out bombing Iran, and also that he did rule out supporting gay marriage. It is my impression -- possibly an incorrect one -- that he was somewhat more bullish on gay marriage until Clinton & others advised him to scale it back a bit, and that he took the more "nuanced" stand of being for civil unions. My chief problems with these two positions he took during his Senate campaign run is that: HE WAS RUNNING AGAINST ALAN KEYES!!!! Alan Keyes couldn't have won that election with the help of God Itself. It seems to me that if you can't stake out controversial views in a no-lose election, then you're just not the person for the job as far as I'm concerned.

Slightly, but only slightly, less superficial research, (that is, Wikipedia without my verifying info in the primary sources listed) gives me similar impressions as my previous ones. If anything, they're slightly sourer. My friend CN feels that, though he disagrees with Obama on a number of issues, from reading his books, CN feels like Obama really is thinking them through and weighing them, and has principled, logical reasons for his stances. I'll have to read it, too, but I have my doubts. My thing is, as a news junkie, I feel like I have an above-average bead on what's going on (though perhaps that's just ego on my part). And Obama's positions do not, in my mind, follow logically from his stated beliefs.

Example A: He talks about bombing Iran and Pakistan if necessary, and the dangers posed to us by a nuclear Iran. Uncontroversial, right? Um, well... if you consider that there's no reasonable explanation for why Iran would attack Israel or the US with nuclear weapons, the idea of starting what would be a bloody and costly conflict against them seems, well, stupid. What do I mean? Simply that: Iranian dictators and religious mullahs are no more completely insane shit-for-brains idiots than the leaders of Soviet Russia, present day Pakistan, or India. Mutually assured destruction (charmingly acronymed MAD) worked and works in those examples -- despite some possibly close calls, neither Russia nor the US launched any nuclear weapons at each other during the Cold War, despite various batshit crazy members in each's government. A more recent example is the acquirement of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India. A number of commentators within and outside of both countries said, essentially, that this was it, MAD wasn't going to work, because what foreigners didn't appreciate is the sheer amount of enmity between the countries, and that MAD be damned, someone was going to say "Fuck it," and start a nuclear conflagration. While that certainly's still theoretically possible, no one's talking about it right now. Why? MAD *did* work.

The Mullahs & Ahmedinejad are similarly not so batshit crazy as to sign their own death warrants with an attack on the US or Israel. Dangerous rhetoric or not, dictators may be reprehensible, but most of them are somewhat savvy in the ways of keeping power, and know that a) if they bomb the US or Israel or Europe, their country, and likely they themselves, are ash; b) if they explicitly threaten to bomb US or Israel, their country is ash; c) if they give nuclear material to terrorists in order that the terrorists bomb the US, Israel, or Europe, their country and ass are still very much grass. From Afghanistan and Iraq, it's perfectly obvious to anyone to see that the US wouldn't wait for the ocular proof to retaliate, and even the whiff of a hint of an allusion that terrorists got nuclear material from Iran would mean, in a word, DEATH for them. (Besides which, some analysts think loose nukes and US & Russian attack readiness are the biggest threats.)

Obama does get into further nuance, but it seems to me that it's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where bombing Iran makes sense. He talks about a nuclear "domino theory" in the region if Iran gets nukes, but bombing Iran would only be worse. In fact, the single BIGGEST thing he could talk about to make us safe is to go back to nuclear disarmament instead of nonproliferation. The difference is, in the prior, ALL countries -- US included -- agree to continuously destroy and decommission their nuclear stocks. If the US, the 800-lb gorilla in our story, agreed to reduce nuclear stocks, other countries (such as Russia) would be able to realistically consider reducing theirs as well. Instead is making sure our nukes are still ready to fly and making new ones from time to time. The LATTER approach, today's nonproliferation focus, simply says "We don't want any more countries to have nukes. Those of you that do, though, um... for shame! But, we won't do anything, you're too dangerous now." Nonproliferation basically tells a country that the only way to be able to defend yourself from US attack & intervention is to finally GET nukes, because once you get them, you're an irrevocable member of the club. Smoke 'em if you got 'em... Not to mention, the hypocrisy of Israel's open secret of their nukes, which are technically treaty and UN violations as grave as it is when "bad countries" do it. What's it called when you have one standard for yourself and friends and another for other people?

Sigh. That wasn't supposed to be so long. My work break's about up. My other examples were going to be Palestine -- where Obama says no one's suffered like the Palestinians, but that when Israel is threatened, we will always stand with Israel, and that Palestinians need to recognize Israel's right to exist -- with no similar demands made that Israel not threaten Palestine or that Israel formally recognize a Palestinian state's right to exist (they've never formally done that as far as I know). 3 times as many Palestinian civilians have died as Israelis; who's the aggressor now? The nuclear power, or the poorest would-be state in the world? And lastly on gay marriage, his retreat to civil unions. My argument is not that these aren't politically wise moves, but rather than if he's running "a new kind of politics," then he should be aware of and promote disarmament instead of nonproliferation or threatening rogue states; he should stand behind tough love for both Palestine AND Israel, rather than just demands of the former and sympathy for the latter; and he should at least admit that civil unions is an intellectually indefensible compromise on gay marriage. "But maybe he really believes marriage is a religious rite and not an actual right?" you say? Well, last I checked a) a number or religions, including individuals and sects within Christianity and Judaism, allow and will perform gay ceremonies, and b) religious freedom was a national right. So if it's a religious issue, and some religions allow it, how does allowing states to ban it represent an intellectually honest path to civil unions, which would be distinct from marriage legally at least in name? And if it's only in name, then isn't that a shell game?

