The Chiliasm Chronicles

Modern civil defense: Spin vs usefulness

2007-07-05T18:13:00.000-04:00

It's really interesting how, despite the decades of additional knowledge available, today's "Emergency Preparedness" booklets sound an awful lot like those of decades ago. Just as in the 1950s, they're vague, incomplete and practically useless in a real crisis.

Recently I came across a print copy of the Emergency Preparedness Manual from the Northeastern District Department of Health (NDDH), the regional health agency that covers Windham County, CT. Having had frequent contact with NDDH people since last September, I know they mean well, are generally competent at their jobs, and have been holding periodic disaster drills of various types to improve regional response coordination. Unfortunately, this guide doesn't show it.

Simply put, such guides should be written assuming the reader has ZERO experience preparing for an emergency and knows next to nothing about the potential hazards. The bold text on page one certainly implies that: It states the agency wants people to be "in the know and ready to go," and tells us to "Prepare now so you'll be ready when seconds count."

Great. The only problem is that, 15 pages and a few passing references later, they still haven't told you how to do the most basic thing -- create an emergency kit. It has several pages defining highly unlikely weapons and diseases that might be involved in a crisis, including sarin, soman, shigellosis and Q fever, but doesn't say word one about what a kit should contain or where in the area to get its contents. Same is true of creating a household emergency plan. ##

The one clear emergency kit reference is itself problematic. Under the section on sheltering-in-place, it states, "Take your emergency supply kit [to your safe room] unless you have reason to believe it has been contaminated." Ummm ... If the kit's being stored at home and is contaminated, doesn't that usually mean the HOUSE is also? You shouldn't stay there, obviously, unless going elsewhere is worse.

Getting into what the guide does say, it's quite correct in noting that "where you should shelter during an emergency is different depending on the emergency." It recommends sheltering upstairs in biological or chemical crises (on the grounds that those toxins tend to be heavier than air, which is true), and underground in radiological or nuclear incidents (also true, with caveats we'll get to). When there, it recommends (as usual) keeping tabs on radio, TV, the Web and other news sources, which might be useful in some circumstances, but wouldn't exist (at least locally) in others.

It fails to note a serious catch-22 in its suggestion for securing that safe room by covering all doors, vents and windows with plastic "Home Guard Barrier Sheeting" (that's never clearly defined) to keep out air -- It notes that the air will eventually become unbreathable, but fails to note that it may be NECESSARY to stay in the shelter for several days (beyond the air's breathability limit) under some circumstances. That would put people in the unwinnable situation of having to choose between, say, radiation exposure and suffocation.

Of course, it also fails to note that the plastic sheeting might indeed keep out particles and toxic gases, but is useless against radiation. Later, when it defines radiation, it generalizes that radiation is "present all around us" (which is true) but completely ignores that different types of radiation (i.e alpha, beta and gamma) require different thickness of shielding and approaches to cleanup. Under "acute radiation syndrome," it lists symptoms, but fails to clearly ID the pattern of onset, the two that are generally seen as characteristic of serious exposure -- hair loss and blood changes -- or that the highest exposures typically spark the fastest symptom onset and have the worst prognosis.

The brief sections on earthquakes (not a big threat here), explosions, fire, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes are largely just common sense and need no comment. But those involving nuclear weapons are dangerously understated.

A glaring case in point is this line -- "... any shield or shelter will help protect you from the immediate effects of the blast and pressure wave" of a detonation. Although technically true, this depends greatly on how close to ground zero you are. Most structures that aren't built of reinforced concrete would become fast-flying shrapnel if you're unlucky enough to be too close.

Most likely, this area won't experience nuclear thermal or blast effects because we're too far from the nearest real target; the real threat around here is fallout, which could come from targets in almost any direction. In that case, residents do need to seriously consider the guide's question of whether to shelter nearby or evacuate the area, but a viable evacuation would depend on what the target was and if there were more than one. Being New England, there aren't many places that aren't at risk of some fallout, except maybe parts of Maine, but NE Conn. is much more susceptible than most. (In passing, it also mentions community shelters, but doesn't say where they are or which ones are potentially fallout shelters.)

That raises a concern the guide also doesn't touch at all -- psychological issues. In crisis, people tend to fall back on very basic, well-learned skills and reactions or, lacking those, panic. At the extreme, people literally shut down, becoming walking automatons or doing nothing at all and letting the horror overwhelm them. What is available to counteract that tendency? I know NDDH has some connections to local mental health services and the state DMH, but what could these agencies do NOW to help people buttress themselves during the crucial period between the emergency event and any relief effort (if there is one)?

From what I've seen, NDDH seems to be pretty good at training police, fire, EMTs and similar services to cooperate, but there's very little effort to get the everyday citizen in on the act.

## The state of CT's preparedness guide, by contrast, very clearly spells out what such a kit should contain, using the standard three-day minimum rule. It also notes something I find encouraging: The first statement (after political blathering) is "Identify and understand your surroundings, including potentially dangerous weather conditions, flood plains, chemical facilities, nuclear plants, etc." That info could be very important, and I'll bet a large number of people couldn't say what the potential risks are in this area. In case of nuclear detonations, I'd also suggest having an idea of what the possible targets are within, say, 100 miles and what the typical wind pattern is.

I also like its simple checklist for creating an emergency communications plan, including the important reminder to have contacts in the area AND out-of-state to contact in case of separation. That would be beneficial in all but the worst catastrophe (namely, nuclear holocaust).

Did we learn nothing?

2007-06-16T22:48:00.000-04:00

From Nukes on a Blog comes this note:

According to a June 7, 2007 press release from Nuclear Watch New Mexico, “The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has invited Members of Congress to ‘celebrate’ on July 2 its production of its first certified plutonium trigger (AKA ‘pit’ or ‘primary’) … produced by the U.S. certified for deployment to the nuclear stockpile since 1989.”

So…a party to celebrate the first new plutonium pit certified for deployment to the stockpile since the year the FBI raided and closed the old plutonium pit facility?

If the scientists are claiming the existing stockpile of pits are stable and will work for the foreseeable future, why do we need more? Clearly, regardless of what they SAY about non-proliferation, this administration intends to create a system by which the U.S. is actually building MORE nukes, not just replacing the old ones, as they claim they want to do with the RRW program.
One question: If they don't yet have Congressional funding for RRW (recently zeroed-out), where is the money coming from for the new pits for those weapons we aren't building?
Another question: Who benefits? As the old saying goes, follow the money ... and we'll see who is really behind this push for new nukes, when many military people recognize they aren't practically useful.
Of course, practicality has never mattered much to this administration. All they care about is politics and image, and nukes are excellent for that purpose -- they look strong (if sold properly, which this admin is terrible at), but they're impotent because they can never be USED. Having nukes is a lot like having AIDS -- if you know it, you should be responsible enough to stop transmitting it, because you know it will eventually KILL you and your partner(s).

Bringing Aug. 6, 1945 home

2007-06-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

It hasn't gotten a lot of coverage yet, but hopefully it will:

Steven Leeper, the American who was recently appointed to run the Hiroshima Peace Museum, is trying to find people across the U.S. to help him display photos, artifacts, and so forth in an effort to remind people just how nasty nuclear weapons really are.

An L.A. Times article is here.
The museum's site is here.

I intend to help Leeper's effort, and could use any help from my readers as possible, especially if you're in MA or CT and/or can pass the message on far & wide. His initial note to me read:

Thank you for contacting me and your offer to help with the exhibitions. Very soon, we will be sending out a letter to potential allies in this effort. You will be on the list. After you receive the letter, you will probably still have some questions. Please write to me at this address and I will be happy to tell you everything I know.

We do need allies, but we have lots of them in MA. Can you do CT? Or Rhode Island?

Anyway, please wait for the letter, then respond quickly and we will be underway.

Thanks again,
Steve

I'll keep everyone informed of progress.
My idea at this point is to use whatever he has in mind as a centerpiece for a display that also features art, poetry and other materials by local people, educational efforts in the local schools, and so forth. It's still in an embryonic stage, obviously.

One thing I DON'T want is for it to include a broader critique of nuclear power. While that issue certainly has problems -- primarily surrounding disposal -- that desperately need to be dealt with, including it here only muddies the water. To me, nuke power still has the potential to be a good thing, if used properly, and we can solve the problems by thinking creatively. But nuke weapons have no redeeming value at all -- they ARE the problem.
We've all seen a definite increase in the frequency of nuclear disaster references in the popular media -- repeats of "The Day After," the series "Jericho," specials on Hiroshima specifically and cataclysmic disasters generally, new books like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," political blathering from all over, and even an episode of the cartoon "King of the Hill." To me, it seems like the atmosphere today is beginning to be as "nuclearized" as it was back in the 1980s, with one major difference ... There's not enough political outcry from the people-at-large. I hope helping an exhibit like this will change that.