Again -- his positions are reasonable. Civil unions are a famous example of Bill Clintonian triangulation. Keeping the idea of bombing Iran alive is a genuflection to the idea of looking like a tough guy for prez. Being careful not to even fairly criticize Israel -- a necessity for any American pol. But NEW? Hardly. Bill Clinton called his New Kind the 3rd Way. Bush called his Original New Kind compassionate conservatism. Obama calling his New Kind of Politics the New Kind of Politics doesn't make it true this time, either.

The American Apartheid Will Rise Again

Have you heard of The Jena 6? I hadn't, until recently. (TGTDN! Thank Goodness There's Democracy Now!)

I'm running more short on time than usual, but follow the links. You'll think you're in the fucking past -- not just because this happened, but because it isn't being addressed nationally the way it absolutely must and should be.

...

In other news, another shocking story from the August 1 Democracy Now!, though a wholly different level/kind of shocking. Bottled water apparently, wait for it... isn't all that great! Specifically, several more companies have admitted their bottled water is freaking tap water from public utilities:

"...most people don't know that Pepsi's Aquafina, Coke's Dasani, comes from our public water systems... Nestle owns several dozen brands of bottled water. The bottled water brand they source from our public water systems is called Nestle Pure Life. They also own Poland Spring, Ozarka, Arrowhead. The list goes on. And regionally, it's distributed across the country. And then we also have Coca-Cola, which bottles Dasani water, and, or course, Pepsi with Aquafina." -- Gigi Kellett, Associate Campaigns Director at Corporate Accountability International

I know people have railed at bottled water before, but the thing is, it doesn't seem to have taken. Dennis Miller ranted about it some years ago, people laughed, and that was the end -- pass me the Dasani, please -- yes, the Dasani made of tap water that is essentially a 7000X markup on the original tap water. Yes, that's smart -- that's the efficient genius of capitalism at work. And it's not as if this conspicuous and senseless consumption is benign: "The environmental impact of the country’s obsession with bottled water has been staggering. Each day an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away. Most are not recycled. The Pacific Institute has estimated 20 million barrels of oil are used each year to make the plastic for water bottles." (Democracy Now!)

So unless you're in the land of Montezuma or somewhere else without improved sanitation and US water quality, you might want to consider at least buying a Britta and a reusable sports water bottle -- you can get the same water quality at almost 1/7000 the price, AND cut down on "foreign oil dependence", garbage, pollution, ozonation, and bone-headed capitalism.

Go to Corporate Accountability International and DemocracyNow.org for more information on water; see Democracy Now! and LeftTurn.org, or just Google Jena 6 for more information on that topic.

I'm so funny!

Apropos of nothing, I had this conversation today and was dazzled by my own smrtniss, er, smartness, er CLEVERNESS:

Me: If Molly punks out, she'll be punking out on herself, and that's not cool.
Andrew: Yeah, that's true, it's not. But we've all done it.
Me (abashedly): Yeah, that's true.
Andrew: But that doesn't mean we can't still make fun of her for it. We can be hypocrites. (laughs)
Me: Yeah! Hypocrisy is AWESOME! (Pause) As long as I'm the one doing it.

Completely unrelatedly, and apropos to nothing especially that last thing, I've been meaning to write down a sort of declaration of principle that's been rattling around in my head for a while and I just wanted to "get it on paper," as it were. In this case, my paper is a self-aggrandizing blog, and I don't really want to get it down just to remember it, but also to be self-congratulatory. Disclaimers aside:

"It is not the purpose of government to require someone be extraordinary in order to survive. Rather, the true purpose of government is to help create and maintain a society where average people have what they need to live extraordinary lives."

I've been working on the exact phrasing for a while for my own edification, but I impressed myself with the sentiment. It's based largely on Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen and his analysis of "equalities," such as in "Inequality Reexamined." And of course, I use government here in a context of strengthened/a Strong "small-d" democracy, sensu Prugh, Constanza and Daly's "The Local Politics of Global Sustainability," the book that helped set my entire research agenda and career (such as it is right now) in place.

This Sunday, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!

A message from Amanda Edmonds, ace Executive Director of local (Ypsilanti, Michigan) food security/organic urban gardening/food sovereignty nonprofit Growing Hope (see also post from the Growing Hope Blog):

Friends, Neighbors, Colleagues...

You know you love the Corner Brewery. If you haven't been there, you will love it-- promise. I don't even like beer YET STILL I love the Corner Brewery's beer. And, the Corner is smoke-free! Soooo, this Sunday we're having a fundraising beer tasting for GH and I'd love for you to come and support us, drink good beer, and hang out with other lovers of the Growing Hope... Beer for a good cause is good beer.

Join supporters of Growing Hope and connoisseurs of fine brew at Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti to support Growing Hope on August 26th from 3-5pm. Tickets price is $20 per person, which includes beer tasting (open bar!) for two hours plus appetizers. Tickets will NOT be sold at the door. You can buy tickets online from our website-- www.growinghope.net, down at the bottom of the main page-- or reserve your spot by calling or emailing us. Give a hollar at 734.786.8401 or send an e-mail to info@growinghope.net and we'll put your name down! And there's more-- if you want to go ahead and get your tickets for Hope's Harvest (Sept 23 at Cobblestone Farm!) you can also get those on our website!

Growing Hope Beer Tasting
Corner Brewery
720 Norris St
Ypsilanti, MI 48198

Sunday, August 26, 2007
3:00PM-5:00PM
$20 (for lots and lots of beer and food!!!)

Bring a friend or seven! If you're a blogger, please post for us!! Pass around to your colleagues and friends and neighborhoods. We've also got a few remaining spots for people to get in free by volunteering to be beer pourers. If you want one of those, drop a line!

See ya Sunday!
Amanda

Growing Hope is dedicated to helping people improve their lives and communities through gardening. Based in Ypsilanti, Michigan, we work with neighborhoods, schools, community groups, and families to develop and sustain organic community growing spaces; we build on the strengths of individuals and the community to bring the benefits of gardens to all.

A largely "Untranslated" quickie on Genetically Modified Foods

Doing research for redrafting a paper/thesis chapter, I came across at least one recent study where genetically modified foods were fed to animals and then statistically tested to see how the animals reacted vs. a variety of other diets. They in fact used Monsanto's own data, released apparently 2 years ago under lawsuit in Europe (did anyone hear about this? I faintly recall something like that, you'd think it might've resurfaced in the news at some point).

So, the re-analysis found several abnormalities in GM-fed rats, especially in weight (lower in GM-fed rat males, higher in GM-fed rat females), and initial signs of damage to detoxifying organs (kidneys, liver). I read it quickly, it didn't seem that they used a statistical test to screen out the fact that when you do hundreds of stats on something, so number will be significant by chance -- I think there is a repeated measure test one can do. Any road, this is not my forté (stats) and I'll be returned to read this and similar studies more deeply, but this is the type of study we HAVEN'T much conducted on GM foods, on the "If it quacks like a duck" theory. ("If this GM duck quacks like a duck, then we can treat it like a duck, and assume it's safe to eat.") Of course, as I commented in an earlier post, I personally don't think our chemical understanding of proteins et al. is good enough to actually determine such "substantial equivalence," and it would seem reasonable to require animal testing as we do for drugs, what hey? (Drugs, pesticides, cosmetics -- but not food?) Clearly, I think this study needs to be followed up on, in exactly the way people aren't these days: animal studies and similar epidemiology, not dissolving GM food in a tube and analyzing its chemical content, when it's not even clear we'd understand pertinent differences if we found them (i.e. the extreme difficulties in determining protein three dimensional structure, which is at least as important as any other chemical characteristic in determining its effects, if not more so.)

Abstract of the paper for those without academic library access (reprinted here under a fair use assumption):

Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
10.1007/s00244-006-0149-5
New Analysis of a Rat Feeding Study with a Genetically Modified Maize Reveals Signs of Hepatorenal Toxicity

Gilles-Eric Séralini1, 2 Contact Information, Dominique Cellier1, 3 and Joël Spiroux de Vendomois1
(1) Committee for Independent Information and Research on Genetic Engineering CRIIGEN, Paris, France
(2) Laboratory of Biochemistry, Institute of Biology, University of Caen, Caen, France
(3) Laboratory LITIS, University of Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France

Contact Information Gilles-Eric Séralini
Email: criigen@unicaen.fr

Received: 18 July 2006 Accepted: 20 November 2006 Published online: 13 March 2007
Abstract Health risk assessment of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) cultivated for food or feed is under debate throughout the world, and very little data have been published on mid- or long-term toxicological studies with mammals. One of these studies performed under the responsibility of Monsanto Company with a transgenic corn MON863 has been subjected to questions from regulatory reviewers in Europe, where it was finally approved in 2005. This necessitated a new assessment of kidney pathological findings, and the results remained controversial. An Appeal Court action in Germany (Münster) allowed public access in June 2005 to all the crude data from this 90-day rat-feeding study. We independently re-analyzed these data. Appropriate statistics were added, such as a multivariate analysis of the growth curves, and for biochemical parameters comparisons between GMO-treated rats and the controls fed with an equivalent normal diet, and separately with six reference diets with different compositions. We observed that after the consumption of MON863, rats showed slight but dose-related significant variations in growth for both sexes, resulting in 3.3% decrease in weight for males and 3.7% increase for females. Chemistry measurements reveal signs of hepatorenal toxicity, marked also by differential sensitivities in males and females. Triglycerides increased by 24–40% in females (either at week 14, dose 11% or at week 5, dose 33%, respectively); urine phosphorus and sodium excretions diminished in males by 31–35% (week 14, dose 33%) for the most important results significantly linked to the treatment in comparison to seven diets tested. Longer experiments are essential in order to indicate the real nature and extent of the possible pathology; with the present data it cannot be concluded that GM corn MON863 is a safe product.