"Little" wars cause huge problems

2007-02-22T22:32:00.000-05:00

Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts
by A. Robock, et al
Published in Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics Discussion 11/22/06

Last fall, a decidedly unpublicized climate conference revealed what anyone with common sense probably already suspected: even little nuclear wars suck.
Read it here
Not only would a regional war using "just" 100 Hiroshima-sized warheads (about 15 kt each, or a total of 0.03% of the globe's nuclear killing capacity) potentially kill the same number of people as died globally in World War II, but it would likely cause temperature and precipitation changes that would rival those that made the Little Ice Age (c. 1450) such a fun time to be alive, with the Black Death, famines, and related problems.
The report, by six scientists including Turco and Toon of TTAPS fame, argues that such a war would cause the average amount of shortwave radiation reaching the earth's surface globally to fall by nearly 10 times the amount it would rise given a doubling of atmospheric CO2. But while the latter doubling has been projected to occur over decades, the post-war decrease would happen within the first year, and conditions would only gradually improve over the next 10 years or so. During that time, the world would likely see a 10% average decline in precipitation and a 1 deg. C average temperature decline for at least five of those years.
While that may not sound bad to the average person, the report's charts and maps are significantly more chilling right after a war: Some parts of the world could see temp. drops of as much as 7 deg. C, with large swaths of western and central Canada, most of Europe, parts of Siberia,most of Australia and the African Sahel hardest hit. At the same time, screwed up atmospheric circulation could cause huge precipitation changes, cutting the rainfall over much of N. America by 20-40% and the Amazon by around 70%, while increasing rainfall by 70-100% over the Sahel and Sahara.
Obviously, losing 70% of the Amazon's rain is likely to have a significantly larger effect than doubling the Sahara's.
Add those things together, and the Robock team is predicting large changes in the growing season for most of the world's breadbasket regions, with North America, western Eurasia and southern South America losing up to a month's growing time for several years.
In doesn't take much to realize this combination of factors bodes ill for lots of people. What the report doesn't look at, however, are other synergies: radiation and/or toxins making some areas uninhabitable (Hiroshima was reinhabited quickly because its bomb was an airburst with little fallout, but wars using multiple bombs detonating in a fairly small part of the globe -- say, India & Pakistan, or Israel & Iran -- aren't likely to be so clean.); numbers of traumatized refugees and injuries that will easily overwhelm the world's medical and humanitarian system; long-term genetic concerns, for those directly affected and globally because of the increase in average radiation levels; economic chaos possibly leading to further wars that might involve the major powers, etc. These may seem exaggerated -- after all, the study looks a war that doesn't directly touch any of the world's major industrial nations -- but the last time we saw such a death toll and economic impact, most of the world had several years to prepare for and absorb it. This one could happen literally overnight.
Our government is making a big deal of Iran's supposed quest for the Bomb, and that should indeed be a global concern. But we need to put as much pressure on India, Pakistan and Israel to come clean about their programs and, far more importantly, resume GLOBAL negotiations to get rid of nuclear weapons forever...

The uniform is NOT a religious tool

2006-11-11T22:04:00.000-05:00

In my day job, I have nearly fallen asleep at some events I was covering, but have never been so offended by one. Until now.

The offending event? A Veteran's Day dinner.

Going into it, I knew it was being sponsored by a local church, but that didn't concern me too much since it was public, free, and at a public school.

For the most part, the speakers who made religious references did so in ways that were at least in context to their stories. I've never had a problem with people believing their faith played some role in their survival in battle, even if I think their training and teamwork (and a little luck) was actually the cause. Nor did I bridle at the prayers the minister gave; that, after all, is his job. But I did find the keynote speaker extremely offensive.

According to the oath of office every military person swears upon enlistment, the job is to "protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic." Tell me, where in that phrase do you find any reference to the Bible or any other religious text?

Apparently, the event's keynote speaker did, somewhere other than among the "enemies" of the Constitution. Correctly noting that the event's purpose was to give veterans, cops, firefighters, and others words of encouragement, hope and thanks for their bravery, he went off the deep end by blatantly proclaiming "the only message of encouragement and hope" is that of salvation through Jeebus.

Veterans Day is about recognizing bravery and sacrifice in service to our country. I don't give a damn what someone believes privately, but if they're publicly representing the nation -- and anyone wearing an Armed Forces uniform speaking at an event is -- they'd better NOT be promoting any form of religion. He was, arrogantly assuming he had the right to preach one narrow religious viewpoint to a school gymnasium full of people celebrating the millions who have served. Many of those present were probably not Xian, and that's definitely true of many of the people who put their lives in danger for their fellow Americans.

As far as I'm concerned, his assertion that he serves and obeys the Xian god is in serious conflict with his oath to serve the United States. What if we elect a non-Xian president (we've had several Deists, people whom the Xian right would never consider Xian)? What if the military had to fight against an ostensibly Xian country or to suppress a fundamentalist uprising in ours? By proselytizing while in uniform, he dishonors the service of people like my father (Army in 'Nam) and grandfather (Army in WW2) who are essentially secular, anyone who is Jewish, Muslim, Pagan or any other religion, and anyone who is atheist.

That's especially true because he says his "mission" is to spread the Xian doctrine ... one many of us see as anathema to the principles of freedom (all Xians are "servants," per the Bible, and servants are by definition not free), peace (Jesus pledged to bring a sword), civil order (his followers were expected to desert their families), and even the principle of military obedience to civilian leadership (kings in Biblical days led by force, not popular will). The existence of that kind of fanaticism in our armed forces reminds me all too easily of the lunatics in Dr. Strangelove and al Qaeda. It is the kind of attitude that provokes crusades (jihads) and witch hunts, and leaves little room for negotiation or compromise -- one the future can do without.

"...Pahk yuh kaah..."

2006-11-05T20:59:00.001-05:00

I guess my mother will be happy to know she succeeded at making sure I didn't have a significant New England accent....

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
North Central
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Musing on cyber-money

2006-10-28T18:57:00.000-04:00

Earlier today, I had to hit the bank to deposit Jenn's check, and was listening to Midnight Oil's Blue Sky Mining album. I'm not sure what about those things inspired the following, but something did...

For many people, the cyber-economy is a fiction, a place where people can manipulate numbers without real world consequences and the numbers themselves have little or no validity. Trillions of dollars flow through cyberspace daily, multiplying with little link to the "real world."

To some degree, I agree with that attitude. But this morning, it also occurred to me that the cybereconomy, if properly managed, has far greater potential to meet humanity's needs than does the traditional economy.

The cybereconomy is not, in fact, rooted in nothing; its roots tap the various intangibles we as a society should put a much greater value on -- creativity, independence, personal uniqueness, entrepreneurship, community and intelligence. These things are not just "business" attributes, they're things most people share, and the cybereconomy actually acknowledges this fact. Combined, these traits provide the basis for an economic system that can truly be global, even go beyond this planet when we do, and include everyone capable of coming up with a new idea. The cybereconomy even has a place (although today's "leaders" won't like this concept) for hackers and counterfeiters, because they create value where none previously existed ... just like the speculators of the old economy.

The traditional economy, by contrast, gives those concepts lip-service, but doesn't really abide by them. Because it's rooted in material resources -- gold, silver, furs, crops, whatever -- it is inherently subject to control by the relatively few people who have those things. Regardless of what avenue of economy a person wants to be active in, there are invariably restrictions of some kind and inconveniences placed on the flow of goods and ideas to benefit a few who claim to "own" them.

As a zero-sum system, the old economy favors certain kinds of interactions -- namely, exploitative ones -- among people and between humans and nature, often to the detriment of both. The only difference is that the "loser" gets harmed immediately, while the "winner" gets harmed in the long-term. It is, by its very nature, a form of both autocratic and scarcity thinking, yet its practitioners deny that fact, to the detriment of everyone.

One example of the fundamental difference between the two economies is art. In the old system, access to art is severely limited, by wealthy patrons (including governments) owning it outright or limiting its circulation to museums that only a relatively few people have access to, for fiscal or geographic reasons. Although many people express their creativity artistically, a small handful tend to define what is economically valuable, and thereby greatly limit the potential of art as a means of livelihood.

By "cyberizing" art, however, the original, physical work still exists, but a vastly larger number of people have access to it and the opportunity to see and be inspired by it. The focus of what's valuable shifts from the actual object to the idea of art and the mindset behind the act of creation.

The same thing could really be said about many things in cyberspace, especially simulated communities. There, people have the choice to literally change the world into something they'd want to live in and an opportunity to experiment with ideas or behavior that very rarely exists in the "real" world. While some people use that opportunity to escape from physical reality, others use it to discover who they are and what they believe. While some of the concepts expressed are hostile, I think the fact they can be expressed and shared makes hostile acts less likely in the long run.

uh-oh...

2006-10-28T18:44:00.000-04:00

When I read this story in the Arizona Republic, an admittedly slightly paranoid idea struck me: they know the voting machines are crooked.

Early voting strong in Maricopa County

Robbie Sherwood
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 28, 2006 12:00 AM

Voter turnout for the Nov. 7 general election could be high if early-ballot requests are any indication.

Early voting is strong in Maricopa County, with approximately 470,000 requests received by Friday's deadline, said Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne. There are 1.5 million registered voters in the county.

She cautioned that Election Day turnout might not be very brisk because of a long ballot.

Osborne did note one "anomaly": Nearly 90,000 more Republicans than Democrats have early ballots but have not yet mailed them back. The gap is usually only half that large at this time, she said.

Republicans typically vote by mail in larger percentages than Democrats, but the numbers could be a sign of an extra effort by state and federal candidates to get out Republican voters in the GOP stronghold of Maricopa County, said Doug Cole, a campaign strategist.

Of the early-ballot requests in Maricopa County, 52 percent came from Republicans, 32 percent from Democrats and 16 percent from independents and unaffiliated voters.

More than 125,000 mail-in ballots have been cast.

Statewide, early-ballot requests were nearing 700,000 late this week

.

This is also an election that features yet another of those Constitutional amendments (Proposition 107) to prohibit gay marriage. According to the Phoenix New Times, it "would also eliminate health and financial benefits that normally accrue to a civil union or couples living together." If anyone reads this blog from AZ, please vote against such nonsense -- it's short-sighted, ideologically-driven bigotry that has no place in a free society.

(I realize I don't live there now, but I did, and think part of me still calls Arizona home.)

Reinventing the Middle East ... and more

2006-09-16T17:26:00.000-04:00

Hmmm... Ralph Peters has an interesting concept of what a future Middle East could look like. Among other things, he proposes new nations like an Arab Shia state, "Free Baluchistan," and "Greater Kurdistan," and the "Islamic Sacred State;" significantly enlarged Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and Yemen; and significantly shrunken Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Some of those things make sense, some don't.

Truthfully, I've thought along those lines, too. Being a map buff, I've played with maps of the tribes and languages in that area to craft an alternate Middle East, and it shares a few points with Peters. For example, I also came up with Kurdistan and Baluchistan, but his vision of a mega-Afghanistan makes no sense culturally. That nation even as it is today is a mess of peoples that don't function as a nation. It's Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, Kyrgyz & other groups often don't share linguistic or cultural heritage. Some of them have significant numbers of their tribe in neighboring nations (namely, Pashtuns, who are also numerous in Pakistan, and Tajiks & Kyrgyz, who have their own countries), while others are seriously discriminated against (namely, the Hazara).

He leaves a rump Pakistan that has little cultural history at all -- the only reason Pakistan exists today is that it defined itself by its Muslim majority in the 1940s, after British India threw off London's yoke and Gandhi got assassinated. A real split based on cultural lines would eliminate Pakistan entirely, giving some (mostly the western regions) to other countries (above) and unifying the bulk of its people into what was, before and somewhat during British rule, a resurrected state of Punjab, which would include part of NW India.

Speaking of India, I think it's interesting that Peters only targets MUSLIM nations for dismemberment. Hindu India is the world's biggest polyglot nation, with literally hundreds of linguistic minorities and a history of being divided into many co-existing (and sometimes warring) nation-states. The nation's disunity stretches back millennia, to the days the first Indo-European tribes migrated from the north and settled in the Ganges valley, but left a large Dravidian population in the south.

To be sure, India has been unified numerous times in its history, but that unity was often a surface unity only, with urban areas (especially the Ganges Valley) accepting whatever the current imperial dynasty was but tribal areas (especially in the south) rejecting him. A great example is Ashoka's Empire, possibly the greatest Indian emperor. The top map is how his realm is typically depicted in historical atlases, but the bottom shows how puzzle-like it really was.

The fact that India is today a functioning democracy is largely despite those centrifugal pressures, but we still see them emerge at times. Today's most notable example is the Tamil Tiger revolt in Sri Lanka, where the Sinhalese Buddhist majority is trying to prevent the Tamil Hindu minority from slicing off the nation's NE third. Those Tamils have a significant presence on the Indian mainland, being a large majority in the state that bears their name, Tamil Nadu.

In some respects, I think Peters' proposal is merely a reflection of the current trend away from big nation-states and towards more ethnically-homogenous entities. Although he's unfortunately correct when he says that 5,000 years of experience shows that ethnic cleaning works, as we've seen in the Balkans and Iraq, I don't think a resurrection of tribalism or regionalism HAS to involve mass murder, as the mostly peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia and the USSR proved.

In some cases, such breakups would probably be beneficial in the long run. Take Turkey: Why does Ankara WANT to keep the fractious Kurds in the country? Why not let them form their own nation and wash Turkish hands of the problems caused by the feuds with PKK & similar groups? The primary reason is probably a vestige of Turkish memory of imperial glory, since the Kurds are the last remnant of the dozens of nationalities the Ottoman Empire ruled for centuries. But the more practical reason I can think of is water -- the Kurdish population resides in the highlands that spawn the Tigris & Euphrates rivers, while most of Turkey itself is semi-desert. An independent Kurdistan would be a major regional player for that reason (not to mention oil wells near Kirkuk & Mosul).

At times, I think this concept should be extended to the US, too. As time goes by, it seems like the liberal, cosmopolitan Northeast and Pacific coasts seem to be sliding away from the conservative, more segregated South and central states in attitude, education, religiosity, dialect, and various other factors. Are we seeing the development of new cultures? Probably; every major state in history (except maybe China) has given birth to new societies rooted in the old one. Many of those spin-offs happened violently, either by invasion or revolution, but we can't afford that today.

Instead, maybe it's time for the people of various states and regions to consider whether their interests are truly best served by being part of a federal America, or whether democracy is best served by having several countries and maintaining friendly contact via modern communications technology and family ties, but not political ones. There's no reason the US couldn't be similar to Europe, with several independent nations linked together by economy, geography, shared interests, and more-or-less open borders to travel and commerce. I think smaller states enable people to watch over and participate in government more easily and are therefore able to be more genuinely small-d democratic. Since this is likely to happen in time anyway, we might as well manage it consciously so as to ensure as much as possible that the outcome is peaceful and orderly. Otherwise, history shows it's very likely to be bloody and chaotic.

Thanks to Kelly at Singularity for the tip.

When media muddy the waters

2006-09-01T00:38:00.000-04:00

Last night, I caught the last half of 20/20's special "The Last Days of Earth." Much of what they said was pretty accurate, albeit seriously lacking in depth, detail, and source citation. The problem I have with the show, however, is that even I as a layman could see some things they said (or, more often showed) did not help the cause of good science.

If you didn't see it, you can probably guess what it was about by the title and the fact I'm writing about it on this blog -- various forms of apocalypse. They looked at seven, but I can't remember them all and only caught the last four: asteroids, nuclear war, global pandemic, and climate change, ranking the last as the most serious threat.

Common sense says all of those things are in fact real threats; but I'm not sure I'd give them the same order. To me, the most serious in terms of what it can ultimately do to humanity and nature is nuclear war, because, in a very real sense, it combines many of the effects of the other three. The combination of megadeaths plus long-term radiation plus a massive smoke pall plus other "synergies" would very likely destroy human civilization for a very long time and cause major changes in the genetics of human and natural communities alike.

Admittedly, I rank that a little higher than asteroids because, while a really big asteroid can actually sterilize Earth and I don't think we can nuke Earth into sterility, if a nuclear war happens it's our fault. Asteroids are impersonal; nuclear war is not.

Asteroids

Anyway, I'm digressing. 20/20's section on asteroids was simplistic but truthful about the prevailing theory that asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving mammals a chance to take over the reptiles' ecological niches. But the "reporters" then argued that an asteroid of the same size hitting Earth now would burn the crust to a depth of 60 miles. Obviously, that's crap: there's no way our mammalian ancestors would have survived such a strike. They lived semi-nocturnal, semi-underground lives, but not that far underground. The only lifeforms that have ever lived that far down are extremophile bacteria.

You can test the effects of various sizes of asteroids here or here.

It mentioned that people have found around 100,000 asteroids, but didn't mention that we occasionally lose some, are constantly finding some only when they cross Earth's orbit, and suspect there are countless more out there. Chances are, if one hits us, we won't see it until it's too close to do anything about.

Of course, they could be right about the one they mention specifically -- an asteroid that's due to make a close (within the Moon's orbit) pass in 2029. They don't say that will hit us -- general consensus is that it won't -- but that the near-miss might alter its orbit just enough to cause a hit the next time around in 2037. What they don't mention is just how small the risk really is: 1 in 26,000 in 2029 and cumulatively just .00023% chance between now and 2054, during which time it'll have three close approaches. The show doesn't identify that chunk of rock, but astronomers know it as 2004 MN4 or Apophis.

The show's discussion of what people are likely to do if faced with a probable direct hit was kind of interesting, but also fairly predictable. It's pretty safe to assume chaos would reign as the time drew near as people try to do things they'd never before attempted (for good and ill). Nobody said they'd go out and commit crimes (obviously, they wouldn't say it on national TV even if they would do it), but a few said they'd want to have children. Excuse me?!? How can someone be so supremely narcissistic as to bring children into a world they knew was going to get walloped by an extinction-level-huge asteroid?

What was equally troubling was what the show didn't mention -- the probability that some people would try to organize a major space effort to keep humanity alive off-world. Such an effort may well be the only thing that could prevent such widespread chaos, and I've said before that I believe we need a good global space program as insurance against just such a catastrophe.

Nukes

The section on nukes was woefully vague and much shorter than the subject warranted. It didn't say anything about radiation or various other ill effects, although it did point out (accurately, I think) that the nuke threat from places like Iran and North Korea is being blown out of proportion to the risk caused by the thousands of nukes the US and Russia still have on "launch on warning" status. It failed to mention, however, that both nations are trying to create new, smaller, more mobile nukes, especially the U.S. Add that to the simmering problems in the Middle East, and it may be time to revisit the Doomsday Clock's setting of 7 minutes to midnight, which hasn't changed since 1992.

The one really questionable assertion they made was that "an exchange of just 20 missiles would cause nuclear winter for several years." The problem here is that the number of missiles is irrelevant, what matters is the number and strength of the warheads and where they explode -- urban or rural, airburst or groundburst. Burning cities are significantly more likely to spew the toxic smoke into the sky that can block sunlight and cool the land, especially if hit by warheads that explode close enough to the surface for soil and debris to get sucked into the fireball. Even the TTAPS study of the early 1980s predicted a 5,000 MT threshold for nuclear winters, which requires significantly more than 20 missiles.

Elsewhere Sagan (as cited by Alan Phillips), notes it could happen with as few as 100 warheads if the targets are predominantly oil refineries and associated structures. Obviously, we don't know for sure... and sane folks don't want to. There's some controversy over the TTAPS calculations, sparking some of the theory's supporters to acknowledge that there needs to be more research done in this area. We've got better climate-study technology and computer simulation capability than we did in the 1980s, let's target it on this threat.

Desmond Ball of the Australian Nat'l University argues even more specifically that even a full-scale war hitting both cities and strategic weapons sites, which Ball estimates at 4140 to 4650 MT, would throw up less smoke than Sagan's nuclear winter threshold of 100 million tons, largely because of where those missile silos are -- in farmfields and tundra, not forest.

Obviously, I'm not citing him to downplay nuclear war's horrors. Even without nuclear winter, it would be by far the worst calamity to have ever hit mankind, and for that reason, I'm still in favor of banning the bomb.

My guess is that a full-scale nuclear holocaust would actually leave most people alive in the short-term, but hundreds of millions, if not billions, would not survive the social, economic, and agricultural disruption, radiation, temporary loss of the ozone layer, diseases, and other problems that can reasonably be expected after such a catastrophe, even if the temperature change is minimal. (Imagine what shape Europe or Japan would've been in for years after WW2 if the US had not created the Marshall Plan. That's the catch -- global nuclear war isn't likely to leave anyone untouched, even nations that don't get bombed, simply due to the nature of fallout and our world's high level of economic interconnectedness.) But I suspect humans will still be here long term, reduced in numbers and cultural complexity and possibly permanently unable to regain today's level of technology, science, and the possibility of reaching the stars.

Pandemic

I can't claim to have anything resembling detailed knowledge of this subject, since I'm not a doctor and have no medical experience of any sort. But as a layman with some knowledge of history, I noticed a couple of things that seemed a little out of whack. In one place, they claim the 1918 Flu Pandemic "killed only 3% of those who caught it." That figure didn't ring true ... but it was. If anything, it was higher than the actual percentage (I came up with about 2.5%). The New England Journal of Medicine reports that "the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people" worldwide. NPR adds, "About 25 percent of the population was infected, with perhaps 650,000 people dying from the virus." At that time, US population was about 104,550,000.