Trifectas: Clarence Thomas and the J Continuum

As loathe as I am to be put into any sort of sentence, group, state, country, or world along with Supreme Court "Justice" Clarence Thomas, this is my third post for today -- a trifecta of non-thesis related work -- and this Slate article uses my favorite word to describe the assholish stylings of Thomas as he pretends, ever so faintly, to have used principles to come up with unprincipled decisions on free speech and integration. Some money shots:

Despite the vast differences between public education then and public education today, Justice Thomas evidently believes the question of whether students have free-speech rights should be answered by conducting an imaginary séance with 18th- and 19th-century Framers and ratifiers, who should be asked: Do you think public-school students have a constitutional right to free speech while in school? This line of inquiry is about as productive as asking an only child: Imagine you have a sister. Now, does she like cheese?...

...he asks how those alive at the relevant time would have applied that language to a set of facts different than we face today. This elevates the expectations of the ratifiers and Framers over the meaning of the text itself. But the meaning of the text—as Justice Thomas surely would agree—must be paramount over the subjective expectations of any individual, whether alive or dead...

For someone lauded as the originalist's originalist, this is a pretty weak showing. For someone looking to advance a conservative political agenda, however, these three cases constitute a sort of trifecta: Curtail voluntary integration and student rights while boosting the rights of corporations. Not a bad couple of weeks... [i]n two of the three most important cases of the past term, Thomas was forced to abandon originalism—his version of it, anyway—in order to reach a politically conservative result. In the other, his originalist reasoning was weak at best.

Go. Read the whole article.

God I hate Clarence Thomas.

That's Right, Irrelevant Exuberance: Slate Writer Calls for Iraq Withdrawl

Philip Carter, Slate writer and correspondent for their "War Stories" column, and himself an Iraqi veteran, is calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. (Indeed, in May he outlined a plan for it.) I don't consider him to be the world's biggest dove, proof 1 of which might be the fact that he served in Iraq. You can object to war on principle and still serve in the Armed Forces, but that hardly qualifies you for pacifist-of-the-year. What I'm saying is, this is yet another call from someone who can hardly be characterized as a crazy left commie pinko effectively pro-terrorist weak-kneed girly man, but someone who a) seems to know what they're talking about and b) would likely support a politico-military "plan for victory" in lieu of withdrawing if, in their opinion, there was one. I've had something like this viewpoint for a while now, but it's nonetheless good to see it gaining steam, some years later than I'd've liked. (And while one may say, "Well, years ago we didn't know it would turn out like this," please see some of the other countries we've reconstructed post-WWII-reconstruction: Haiti (#1 poorest country in our hemisphere, very high intervention by the US for decades), Nicaragua (#2 poorest country in our hemisphere, high intervention, most of it illegal i.e. Iran-Contra), Afghanistan (not doing so hot), Guatemala (ended up helping a prolonged civil war continue with thousands of civilians killed), Greece, Brazil, Grenada, Libya, overthrowing the democratically elected Shah of Iran, and sundry other examples. In other words, there was no real reason to think intervention by the US was going to lead anywhere good in this case either. Go ahead, closely examine the history of US intervention -- results like those we've seen in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Iran are far more common than those for post WWII aid to Germany and Japan.

A distant cousin (but close childhood friend) once said that he wanted to go into the field of history to make sure that the US learned its lessons and never went completely the way of the British Empire through the course of making the same mistakes, for the love of God. He's since gone into a different area -- it doesn't seem like the slack's been taken up on this one, hmm?

US' falls further behind in Gender Equality

Hello, faithful readers, and people who googled this page by mistake.

So, there are numerous ways one could imagine in which the US falls further behind in gender equality. In this case, it's in our running series, "Countries that already have had elected female heads of state." This includes places from Ireland to Liberia to Pakistan to the UK to Jamaica. It does not, sadly, include us, the US.

Today, India has joined the august body of people with female heads of state before the so-called leaders of the free world. (That's us again.)

That still doesn't mean I'm for Hillary Clinton. J-Friend APVS recently pointed out that, despite not having terribly strong identification with Hillary politically, she thought that having a woman as prez of the US (or a black man, an equality concern for a different day) behind the podium every day for 4 or 8 years, standing, sitting, signing there as the so-called leader of the blahdyblah blah would be an extremely potent visual. (I took some liberties with APVS's exact phrasing).

We here at the Continuum agree, but strongly disagreeing with Hillary on matters of policy (or, more precisely, not trusting her to do the few liberal things she's mentioned and trusting the loopholes she's left herself in the rest will get well-used) we're not ready to vote for her. On Iraq, we find her very disappointing, and on everything else, mediocre at best. We -- er, I, sorry for the affectation -- don't trust Obama, for his part, because his resolve hasn't been significantly tested, and I'm still very very disappointed/frightened by his noises during his Senate campaign about rethinking the wisdom of legalizing gay marriage and the possibility of attacking Iran. It's not just that he said these things that I disagree with, but that he said them in a race he almost couldn't possibly lose. NO ONE likes Alan Keyes. Illinois voters seemed more likely to ask Dick "Dick" Cheney out for a drink than Alan "I hate Carpetbaggers like Hillary Clinton" Keyes "Carpetbagger for Senate '04." The man was not popular, and not just because his voice sounds like Jon Stewart doing an impersonation of the doctor guy from the Simpsons after having had his nose broken. If you can't stand up for liberal positions when your insane-oh "my gay child is going to hell, ha ha" conservative opponent is so thoroughly disliked by everyone and has no chance of winning ("Hmm, we can choose a black man or a black man brought in by the Republicans for the sole reason that he's a black man to compete with the other black man"), then I have nooooo faith that you'll make the hard, correct progressive calls I'm looking for when your gonads are really on the line.

So. Yes. India: Woman President. First one. Beat us, by at least a year and a half if not more. (They did already have precisely one woman prime minister -- they're one of those countries with both a PM and a prez -- which is good and all, though Indira Gandhi was not, from all accounts, a nice person -- in the forced sterilization, authoritarian head of state meaning of the phrase "not a nice person".)

Here it comes, walking down the street...!

For some ungodly reason, I can't get Firefox to let me title this post, but:

OUR ARTICLE'S FINALLY BEEN PUBLISHED! After several years of work, and after being accepted over a year ago, and an unexplained 2 week delay in the stated publication date, "Organic agriculture and the global food supply" has finally been published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems née The American Journal of Alternative Agriculture.

The editor's said it's already caused a bit of a stir and controversy, before it's even been published, and we've already received a couple of critical missives from both those who I consider complete quack flacks and those who have above-board criticisms. Also, we got favorable mention at a recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, of the United Nations) conference, and in a resulting Associated Press article about elements of the conference, titled "Switch to organic crops could help poor." For general information, our article analyzes as many studies of organic vs. conventional and organic vs. low intensity agriculture as we could find from reputable sources (both peer-reviewed academic studies and works from established agricultural data sources, such as the FAO). We find that organic agriculture indeed can provide enough food to "feed the world" -- now, and into the future. We also find that there's enough organically acceptable nitrogen -- that is, non-synthetic nitrogen sources (chemically synthesizing nitrogen is incredibly resource-intensive) such as green manuring (using plant residues) to provide the required fertilization for organic crops. Things are, of course, enormously more complicated than even our article could go into, but the bottom line is, our research indicates there's not a present scientific basis for saying organic food can't provide enough to sustain the world's population.*

I wonder if this really means I'm going to be thrown into the deep end of a sustained controversy, or if this article will lay quiet among those outside certain circles... many friends of ours have been eagerly awaiting its publication, so they can cite it themselves. If anyone else steps into the fray remains to be seen. However, our corresponding authors say that they've received overwhelmingly positive notices from people who've read the paper -- many of whom we've never met before and have no ties to (i.e. not necessarily biased in our favor), and only a couple of negative notices.

In any case, our article seems destined to stir up a bunch of debate, some scientifically rigorous, much not, I'd expect... There are a lot of oxes to be gored in refuting, even tentatively, the "Organic agriculture won't provide enough food for the present or future" argument.

I'm not sure what this means for me long-term. I'm still a bit of an anomaly -- ok, presently a complete anomaly in my department, and ecologists tend to see themselves, in my opinion, as "pure scientists" who shouldn't get involved in messy politics and hard-to-study humans. So on the one hand, I figure that anyone ever interested in hiring me is going to realize from Day 1 I don't hew to the traditional boundaries; on the other hand, I wonder what potentially being in the middle of a contentious debate where it's even easier than normal to mix legitimate scientific concerns and hogwash will bring in terms of favorable and unfavorable attention from future employers.

Since I'm not even sure what sector my future employers will be in, though, I'm not so concerned as of yet. But curious.

Let the games begin!

*(It's useful to note that we didn't find that organic agriculture can necessarily produce more than "conventional" Green Revolution agriculture. Rather, we found it could provide enough food for everyone. More food than can be eaten is not any kind of necessary boon, so the idea that conventional can produce more than organic becomes much less meaningful when producing "more" means food beyond what is sufficient for a healthy and active life with a variety of satisfying foods available to all. As a colleague once said, "Eat until you're satisficed." Indeed, we Americans certainly don't need to eat more on average than we do now...)

An Inconvenient Idea: Poppies and Cocaine for Food

I'm reading -- skimming -- presently a book called Ecoagriculture by J.A. McNeely and Sara Scherr. Color me deeply unimpressed so far, but it has inspired in me another idea that, of course, makes sense but will, of course, be dismissed or poo-pooed or ignored, either because it goes against the supposedly inexorable logic of capitalism, which governs all space-time, and is thus impractical, or simply because it goes against capitalism and therefore those whose oxes would be gored just wouldn't wanna do it. (Of course, the latter is the cause of the former, but somehow this constitutes immovable realities, around which pragmatic progressives should reshape their dreams.)