According to the same NEJM article, "more than half the deaths occurred among largely healthy people between 18 and 40 years of age and were caused by a virus-induced cytokine storm (see diagram) that led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). ...If we translate the rate of death associated with the 1918 influenza virus to that in the current population, there could be 1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million to 360 million deaths globally."

The show also notes that smallpox & other germs could be used as weapons. In its present state, the show said, smallpox kills about 30% of its victims -- a significantly higher rate than the 1918 Flu. Under some circumstances, it's even more deadly -- some evidence suggests the death rate among the biologically unprotected Native American population exceeded 65%.

Climate Change

This was an unfortunate mixture of mostly good spoken fact and grossly misleading imagery. Most obvious was when they spoken of sea level rising if Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt -- 20 feet individually, 40 feet together. That's a pretty severe rise, one that would (as their sources, which includes climatologists and Al Gore, said) inundate south Florida, southern Louisiana, Bangladesh, parts of Manhattan and possibly London, and many other coastal areas. but teh graphics shown at teh same time exaggerated the flooding immensely: they showed blue covering over half of FLorida, huge stretches of the UK, and even mountainous regions of Southeast Asia and Africa far from the coasts.

As TV studios know quite well, people pay far more attention to images than words, a fact that makes such a presentation a major league disservice to the work the scientists are doing. By so exaggerating a threat that is serious enough on its own, it only provides ammunition to the very naysayers the show largely (and accurately) discounted verbally.

Instead of hyped up graphics of biblical proportions, they should have taken the time to show realistic maps of the potential sea level rise, scenery from areas that are already seeing problems, etc. Among those available are these ones from the EPA (note that they only show a 3.5 m rise), or go to places like this (USGS) or any decent topographic map of seashore regions and figure it out yourself from the contours.

10+ years and little change...

2006-09-01T00:31:00.000-04:00

I came across the article this links to while doing some research for a story at work. It's a little old (1995), but much of what it says hasn't changed significantly. If you're concerned about protecting public education and the transmission of secular ideals, please read it.

The "war on Christians" ...

2006-08-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

... really is happening. But not because of us secular folks. It's being prosecuted by scumbags who claim to be Christians!

Church congregations often vulnerable to fraud and schemes
Billions of dollars turned over by the faithful lost to scam artists

By Rachel Zoll THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Randall W. Harding sang in the choir at Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, Calif., and donated part of his conspicuous wealth to its ministries.

In his business dealings, he underscored his faith by naming his investment firm JTL, or “Just the Lord.” Pastors and churchgoers alike entrusted their money to him.

By the time Harding was unmasked as a fraud, he and his partners had stolen more than $50 million from their clients, and Crossroads became yet another cautionary tale in what investigators say is a worsening problem plaguing the nation’s churches.

Billions of dollars has been stolen in religion-related fraud in recent years, according to the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state officials who work to protect investors.

Between 1984 and 1989, about $450 million was stolen in religion-related scams, the association says. In its latest count — from 1998 to 2001 — the toll had risen to $2 billion. Rip-offs have only become more common since.

Cases in recent years show just how vulnerable religious communities are and Chuck Crites, a former member of Crossroads Church, learned firsthand how effective con artists can be.

The businessman was swindled out of $500,000 by Harding in a Ponzi scheme, which uses money from newer investors to pay off older ones.

Crites said Harding, who pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and money laundering, boasted about helping fund a new Christian high school for Crossroads and hired a music pastor from the megachurch as a sales agent. “At one point he even told me how much money he had given to the church that year,” Crites said.

Lambert Vander Tuig, a member of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., ran a real estate scam that bilked investors out of $50 million, the Securities and Exchange Commission says. His salesmen presented themselves as faithful Christians and distributed copies of “The Purpose Driven Life,” by Saddleback pastor Rick Warren, according to the SEC. Warren and his church had no knowledge of Vander Tuig’s activities, says the SEC.

At Daystar Assembly of God Church in Prattville, Ala., a congregant persuaded church leaders and others to invest about $3 million in real estate a few years ago, promising some profits would go toward building a megachurch. The Daystar Assembly was swindled and lost its building.

And in a dramatically broader scam, leaders of Greater Ministries International, based in Tampa, Fla., defrauded thousands of people of half a billion dollars by promising to double money on investments that ministry officials said were blessed by God. Several of the con men were each sentenced in 2001 to more than a decade in prison.

“Many of these frauds are, on their face, very credible and legitimate appearing,” said Randall Lee, director of the Pacific regional office of the SEC. “You really have to dig below the surface to understand what’s going on.”

“The size and the scope of the fraud is getting larger,” said Patricia Struck, president of the securities association and administrator of the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions, Division of Securities. “The scammers are getting smarter and the investors don’t ask enough questions because of the feeling that they can be safe in church.”

Typically, a con artist will target the pastor first, by making a generous donation and appealing to the minister’s desire to expand the church or its programs, according to Joseph Borg, director of the Alabama Securities Commission, who played a key role in breaking up the Greater Ministries scam.

If the pastor invests, churchgoers view it as a tacit endorsement. The con man, often promising double digit returns, will chip away at resistance among church members by suggesting they can donate part of their earnings to the congregation, Borg says.

“Most folks think ‘I’m going to invest in some overseas deal or real estate deal and part of that money is going to the church and I get part. I don’t feel like I’m guilty of greed,’ ” Borg says.

If a skeptical church member openly questions a deal, that person is often castigated for speaking against a fellow Christian.

Ole Anthony of the Trinity Foundation Inc. in Dallas, which investigates fraud and televangelism, partly blames the churches themselves for the problem. Anthony contends the “prosperity gospel” — which teaches the truly faithful are rewarded with wealth in this life — is creeping into mainstream churches.

Harding was nabbed with the help of Barry Minkow, who was himself convicted of fraud years ago. Minkow eventually became a pastor in San Diego and started the Fraud Discovery Institute, which is dedicated to investigating scams.

Crites is putting his money toward a new fraud-awareness kit for churches and other groups that Minkow is developing.

“It made me angry at how people are abusing the trust that exists in church communities,” Crites said.

Investigators say all denominations are at risk, but the most susceptible communities are ones where members are deeply engaged in church activities, such as service programs and small group prayer, giving con artists plenty of chance to ingratiate themselves.

Is this 1706 or 2006?

2006-08-12T15:47:00.000-04:00

(Expanded 8/13/06)

Recently, while researching unrelated stuff in the Mass. General Laws, I came across something that made me realize some of the religious wingnuts' ideas aren't that far from reality's surface (in a very scary sense). Here, in the state that legalized gay marriage and prides itself on being one of the most liberal in the nation, a book like Christopher Moore's comic novel Lamb, anything atheist, and anything challenging biblical accuracy are technically illegal.

Chapter 272: Section 36. Blasphemy

Section 36. Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying,cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior.

There are obviously all kinds of things wrong with this statute. One of them is this: how do you determine, as a matter of law, whether something is done "contumeliously"? I might have heard that word once before, but still had to look it up to be sure it means what I suspected it meant:

adv : without respect; in a disdainful manner. [syn: contemptuously, disdainfully, scornfully, showing contempt]

In other words, the law is redundant as well as religiously biased. Without doubt, such laws are worthy of contumelious reproach in large quantities, especially if the phrase "his government" was intended to mean the human officials governing us. Any law suggesting that government is divinely sanctioned, even if it's a good government, is dangerous to democracy and free thought.

Even by standards of other existing blasphemy laws, the Mass. law is a little extreme (although not nearly as extreme as Pakistan's, which calls for death if convicted). Wikipedia has a good, brief summary which notes that the last person jailed for violating such a law in the US (specifically, the Mass. law) was Abner Kneeland in 1838.

According to AJ Rivers, a pro-Christian writer in the UK, British law reads:

Every publication is said to be blasphemous which contains any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous matter relating to God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible, or the formularies of the Church of England, as by law established. It is not blasphemous to speak of or publish opinions hostile to the Christian religion, or to deny the existence of God, if the publication is couched in decent and temperate language. The test to be applied is as to the manner in which the doctrines are advocated and not as to the substance of the doctrines themselves.

Note the distinct difference in bold... although fundies tend to not consider ANY statements opposing them to be "decent and temperate."

Rivers, who supports having a blasphemy law on the grounds that Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice from 1671-76, claimed Christianity is part of English law in 1676, reasonably notes that people need to comprehend a law for it to be valid, and the fact that most Britons are secular means such laws are essentially unfair to them. He also notes that "the sincere heretic is not automatically a blasphemer."

Mass. law, as we've already seen, says otherwise, and Biblical "literalists" have no interest in being fair or considering the views of others. They'd rather enforce laws in much the same way God does in Exodus 32:10, when God threatens to slaughter the Israelites down in the valley for creating a golden calf despite the fact they do in to praise him and have not yet received his new law saying it's wrong.

Rivers writes, "For 'blasphemy' is inextricably linked to exclusive truth-claims." That's exactly the problem. Laws like this criminalize speech based solely on ONE side's definition of what is "truth," as opposed to what can be documented as fact for both sides.

"For the sceptic, religion is essentially a matter of uncontrolled, and thus arbitrary, choice," he writes. "But from within a religion, the commitment stems from a recognition of the truth. Unbelievers are blind, not mistaken. One's own faith cannot simply be changed at will."

The fact that millions of people convert between religions or give up religion entirely every year disproves Rivers' statements here. The only sense in which religion is NOT a choice is that in which children are taught its tenets from an age that's too young to question them; without the ability to seek alternatives, they naturally accept anything they're told as fact. When they eventually do develop the ability to think for themselves and the stockpile of experience and knowledge to ask good questions (if they're allowed to), the doctrine has a firm hold on their subconscious that is extremely hard to untangle. Religions would not survive without such ready-made believers.

We unbelievers are not blind; we just see where real world fact contradicts religious "truth" in ways that make religion not useful to us. To us, there's no point in allowing the Bible, Qu'ran, or other doctrine guide our daily lives any more than we'd want Tolkien, Heinlein, or Darwin to do so. If a source is accurate, it's worth borrowing from; if it's out of date or simply documentably wrong (in a factual, not moral sense), it needs to be corrected.