What the hell am I talking about? yes, sorry, i'll get on with it.

Ecoagriculture is about feeding the world and the growing human population while saving wild biodiversity. The authors point out the existence of widespread hunger, poverty, especially rural poverty and the poor farmers forced to intensify production and encroach on valuable biodiverse habitats to stay afloat... yadda yadda yadda, all things I agree with. Of course, they somehow (so far) fail to see that a) there's more than enough food being produced today, the problem is distribution, and b) intensification (more food on less land) tends to, economically, draw more people to produce as it gets easier to produce more (yay capitalism!), incurring further price declines of the type what makes being a farmer difficult. (And c) several studies at least have consistently shown it's the rich, large farmers who cause the most damage to conservation-valuable lands... go figure, huh? Why oh why wouldn't people and governments want to go after big business? The mind boggles.)

Jeff & Sara so far seem to be saying we should hurry up and help tropical farmers intensify, and sell tropical products to us so that we pay them enough money that they can then buy grain from us! (You see, thereby saving their biodiversity, because they won't have to bother with growing their own food, they can just sell us coffee and bananas and passion fruit etc.)

So. Can't call them out there, insofar as that this is a pretty traditional view. But wait: let's set a moment and think: if we were designing a system that made sense, and the stakes are really high (widespread hunger: check; rapid biodiversity loss: check), would we figure, instead of carting produce around the world in extremely resource-intensive planes as fuel prices are likely to climb and global warming increases, wouldn't it be better for the Developed Countries to just directly aid the so-called Developing ones, with just normal aid payments to encourage programs that support small farmers, support local agriculture and local markets, and in general look to reduce everyone's ecological footprint as much as possible? Do they have to grow luxury items to sell to us to get money to buy food items from us in turn? Doesn't that seem, I don't know, stupid?

So, what's occurred to me recently is that none of the food & environment-concerned folks (or none that I know of, including me 'till recently) are advocating a turning over of luxury crop land to food land. A coffee plantation, when rustic coffee is grown, can actually provide a lot of food & fiber crops. Pasture systems can become silvo-pastoral (integrated with some amount of forestry) and provide a variety of useful products locally, as well. Why doesn't the US stop paying so fucking much for new clothes we throw away a year from now and instead encourage and support foreign countries in subsidizing the conversion of cotton crops into diversified food & fiber systems for local use? And you know what: if subsidies and price structures were set up such that food prices were a decent living, people growing cocaine and poppies or what have you would probably start growing food. Oh, not today or tomorrow, but if the future is as dire as it may be -- and Sara & Jeff seem to be trying to paint a very dire picture, indeed -- food prices may skyrocket! Then, of course, it would be more profitable to grow food than drugs. But why wait that long, and worry of the effect on consumers? Since farmers only get ~$0.20 on every dollar we spend in food (see handy reports from the U. of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, especially the work of Marty Heller & Greg Keoleian, a friend and colleague and a former professor of mine, respectively), and advertisers get a whole bunch of the rest... well, you do the math. Should people starve, or food prices go up, or farmers get an unfair price, or... should we market, and eat, locally, making sure the money AND RESOURCES are used well and used in our own communities?

Some factoids from Marty & Greg (not Jeff & Sara):

Marketing of domestically grown and consumed food, including charges for transportation, processing and distribution, cost an estimated $466 billion in 1998[44]. That represents 80% of the $585 billion that consumers spent on foods originating on U.S. farms. Marketing costs rose 54% from 1988 to 1998. Nearly 88% of the $186 billion increase in consumer expenditures for domestically grown food resulted from increases in the marketing costs[47]. The cost of labor composed nearly half of the 1998 marketing bill. The remainder of the marketing cost is balanced between packaging, transportation, energy, advertising, business taxes, net interest, depreciation, rent, and repairs (see Figure 1). The relative cost of marketing different food items is reflected partly in the farm value as a percentage of retail price seen in Table 9. As mentioned earlier, the farm-to-retail price spread has increased every year for the past 30 years. While retail food prices rose 2.4% from 1996 to 1997, farmers received 4.4% less for the food they produced[57]. In 1997, food manufacturers (including the tobacco industry) received an after-tax profit return on stockholder equity of 19.8% (5.6% as a percentage of sales), a culmination of 5 years of increasing profits. Food retailers averaged a 17.3% return on stockholder equity in 1997 (1.6% of sales)[45].

Surely, there are places where resources and costs must be cut and reallocated that would represent wiser choices in a sustainability-challenged world than advocating and increasing silly exportation? (I.e. the luxury food-for-money-for regular food example given here. See also: Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, where they export bananas and other food to Costa Rica because it fetches better prices there. Then, of course, they have to buy food for themselves, and end up importing some of the same foods from abroad. These are perverse systems, capitalism or no, and I don't think they can survive the harsh gaze of sustainability, ecoagriculture or no...)

Stuart Taylor Jr. Doesn't Suck (for now)

In my last post I was rather worried that Slate "Breakfast Table" column between their senior editor Dahlia Lithwick and legal scholar Walter Dellinger would suffer by the addition of National Journal and Newsweek writer Stuart Taylor Jr., who was brought in as a conservative voice on the rather horribly (imho) decided cases today by the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) to give an alternate perspective on achieving racial integration.

Lo and behold, I don't entirely disagree with him. (Though at my old job, we usually followed that with "What, so then, do you AGREE with him, because those are the two traditional choices?") He recommends integration based on socio-economic factors which will encompass race to a large extent because race has been a primary axis of socio-economic discrimination in the US in the past (and present). I totally vibe this idea, except it always makes me feel nervous because I never want well-meaning (or otherwise-meaning) people to then be lulled into thinking we can thus remedy all racial inequality. Using economics as a proxy works because of the effects of past racism, and so using it as a rubric to solve present racism can only, I think, go so far. Dellinger does a good job of pointing out the limits of Taylor's opinion, as well as the limits to the SCOTUS opinion, and surprisingly, he helps convince me that the University of Michigan's now-invalidated old method to promoting racial diversity in their undergraduate admissions may actually have been correctly criticized -- in that they required the U to decide who belongs to what race, a very fraught and loaded business that large institutions have not previously been known for their goodness at.

In the end, Dellinger makes the good point that "[Justice Kennedy's] opinion [upholding some theoretical future uses of race in promoting integration] looks good only by comparison with the plurality opinion of the chief justice."

And in an end point I won't get into here, from Karen Brodkin, author of How Jews Became White Folks,

Conventional wisdom has it that the United States has always been an affluent land of opportunity. But the truth is that affluence has been the exception and that real upward mobility has required massive affirmative action programs.

In other words, as I think I often paraphrase her, or remember from a different part of her book: "There is little doubt that Affirmative Action can work to diminish disparities for discriminated classes. Indeed, nothing else ever has."

SCOTUS Plays "Hide-and-Go-Fuck-Yourself"

Sigh. So the Supremes have handed down their decision on the de/segregation case, in Kentucky and in Oregon, finding in essence that race can't be used in methods to address racism. This is rather like the Ari Fleischerian formulation of hoping your own hopes aren't dashed. Good commentary/analysis here and here, which big picture says Justice Kennedy's opinion, being the narrowest, (and, frankly, the closest to a "swing") is the "controlling" -- i.e. precedent-setting -- opinion. His opinion has the excellent formulation the race can be used when addressing past discrimination, but really, that's kind of icky and breaks too many eggs to make the integration omelet. He goes on to say it's ok to use race as a last resort, and if you show there aren't other means, such as zoning school districts etc. to make them racially diverse. (Great pre-commentary from Walter Dellinger on the legacy of Brown v. Topeka and the folly of banning race use in addressing racial discrimination here.) In other words -- you can use proxies for race because then we can continue to pretend that race doesn't matter. Fucking A.

For reference: The two cases were in school districts where they wanted to encourage a breaking up of the pre-existing housing segregation, which of course has been in no small part a result of discriminatory practices dating back to the GI Bill and white flight, and before than even, Jim Crow and forced and legal segregation. Their goal was to make sure every school had some portion of white & minority students, and not a ridiculous skew that didn't reflect overall city demographics one way or the other. Actually, Dellinger (a Duke University Law Professor) summed it up this way:

The idea that the principle of Brown condemns the valiant efforts of, say, the Louisville community to maintain schools attended by both black and white students seems profoundly wrong to me. The Louisville school system (I keep using Louisville, because I know that case better) takes account of the race of students to keep each school integrated. They don't try to replicate the one-third-black percentage of the district as a whole in each school, but they do take race into account where that figure would otherwise fall below 15 percent or above 50 percent. Good people, black and white, in Louisville have refused to give up on the public schools. They know that sharp imbalances in the race of a school population leads to "white flight' from the schools and that using race to keep schools integrated is essential to the viability of public schools.

Of course, they could have a system in which each school almost always reflects the racial proportions of the district's overall population simply by assigning all students by lottery. Each school would usually wind up about one-third black. No system would do that because assignment by lottery would impose enormous costs on families in transportation and deprive them of the great advantages of neighborhood schools. But, as I argued in my last posting, using neighborhood as the sole mechanism for school assignment means that the schools will replicate the housing segregation that defines Louisville as it does many of our metropolitan areas. The carefully planned Louisville system combines neighborhood schools with parental choice and some use of race to ensure an integrated experience and a viable public school system.

So. Yes.

Dellinger & Slate's Dahlia Lithwick have been conducting a dialogue on the SCOTUS' recent decisions (linked to throughout my post). They've added a conservative member to bring a new view, whose response is titled: Don't Despair -- There's a Better Way to Achieve Integration. I'm deathly afraid of reading this. Though, there's some slight possibility he's going to suggest higher education for all, universal improvement in housing and human services, cleaning up the pollution that disproportionately affects minorities and poor whites, and general redistributional justice. And perhaps he'll also bring me a dollar with compound interest for my wisdom teeth from 5 years back or so, and take us all to a magical gumdrop land full of chocolate rivers and strawberry fields.