That concept is blasphemy to many serious religionists, who cannot accept the fact that their sacred books were written by humans, for humans. Often, those books do contain some ideas that reflect common human experience and make evolutionary sense -- they wouldn't stand the test of time if they didn't. But most such ideas do not need to be written down to be passed down the generations; ideas such as the Golden Rule are practiced by illiterate cultures as effectively as by literate ones. The existence of books only made it easier for specific codices of ideas and experiences to be disseminated more effectively than others ... and thereby expose both their strengths and their weaknesses more broadly.

Most of the latter come from the fact religions evolved within a specific cultural and historical period; those who founded them did not actually target all of humanity for all time, and would have thought doing so an impossible if not ridiculous task. They were concerned mostly with their own people -- often, literally, their biological kin, or at least kin groups descended from some shared ancestor, real or imagined. Religion evolved as law for societies in which most people were related and illiterate, but the times have changed significantly and religion needs to catch up, just as secular law should.

In that vein, I sent the Massachusetts blasphemy law to my state rep with the following note:

I came across this outdated law while doing some other research. Since it clearly dates back to colonial times and clearly expresses favoritism of one religion over any others in violation of the U.S. Constitution, I'm asking you to propose a bill to repeal it: [Text of law here cut for space].

I realize it probably hasn't been invoked in a century or more, but that's beside the point. As long as archaic and discriminatory laws like this exist, they can and eventually will be used by those who seek to repress free thought.

His response:

You make an excellent point regarding out of date laws. I am happy to file this on your behalf if you would like for the upcoming session, which will start in January of 2007. Let me know if this has your approval.

Obviously, I approved.# He's a Republican, but around here, most GOPs are pretty sane; they'd be Democrats in most other states. Most likely, this bill will pass with few objections.

But I bet that wouldn't be so in some of the "Red" states, and that's the whole point -- Puritanism is far from dead, and anyone who cares about freedom needs to find this kind of law and push for its repeal before it can be used to bludgeon us back into the Dark Ages.

_____________________

# It was not lost on me, though, that he can only be sure of this b/c he has no opposition this November. Nor does my state senator or US rep., and my US senator's token opposition has no chance of winning. Although I love the fact that Mass. is very liberal, I would like to see more interesting elections.

'Damnation Alley' vs. Done Very Badly

2006-08-08T15:22:00.000-04:00

The Book: By Roger Zelazny (1968; *** of 5)
The Movie: Starring George Peppard, Jan Michael Vincent (1977; * of 5)

About the only two things the book and movie versions of Damnation Alley agree on are these: (1) The main character, Tanner, is on a life-threatening journey across a hostile, bizarre post-apocalypse America in an specially-built armored vehicle and (2)the skies are regularly colored by weird, almost hallucinogenic aurora storms. Otherwise, they might as well be about two very different stories.

I don't remember if Zelazny's name was mentioned in the movie credits, but if I were him, I wouldn't have had anything to do with it. It's that bad; that far off the book's plotline. The ONLY thing warranting even one star was the atmospheric effects -- the acting is horrible, the characters have no personality, their journey is pointless, the various encounters are implausible. Hell, even their route cross-country doesn't make sense: Why would someone traveling from California to Albany divert to Detroit... when the early scenes specifically state Detroit's gone?

In the film, Tanner is this half-assed, wanna-be biker who quit the military after the war because he saw no point in staying in. The bike just exists to show how "cool" he is ... and he rides it at every stop, regardless of the fact that many of them would still be glowing with radiation. The film, however, has almost no reference to radiation at all. Instead of being a sever challenge, the journey is essentially a lark undertaken solely for selfish reasons -- Tanner and other military folks go 3000+ miles to check out a recorded, repeating signal in Albany that isn't saying anything, and would be impossible given the atmospheric disturbances. (In the film, the events happen about 2 years after the war.)

The real Tanner has a first name that says a lot about him: Hell. He's a REAL (stereotyped) biker -- the "last Hell's Angel," leader of a rapacious gang who terrorized struggling California communities until he got caught. He's been in jail a few times, killed several people, smuggled things to other surviving communities, and is finally given an ultimatum: Take plague serum to Boston (NOT Albany) or rot his remaining years in prison.

There's no radio -- just a radiation-sick Bostonian messenger who struggles into Los Angeles pleading for help. In Zelazny's vision, California knows Boston still exists, and believes it might be the only other organized nation left on the continent. As it turns out, at least two other places are still organized, Salt Lake City (which, in the movie, is occupied solely by carnivorous cockroaches; the filmmakers clearly didn't have the skill to portray the complexity of interaction with a living community) and Albuquerque, and others are populated but essentially lack government. These events take place at least a generation after the war -- Tanner was born afterward, and is somewhere in his 20s. It might be longer; Tanner encounters an insane scientist on his journey who remembers the war and the anti-science pogroms afterward; he could be in his 50s. (This character, one of Zelazny's more interesting side characters, doesn't exist in the film.)

Zelazny gives us scenes of life in Boston -- it's a real place, with real people (the almost hopeless mayor, the greedy businessman, the teen lovers, cops hunting down looters, all struggling under the threat of extinction by plague). That's unlike the movie's Albany, which is a complete fantasy, a religious heavenly escape from reality. It is the fundamentalist end-all-be-all salvation as a selfish goal rather than the book's salvation as something people give to each other to help them through tough times.

In both versions, there are huge animals marauding across the landscape. The movie depicts them with exceptionally bad special effects -- it's so obvious they've spliced images of scorpions into a set background, for example. The book's beast are more variable -- huge bats, scorpions, snakes, Gila monsters, etc. But they are no more plausible: Evolution doesn't work that way. Radiation-induced mutations MIGHT create extra-large lifeforms, but only in very small numbers, not hordes. A far more likely probability would be a much LESS fecund landscape, smaller creatures, deformities that harmed their ability to adapt, etc. Zelazny's story is really a nightmare that happens to have an apocalyptic setting, not a survival novel. But he gives the character a palpable humanity -- flawed, but not entirely evil.

The movie plot also makes no sense. In the beginning, text says the war "knocked earth off it's axis," and at one point a character claims "if it comes back, everything could go back to normal." That's complete bullshit, not just very bad, lame pseudo-scifi. Of course, in the film, the latter happens at the end -- a deux ex machina where the hero rides into the sunlight over a green landscape. The book has no such nonsense -- Hell Tanner's success doesn't change the world; the sky is still full of garbage & electromagnetic storms. It doesn't even change him that much -- Boston erects a statue in his honor, and he's "the most likely suspect" in its graffiti defacement.

All it does it save some lives.

Oh, and one personally quirky thing I liked about the book (and disliked the film for completely omitting it) was that Tanner used Mass. Route 9 for the last leg of his journey. As a kid, I LIVED on that road. At one point, about age 4, the cops even had to take me home because I was "directing traffic" in the middle of it :-).

I'm not sure what Zelazny saw as a target at 90 mi from Boston, though -- that's in the middle of the rural Berkshires. The nearest town of any size is Pittsfield, and that's not worth nuking. The nearest probable target is Westover Air Base in Chicopee, about 60 miles from Boston, but that's not on Rte 9. (He has several scenes of Tanner avoiding radioactive craters that aren't near any plausible target.)

"Common sense" & the Simplification hypocrisy

2006-08-04T14:36:00.000-04:00

Over at David Brin's blog Contrary Brin, there are always intresting threads on the rampant misuse of "common sense," primarily by Republicans, to uphold their own influence at the expense of changes that would benefit the vast majority of the world (such as technological changes sparked by the effort to counter global warming). In one, he quotes former GOP White House staffer Peggy Noonan as saying:

"I note here what is to me a mystery. It is that people with lower IQs somehow tend, in our age, to have a greater apprehension of the meaning of things and the reality of life, than do our high-IQ professionals, who often seem, in areas outside their immediate field, startlingly dim. I don't know why intellectuals--or cerebralists or eggheads or IQ hegemonists--seem to miss the most obvious things, floating on untethered by common sense.”

Attitudes like this underlie and even create the kinds of blame games -- and, ultimately witch hunts -- I talked about a few posts ago in "Messing things up..." In those books, the fuel is religion, but as Brin & his readers note, the underlying problem is that some people have a vested interest in believing that if we win, they lose. Therefore, they feel they have to win at all cost, regardless of what that may do to our (and, by definition, their own) future generations or other long-term considerations.

Instead of blaming the truly responsible parties -- those who were unable or unwilling to negotiate or to look at the situation from someone else's viewpoint; those who put their own narrow wishes above the needs of the many -- the forces expressed by Miller's Simplification, or Brackett's New Mennonites, or any number of historical pogroms find scapegoats that are easy to identify. Ironically, those kinds of processes are often started by people who, by most reasonable definitions, are themselves intellectuals (for ex., Marx, Lenin, Neitzche), but achieve their bloodiest expression later under a second tier of leaders who are essentially thugs (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler). Anti-intellectual attitudes can be found on the fringes of the political spectrum under any label.

Noonan and many others are themselves intellectuals, and essentially recognize that their "zero-sum" perspective cannot survive over the long term if we as a species are to continue growing intellectually and technologically. So they hypocritically appeal to the mob mentality so easily created among those who aren't as well educated but see (accurately, in many respects) that the "eggheads" in fact have a less restricted life than they do. Zero-sum folks take that energy and target it at other people, pointing out the differences between "us and them" in terms of "their" failings (in Noonan's case, how "they" lack "common sense" or "morals" or whatever).

By contrast, people who see the benefits of a "positive-sum" approach take that energy and target it at the ideas and behaviors that are holding those people down, encouraging them to get educated, to question their situation, and to use their talents to benefit everyone including themselves. Instead of appealing to manufactured differences, it appeals to the common ground we all share. That is the basis of the practice of science, efforts for civil rights, and liberalism in it's broad sense -- expanding the numbers of people who are educated or at least feel like they're a valuable, equal part of the complex national (ultimately, global) community.

Doomsday begins at home...

2006-08-03T15:15:00.000-04:00

...Especially when the household involves child abuse, or, worse, child sexual abuse.

Sick stories involving the creatures who do such things have been popping up in the media with greater frequency in the past couple weeks than I've seen in quite some time. I've seen at least six such stories. A few are: Here in MA, 11 guys got nabbed in "Operation Trenchcoat" for using the Web to solicit sex from minors. Another couple recently got convicted for molesting their own kids... and encouraging them to have sex with each other -- the husband got 5 life terms, the wife, 40 years. And now, a Cleveland guy purporting to be promoting the arts -- and self-proclaimed pedophile -- is being held for molesting autistic children.

In part of the last article the Herald didn't print, AP added:
"Not all pedophilia is bad, and sex with boys can be healthy,"
Distasio said. "It's an argument I'm willing to make, but my attorney is not."

No shit. That's because the attorney's not a twisted fuck. These kinds of self-justifying arguments are common for pedophiles, who typically have little ability to see things from another's point of view (esp. their victims'). Detective Mark Gado has several common traits of pedophiles here.

The first website a Google search for Distasio's group turned up said, "Arcadian Fields is a ministry of the Universal Life Church. The goal of the ministry is to provide free food and shelter for artists and musicians in order to promote education and health through interactive entertainment."

Since this pervert is apparently AF's FOUNDER, I can guess what kind of "interactive entertainment" he had in mind. Even more twisted details of "Brother Patheticus" can be found here.

The ULC has zero qualifications for ministers. They will literally ordain anybody, and that points to a serious problem. Groups like ULC, while they might be well-intended, provide cover for those who see authority of any kind as a ticket to express their own whims. Those can be good; I believe the group aims to give Pagans a chance to practice their faith with legal protections other ministers get, including the right to marry others. But for some (obviously including this creature), the authority is solely being used to benefit themselves.

As a step-brother to two people who are developmentally-disabled & someone who worked with autistics and others for several years, I can't really put into words how disgusted people like this make me. But I can summarize it this way: Child sexual abusers are among the VERY few criminal types I have no problems executing.

But that doesn't prevent the problem from recurring. As someone I interviewed once said, child abuse "grows like mold in darkness." The only way to prevent it is to blow open the doors of secrecy, to stop treating children as if they're the property of adults and acting as if their ideas and their reality mean nothing. I think a big part of that means standing up to our society's acceptance of religion as an excuse for people's behavior. While the vast majority of religious folks are NOT child abusers/molesters, all too often, molesters justify their abuses with religion or use religious threats as a weapon against their victims.

Child abuse, with or without molestation, just continues the cycle of violence we see writ large in society's drug abuse, gang and international wars, and less obvious manipulations of people for the benefit of a few. If we want real peace, it literally has to start at home, by ending child abuse.

A few good sites on this issue:

The National Assoc. to Protect Children
Andrew Vachss's website
RAINN
David Baldwin's Trauma Pages
Men's Resource Center for Change

Thanks to Dispatches from the Culture Wars for the tip.

putting things in perspective

2006-08-01T23:47:00.000-04:00

Hmmm... As i mentioned a few posts ago, I got laid off a week ago. I hate job hunting, but even if I find no job for the rest of this year, the money I've made so far makes me wealthier than 87% of the WORLD's population.

Wow. Where do YOU stand?

I've known for a long time that we Americans take our wealth for granted, but seeing that really brings home how much of a disparity there really is.

Wow.

I don't think there's ANYTHING we could not achieve with our nation's wealth if we really wanted to do it.

Messing things up even after the end

2006-07-29T22:29:00.000-04:00

The Long Tomorrow, by Leigh Brackett (1955; **** of 5)
A Gift Upon the Shore, by M.K. Wren (1990; **** of 5)
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959; ***1/2 of 5)
Swan Song, by Robert R. McCammon (1987; *** of 5)
The Stand, by Stephen King (1990; ** of 5)

Religion plays a major, even inordinate, role in many conceptions of what life might be like after civilization collapses. That, of course, surprises no one. One factor in why armageddon in any form is a threat is that fundamentalist dogma says it basically has to happen for their doctrine to be fulfilled. To prove their way is the only "right" way, they promote massive destruction, although not always actively.

McCammon's Swan Song is probably the most obvious example of this I've ever read, possibly exceeded only by Stephen King's The Stand. Both of these lengthy tomes have strongly dualistic themes, with rampaging inhuman evil leading human evil in an effort to kill off the last of human hope. King's version is overtly Christian in tone, even to the point of having the evil forces based in Las Vegas, while McCammon's has almost a pagan feel, with its focus on a girl who can grow plants magically, an obvious mother goddess image. The main evil character in both is almost identical, right down to his ability to shapeshift, making me wonder if one inspired the other.

An interesting element of Swan Song, though, is a key good character's blatant rejection of the fundamentalist insanity -- literally. Sister, a former NYC street person, starts off being incredibly delusional, ranting to everyone passing by that "the Rapture" would be a wonderful thing. Appropriately enough, she calls herself Sister Creep at that time. Although she never remembers her real name, after the bombs fall, she does remember what happened to her to cause her madness and realizes the whole concept of "Rapture" is crap. Despite the existence of evil, nobody's coming down to swoop the good guys into a wonderful other world -- the only wonderful world that'll exist is if good people create it themselves.

That latter theme is sort of echoed in both Wren and Brackett, but in a different way. In both, a small element of society is trying to save the science and printed wisdom of our civilization ... to the great horror and religious opposition of the majority. Wren's tale is a microcosm of Brackett's -- it focuses on just one group of people, with two who want to save books and teach the children to think opposing several who believe all books are evil except the Holy Babble. The fact that the two skeptics are women in a very patriarchal cult and possibly lesbian lovers (that's never clearly stated, but definitely suggested) creates an extra level of tension.

In Brackett, the fundamentalist impulse reigns supreme, in the form of New Mennonites who overtly reject the science and cities of 20th Century America. The book has a good point that a back-to-simplicity mindset would indeed be a survival trait in the decades after WW3, but coupling that with venomous, Babble-quoting lynchings of people even suspected of harboring scientific devices or ideas is not. They go so far as to pass a 30th Amendment to the US Constitution banning all communities of over 1,000 people or 200 buildings. (Brackett writes one of the few post-WW3 books that postulates a new dark age in which the US survives as a country; in this case, our society is dropped back into the 18th or 19th Century.)

Brackett's New Mennonites would fit right into the Simplification envisioned by Miller: rampaging mobs of self-described "simpletons" murder the vast majority of educated people, then even literate folks, and burn any books they can in their anger at the folks they blame for WW3. That Simplification, however, doesn't specifically have a religious motive; in fact, the whole point of the book is that the Catholic church helps save what knowledge it can.

The irony there, however, is subtle -- the key character spurring the creation of the monastic order of "bookleggers and memorizers" is a scientific, secular Jew (the title character) later canonized for alleged miracles having nothing to do with his eforts to save knowledge. Furthermore, although the monks don't hide the material they slavishly copy over the centuries, they don't actively share or utilize it either. In 3074, the monks have had the printing press for a century ... largely becasue an abbot 500 years earlier specifically rejected a proposal to build one as unnecessary because there was no market for cheap books. (Never mind the fact that cheap books would have made it possible to educate people more easily; in 3074, there's a line noting that the village of Sanly Bowitts has the "fantastic literary rate of eight percent" despite being just a few miles from the abbey and its 100% literacy rate.)

That kind of dogmatic foot-dragging is common in Miller's chronicle. In fact, I'd say organized religion's strength (when not being used to promote hostility) is it's ability to preserve the past when the average level of society is low, but it is largely ineffectual at dealing with the present or promoting a healthy future when average people are educated. The browbeating that works on the ignorant only annoys and turns off the educated, but many churches cannot adapt effectively to cultural change, and tend to speak with a voice of unreason cloaked as "morality."

Toward the end, we see references to the Pope praying for peace as another nuclear war threatens a re-established global civilization that has progressed beyond ours technologically (including space colonies) ... but doing nothing to actually prevent war. Instead of criticizing people for their behavior, how about promoting the common ground humans share regardless of nationality? Had the Church done THAT over the centuries, there probably wouldn't be a threat of global war (Miller's future war OR modern war).

A look at the past... or future?

2006-07-23T23:08:00.000-04:00

Not far from where I live, the towns of Dana, Greenwich, Enfield and Prescott were evacuated to make way for Quabbin Reservoir in 1938. The people were scattered among various other communities, their houses removed except for the foundations, their cemeteries transplanted, their way of life completely re-arranged. The acreage of the towns themselves -- what isn't now underwater -- was ostensibly annexed to neighboring towns, but much of it is state-owned conservation land protecting the reservoir's feeder streams. Even a railroad and state Route 21 that used to serve that area are gone.

The maps are quite telling (look in the lower right-hand corner): 1938 vs 1939.

Today, I visited what used to be Dana Center. It's accessible by way of a generally passable, still paved road that's closed to car traffic, with grass and moss growing through the cracks and potholes. (On the 1909 map (the first link above), that's the route from Nichewaug through Dana and down along Pottapaug Pond, which still exists as a de facto arm of Quabbin.) A hike of a mile or so through forest that's still reclaiming old farmland at the edges takes you past a modern portajohn, a couple of small trails leading to stone house foundations, a locked hut containing some old signs, and a big rock outcrop I first thought had a stone wall atop it, but found to be a great place to write.

Typical of New England towns, Dana Center had several buildings focused on the town common. I can only guess at what they were from their foundations & my knowledge of NE towns, but I presume the one on the north side, fronted by horse hitching posts, was Town Hall, the one on the west side was a church, and those to the south were houses or shops (or both). The only modern element of the scenery is a stone memorial reading "Site of Dana Common 1801-1938. To all those who sacrificed their homes and way of life. Erected by Dana Reunion 1996."

What did those reunion folks think when they saw the foundations of their homes after all these years? How did that differ from the ideas of their kids and grandkids, who never knew Dana as even a place on the map?

Part of me wishes the reunion folks had also erected something (say a diorama) that would give visitors a guide to who owned the homes and what the Common area really looked like then. But most of me is glad they didn't -- this way we get to see what really happens when nature reclaims things. Dana 2006 is a nice escape from modern society -- lots of sound, but all of it wild: birds of various kinds, bubbling brooks, fish gulping insects on the reservoir's surface, wind in the leaves. The only sound of civilization is a passing plane; this place is far enough in the boonies you can't even hear cars on the nearest state highway.