Every Freakish Ovum Is Sacred

Today's Human Nature in Slate talks more about "Interspecies embryos", where apparently human's & (other) animal's genetic material are mixed. I'm not sure what exactly the scientific upshot of this is, but I'm willing to believe it could lead to all sorts of potential exciting discoveries.

But it's still creepy. At least petri-dish bestiality isn't likely to be any good for a disturbing new porn site.

But creepy as it is to me, that PALES in comparison to what Saletan says the Catholic Church in England and Wales has announced:

Bishops' testimony: 1) "Interspecies embryos" should be treated like human embryos. 2) "At very least, embryos with a preponderance of human genes should be assumed to be embryonic human beings." 3) "It should not be a crime to transfer them … to the body of the woman providing the ovum, in cases where a human ovum has been used to create them. Such a woman is the genetic mother, or partial mother, of the embryo; should she have a change of heart and wish to carry her child to term, she should not be prevented from doing so."

gah Gah GAH!!!! That is an amazing ascending order of craziness. Ok, sure, treat a chimera embryo as human, that's just extending the Catholic pro-life absolutism a little farther... ok, if it has a "preponderance" of human genes, we're now going to go ahead and, I don't know, assume God has ensouled it so it's an embryonic human being which in the pro-life stance has the same rights as a post-embryonic human -- i.e. developed, birthed, breathing, differentiated, extremely multicellular human being, ok, gettin' crazy now... So, are you done? what What WHAT? It shouldn't be a crime to try to gestate the damn thing? I guess the only consolation is what I expect would be the extremely low chances of bringing an interspecies ovum to term. Species that can't interbreed often end up having problems way before birth -- though many of those involve blocking fertilization of the ovum in the first place, so I don't know. ANY CASE, here're my questions: Has any woman actually said, "Please, can you put my cow baby back in my womb now? We're naming her Marilyn Mooooonroe." And, if not, is the Catholic Church really pressing them to do so? ("Really, in this case, think of your cloven-hooved baby as a blessing from God!")

(It does appear that scientists don't expect to use human eggs, but rather animal eggs with human genetic material, but the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales seem to have said "preponderance of human genes" or something of that sort. I think the Cadbury Cow Egg filled with Creamy Human DNA would be even less likely to successfully implant in a human womb, but whatever -- we have, or at least I have, NO IDEA what this would do to the woman in question or what the embryo's development would be like. If, by some extremely small chance, implantation and gestation were to actually get under way, my guess: bad. It really would be horrific if the Bishops of England and Wales were encouraging some of their flock to go through a possibly dangerous and patently ludicrous attempt to bear an experimental chimera just to save one of God's microscopic children. Do we really need some more extra-special complicated ethical questions? Did the Bishops of England and Wales just get bored? I have a movie to suggest, if so.)

Now, see, THIS is why John Kerry lost...

Readers of the J Continuum know I'm not the biggest of John Kerry's fans, but fewer remember I was completely on board with him in the early, pre-primary days. And indeed, even when running, when people said nuance was killing him, I said nuance is good, and necessary, and without bringing nuance into widespread, mainstream political discourse I don't think most other progressive goals are achievable.

But, you know... nuance is different than fucking windy. You ever meet those people who use half hour power point presentation when really, 5 words would do? Or, more surrealy, when one's mortal opponent in a deadly battle to the end is temporarily dazed and you think it best to tap them lightly on the head to check if they're ok? This is what John Kerry did responding to the VP's beyond-risible propositions that a) the VP's office is not part of the Executive branch of government because he's also the (usually non-voting) president of the Senate and therefore some execu-legislato chimera so nyah nyah nyah, and b) ignoring all that, the VP's office was specifically exempted from following the President's Office's orders for the executive branch because the President specifically excluded the VP's office.

What do we call this, ladies and germs?

FUCKING BULLCRAPTACULAR comes to mind.

Senator Kerry, your reaction:

This legalistic response raises more questions than it purports to answer," the senator said in a statement. "I . . . ask again for the Vice President's office to plainly answer the question of whether he considers himself outside the realm of agency scrutiny."

WHAAAAAAH?

Outside the realm of agency scrutiny? Legalistic response? That's what you have to say about claims that the Vice President is NOT PART OF THE PRESIDENT'S BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT alongside simultaneous claims that THE RULES THE PRESIDENT SETS FOR HIS ADMINISTRATION SHOULDN'T APPLY TO HIS THE SECOND-IN-COMMAND IN HIS ADMINISTRATION? Who with the fuck now?

Sen. Kerry, I think the appropriate response is best summed up with a paraphrase of the great Jon Stewart:

"Stop it! You are hurting America!"

(and just BTW: Is there any way that one can look at these cold, dead eyes and crooked teeth sortieing from a crooked smirk and not feel a shiver going down their back as if they've sensed the presence of true malevolence? (Next time, on the Continum, J becomes a charismatic minister: "The DEVIL, he is REAL, for I have SEEN HIM!"))