In some respects, especially with the nonsense going on in the Middle East bringing to mind questions of what kind of future we'll have, walking through Dana today could be a tour of the past or a premonition of the future. Will there be a time when our descendents walk through modern-day towns and see them being overgrown or even crumbling in ruins? If so, why? Will it be because we consciously chose to move to cities or to reduce our population, because some illness struck many of us down, or because we went nuts and decimated ourselves in some brutal manner?

We'll find out ... maybe in the near future.

predictions, predictions...

2006-07-22T22:24:00.000-04:00

Found this on the Strategy Page BB's Predictions Market, one of many predictions they have listed (some plausible, some clearly ridiculous):

A nuclear weapon (A-bomb or H-bomb) will be used in anger somewhere in the world before midnight Dec. 31 2009. Dirty bombs don't count.

PRO FUTURES: 370 CON FUTURES: 868
PRO VALUE: $3.35 CON VALUE: $1.43
DATE POSTED: 8/25/2005

So, we've got folks who are willing to gamble on the possibility that someone will NUKE someone else in the next few years ... and thereby profit if it happens? WTF?

That concept is very twisted, but what's interesting here is that 29.8% of those who bought futures on this question think it will happen. That's very close to figures I've seen scientists give when asked to predict the probability of that very same thing happening. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I saw it... ##

One of the guys I work with (rather, worked with; I got laid off Friday) told me he's telling friends not to make plans more than a week in advance because of the war in Lebanon. As he put it, it could explode into WW3 or essentially fizzle out, but it's really hard to tell which.

Jenn (my gf) and I have been talking about this lately, about what our options are if the shit hits the fan. She's known about my interests in this area for some time, but only with the chaos in the MidEast climbing to a new level of brutality has it become something she's beginning to be concerned about. I think we're at the greatest risk of WW3 than at any time since Ronnie Reagan pumped so much $$$ into nukes in the early 1980s.

Being in Massachusetts, we're in target-central if people start tossing nukes around. Although we don't live in one of the cities & therefore are very unlikely to get hit directly, we sit right on the Springfield-Worcester-Boston axis and would get significant fallout from any of them. As I see it, there are at least nine targets within 50 miles of us: those three cities, Hartford, Providence, New London Sub Base, Westover ARB, Hanscom AFB, Bradley Internat'l Airport. Of them, I suspect Boston, New London, and Hanscom would be first-salvo targets. Maybe, if shooting starts, we'd get lucky and have it fizzle out after that salvo.... Worst case scenario, of course, is that everything gets launched, in which case almost any community over 15,000 could have a bomb with its name on it. Obviously, in that case, we're toast.

Short of that worst case, I intend to try to survive... but would obviously rather not have to deal with such events.

## (Added 7/31:) I forgot about this post from last year. It doesn't have the specific figure I was seeking, but does indicate the threat we face...

Dragons

2006-07-01T01:31:00.000-04:00

I am
the last bastion
in a sea of concrete,
a see of storms
in the heat.

Before me,
my twin lies raped,
torn asunder by steel,
a place to play games.

Between us there is water.
That is good; it has
long
been unseen here.
But it does not flow anymore.

That constant noise that resembles flow
is not happy.

Above,
steel dragons growl
in passing,
a never-ending series of them
that land nearby but never say hi
like they used to.

Why?
Are they depressed at being enchained
or at seeing the glass shards and paint
that deface me?

Distant kin watch from the dust-haze,
but the nearest are harder to see
through the smog,
those brown clouds
that eat away at reality.

and still another dragon comes.
Maybe this one will say hi...

Renaissance

2006-06-27T13:09:00.000-04:00

Pieces
little windows
fragments of times
in which I once knew you.

Sunlight & black roses
mark a place
in another century --
1400? 1500?
Time never meant much back then.
Time moved too slowly back then.
Not like now,
when we never quite know
if we'll connect
at the doorway.

Arching overhead,
the contrails
of things we'd have once called
dragons.

Under our feet, round pebbles
of clear sand,
pieces of a future
we've set to rebuild
in the image of past forests,
pasture, passed slowly
just you and me...

Black Kristel Night

2006-06-27T12:52:00.000-04:00

Obsidian
You knock at my door, soundless,
and I know you,
Yes, I know you...

Dark flame in a white room
drawing heat from the night.
Words on a scrap of paper,
a few short lines
that pretend to tell
the tale of a person
lost on the streets.

Obsidian, sharpened
by terrors
at the hands of strangers,
family monsters,
betrayal of friends.
I know you --
one of those Burke could not save.

You knock at my door
and no one is there,
just a fiction on the front page
of everyday's news.

But behind the words...
terse words, of crimes committed,
sentences served,
paragraphs violated
in some dusty tome
no one actually reads...
behind the words
there are eyes,
a gleam in the darkness,
a shadow
turning
to run
away
from the light.

Obsidian, reflecting
a pitch darker than night,
endless night,
even when the sun still shines.

Yes, I know you...
...Your reputation has preceded you.

Senate panders to ignorance

2006-05-20T22:34:00.000-04:00

Not long ago, the US Senate approved a bill to make English the official national language. I've always thought the concept is stupid, largely because people are going to speak whatever they want.

But the following line from a response over at Aging Hipster encouraged me to explore this issue in a lot more depth, so here goes:

You cannot bring weakness and illiteracy into the country and ask for all kinds of privileges.

Excuse me? There's so much HOMEGROWN illiteracy # needing serious correction that English-only bills like this are a complete waste of valuable lawmakers' time. Instead of pandering to base prejudices, let's see Congress pass bills funding our existing educational system to the level it needs, rather than patting itself on the back for confusing and contradictory legislation like NCLB while gutting and ridiculing the public schools.

One important element of that has to be investment in teaching multiple foreign languages in US schools, starting at a young age, when science shows it's most effective. MANY nations (not just Canada, as Hipster notes) have multiple languages in everyday use; most of the European schools routinely teach three or four tongues. When you live no more than a few road hours from several other countries, doing so is simply common sense.

With air travel, the same is true of the US today. We need to get our heads out of the sand and realize that insistence on English only (and many other policies) simply brands us as parochial ignoramuses and limits our ability to understand what's going on in the world at large.

Many of the people who come here as illiterates do so because they're coming from a situation of abysmal poverty that doesn't ALLOW them to get education. If we want uneducated poor people to stop coming here, we need to invest in stamping out ignorance and poverty everywhere. Our government could help there, but it consistently underfunds international aid and fails to pay its share of the budgets for global bodies like the UN that, despite their problems, are trying to improve conditions elsewhere.

The second example of recent pandering is even worse. While that proposal is largely ineffectual, the Senate Judiciary Committee's recent passage of a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is simply bigoted and contrary to the basic principles that make America great -- tolerance, respect for others, and the whole concept of opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

As typical of almost everything under this administration, it passed as a party line 10-8 vote, and a glance at the committee's makeup shows why. Several members are notorious for bizarre ideologies fueled by their twisted versions of Christian dogma. Three of them opposed the anti-torture bill last year: Coburn, Cornyn, and Sessions, and Brownback is well known as the anti-evolution flunky. These people do NOT deserve the power they have.

As some of my half-dozen or so readers know, I'm from Massachusetts -- and proud to be a citizen of the ONLY state to so far legalize gay marriage. But we still have wingnuts who think it's ok to rescind civil rights once people have received them; they've been trying to get an similar constitutional amendment on the ballot. It's temporarily in limbo -- the state Constitutional Convention scheduled to debate it earlier this month was postponed until July -- and I hope it dies the ignominious death it deserves.

As someone once said, you do NOT make civil liberties subject to vote. When that happens, anything deemed unpopular could come under the gun and potentially be banned simply because it IS unpopular.

In this case, the concept is itself ridiculous also because gays have been marrying for a couple years now and guess what effect it has had on the institution of marriage overall -- NONE. Personally, I think it encourages marriage even among straight couples, but couldn't point you to data. Regardless, it should be left as state law because the state should be encouraging (but not forcing) committed, loving, responsible relationships of any kind, given all of the factors in today's society that promote discord and animosity.

*********************

# I'm only addressing the illiteracy side of this statement because labeling such folks as "weak" is both incredibly prejudicial and inaccurate. Physically, many of them are quite healthy -- they often work at manual labor here and were strong enough to GET here, often under dangerous conditions. Many literate Americans couldn't survive the deplorable conditions in their homelands, and some of us don't know what real work means without our technology to do half of it....

Thanks to Silly Humans for the tips.

Challenging the terror mindset

2006-03-07T12:42:00.000-05:00

Battlestar Galactica
SciFi Channel series
RATING: ***1/2 (of 5)

There's never enough good science fiction on TV or in the movies, especially with today's trend of rehashing shows/movies from decades ago.
Battlestar Galactica, however, is one of the exceptions. The modern version deals with thought-provoking (and sometimes worrisome) ideas the original 1970s series lacked. It has interesting characters with very real human reactions (or, in the case of some of the Cylons, believably inhuman ones), none of them stereotypical. It has far more depth than the typical TV SF staple of things blowing up in space, despite being war-themed. And more.
Rolling Stone recently praised it for addressing a very timely concept -- what it's like to be in a society under seige by terror. I agree, the new BG does that well. But what RS doesn't mention is that the show is also an exploration of the seductive madness of messianic religion, particularly monotheism.
The bulk of the Cylons, you see, are obsessively salvationist; their single-minded belief in their one god's "destiny" for them to supplant natural humans makes many of them inhumane and gives them a worldview that justifies the massacre of billions of sentient beings. (The fact that the series starts with just this happening due to nuclear weapons is what makes it fit with this blog's theme....)
By contrast, the natural humans and a handful of Cylons who have had extensive contact with them are largely secular polytheists, although their whole space voyage is predicated on the semi-salvationist belief that a 13th tribe of humans escaped to Earth long ago. They seek Earth, but more importantly, they seek safety from the unpredictable but recurrent terror of the Cylon pursuit.
There's an obvious real-life parallel here in today's near-obsession with the "War on Terror," but we need to realize that the enemy symbolized by the Cylons isn't any particular religion, it's the fanaticism that comes from believing one way is the only way. We can see that in fundamentalist Islam, in dominionist Christianity, in theocratic leanings of any stripe, and even in some ostensibly non-theological political systems. In all such cases, the paranoid ideology has no outlet for doubt and therefore leaves no room for unforeseen occurrences or errors, instead attributing those to "sin," "treason," or something similarly bogus. The underlying common ground isn't belief, it's the distortion of belief into authoritarianism.
Sometimes, authoritarianism sneaks up on a society in the guise of reform or hope, but it's almost invariably a product of popular deprivation and desperation. In BG, that seems to be symbolized by Baltar's presidential campaign -- he promotes the idea of stopping at a newly discovered habitable but semi-desolate planet not because he really believes in it but b/c it's a winning political issue... and is promoted by his Cylon lover/alter ego Six.
Their relationship is itself interesting -- it's an example of natural or functional plurality on both sides. On Galactica, Baltar constantly talks to Six in his mind, while on Caprica, Six does the same with him... or, at least, versions of each other. (There's no evidence to indicate they're in contact in real-time, although they were before the war.) In both cases, the relationship is a rather uneasy one.
A different version of plurality exists in the other Cylons, who usually have one psyche sharing several bodies. Take Sharon (aka "Boomer"): Everybody thinks she's human, including herself, until she tries to assassinate Cmdr. Adama. After she subsequently gets murdered on Galactica, a ground crew finds her on one of the colony worlds and we see her having trouble fitting into Cylon Caprican society. In both of the latter cases, she comes to realize she remembers details from all three (and possibly more) "lives." That other-memory theme also exists in various SF, especially the Bene Gesserit characters of Frank Herbert's Dune series, although there it's serial.
As you might've guessed, the Cylons often look just like us. Unlike the old series, they aren't all clunky robotic lifeforms that speak electronically. The symbolism is obvious: not only is the "enemy" among us, the fact that some humans are willing to spare Sharon (and if she's capable of bearing a child, doesn't that make her human???) despite knowing she's a Cylon is a reflection of what we should be doing to deal with real-world problems. Curiously, Sharon and Six on Caprica come to the reverse conclusion -- that humans deserve to live.
Both sides do it for the same reason, one that real-life politicians often refuse to acknowledge because it threatens their concept of power: Relationships make people far less likely to kill each other. If we spent far more time, energy and resources on creating opportunities for people of different faiths and cultures to interact as equals, we'd see more of them become friends and there'd be fewer wars.
That may sound simplistic, but sometimes the simplest solution is the only one worth trying.

***********************

On a lighter note, I found a quiz on which scifi crew I'd fit in best with. It seemed appropriate given this subject, even though Galactica didn't rank as my best fit under their scoring system. (Had to delete the photo b/c it screwed up the layout of my blog):

You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.

Moya (Farscape)

88%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)

81%

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)

75%

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)

75%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

75%

Serenity (Firefly)

69%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)

56%

FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)

56%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

50%

SG-1 (Stargate)

50%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)

50%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

38%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

How NOT to write an apocalypse story

2006-02-26T04:12:00.000-05:00

The Aftermath
by Samuel C. Florman
Thomas Dunne Books, 2001
RATING: * (of 5)

This book has to be the "Left Behind" of scientific apocalypse stories. Where that series preaches religion, this book plods on and on about modern civilization's great achievements and how important it would be to replicate them, even though doing so would be nearly impossible in practice. It's plagued by wooden writing; characters that are largely just names, titles and self-aggrandizing adjectives (about the only place some of them come to life is between pages 64 and 77); abysmal knowledge of human behavior; and list after list after list of minutia.

In short, it definitely violates at least Vonnegut's first rule of writing fiction.

The beginning is fairly typical. We see plausible short vignettes of the last moments of everyday people worldwide who get caught in the firestorms or tsunamis sparked by a massive comet slamming into the eastern Pacific and its fragments elsewhere.

The only problem with that is that the book is set up as a personal journal alternating with a survivor's "official" history, meaning Wil Hardy could not possibly have seen any of those events. Why? Because he's one of about 1500 people on a cruise ship in the Indian Ocean at the time. Most of them are engineers and their families, with a couple hundred crew who are mostly young and single.

While Florman is clearly knowledgable about engineering and some aspects of the history of science, this book falls flat on its face when talking about numerous other areas. For the sake of discussion, let's accept as plausible his imagery of the comet-crash causing an atmospheric firestorm that burns almost everything except for a "safe zone" that barely touches land in eastern South Africa and southern Madagascar. Common sense says such a global fire would spew trillions of tons of ash into the sky and probably blot out the sun for a long, long time.

The Tambora eruption of 1815 is generally believed to have caused the "year without a summer" of 1816, where summer frosts were reported in New England and Europe, halfway around the world. THAT ejected "only" 150-180 cubic kilometers of ash into the sky. Obviously, a comet causing the global destruction Florman envisions would send up FAR more -- he says it's about 16km in diameter (p. 36), more than half again as big as the one that killed the dinosaurs. Yet, he has the darkness and icy cold descending suddenly (despite the oceans' natural heat reservoir) and breaking in just four days.

How is that remotely possible?!?

What's FAR worse is his abysmal comprehension of trauma psychology. Face it: the people on this boat are suddenly isolated, their entire civilization annihilated, friends and any family members not present gone (although I suspect other pockets of survivors would in fact exist), a large chunk of their educations and technology now useless, etc. As he writes, "Her scientific terminology could not soften the horrifying reality that apparently human civilization had been destroyed." But shortly thereafter, the children are playing Bingo and Capture the Flag?!? Sure, the younger ones might not grasp the situation, but kids are extremely good at picking up on adults' cues, and they'd KNOW without doubt they would never go home again. Simply keeping the meals on time will NOT "keep chaotic nightmares at bay" for long.

Curiously, from a psychological POV, the added trauma of having their boat run aground and slowly sink would've been beneficial. Instead of being trapped on a boat with nowhere to go and little practically useful to do (a situation tailor-made for rapid "decompensation" as psychologists say), everyone now had to work to survive. That CAN help stave off traumatic meltdown for many people, but we can still expect to see widespread signs of PTSD cropping up in short order. Not everyone would get its full-blown, seriously debilitating form, but almost everyone would see some symptoms. In Florman's world, almost no one does.

A comparison to a real catastrophe is in order here, for perspective: A woman I spoke to from Mississippi said the simplest PTSD sign --"drifting off" in mid-sentence -- happens frequently to almost everyone she knows who lived through Hurricane Katrina. And they KNEW they could get help elsewhere, even if everyone nearby was "on their knees" as she put it. That lifeline would be GONE, completely and irreparably severed, for Florman's characters.

That said, it IS plausible they'd make the effort to save whatever they could of their books, tech, tools, etc. It's human nature to avoid trashing the past, and they would only really see how irrelevant many of their skills now are for basic survival by experience. Unfortunately, we never see that in Florman's world -- long stretches of the text are meetings between engineers talking about how they'll make those skills reality again, with very little discussion of what skills they REALLY need now, and even less actual ACTION. Even the survival skills they know of come from books and are described in lists.

And that's even after they meet a town of surviving Zulu. Common sense says the cruise people would aim to learn as much as they can from the Zulu -- and that element DOES pop up occasionally -- but their attitude is clearly aimed at rebuilding civilization even before they have a steady food supply, huts to live in, etc. In several places, Florman praises the "need" for some form of bureaucracy, and many pages are devoted to essentially listing how many people will be devoted to this impractical project or that... with no depiction at all of the engineers actually getting to know their new hosts as people or trying to determine what THEY might want from the future. (In fact, the major images they borrow are from the Afrikaners, not the Zulu, and I'd imagine that might offend a few Zulu.)

At one point, a character says, "What do we do if the survivors in this very strange corner of the world do not care to join with us in our enlightened enterprise?" That line's a great depiction of both arrogance and the overall clunky writing style. It's arrogant in the same way missionary work is supremely arrogant, because it assumes other ways of living are somehow inferior simply because they're different and/or less complex. It's clunkiness should be obvious; can you imagine anyone actually SAYING that casually? Neither can I, but Florman routinely has characters speak this way.

Such phrasing strongly reminds me of some autistic people I've worked with over the years, and I DON'T say this in any derogatory sense, just as a description. Couple the phrasing with the book's apparent lack of comprehension of how humans really behave under stress and it makes me wonder if Florman is himself autistic.

Even the name they give their makeshift settlement -- situated improbably away from a river instead of on it, and a pretty long hike from the Zulu village -- demonstrates an autistic inflexibility: "Engineering Village." Couldn't they at least have named it after a famous engineer or scientist -- say, Hawkington or Einsteinville? It is, after all, the place they may be living forever, and I could easy imagine many engineers among them wanting to honor scientific heroes.

The Zulu have also suffered, of course: When the newcomers visit the Zulu village (Ulundi), they're shown to "one of the few buildings that remained standing amid charred ruins" by children playing in those ruins.

Again, WTF?!? Somehow, despite their own homes being in ruins, many of their people, crops, and livestock dead (and probably others escaped), and their clan structure wounded, they can supply several deliveries of food to the newcomers, some of whom apparently do nothing but talk. HOW? The fact that this occurs in the Southern summer is helpful, but not enough to make it believable.

Vonnegut's rule #6 (link above) says the characters should have nasty things happen to them "in order that the reader may see what they are made of." There's plenty of nastiness in The Aftermath, but we never really see what the characters are made of, nor how they got to be the way they are. They're all one-dimensional, especially the stereotypical enemy marauder "Queen Ranavolana."

This woman is probably the most implausible character of them all: what little we know of her history is clear on the fact that she's a young American drifter, drug addict, and loser. I find it very unlikely she'd ever be able to convince a bunch of rugged criminals from Madagascar to buy into her story that she's "sent by the Creator to be their savior" and the reincarnation of their island's brutal 19th C. queen, whose name Florman misspelled. She'd be FAR more likely to end up being forced into sexual slavery, especially after civilization's demise.

Florman makes repeated reference to the fact she gives her pirate fleet red sails, even at one point having the cruise ship's captain claim he'd never seen any ships with sails that color. Huh? I find that extremely hard to believe; you can see almost every sail color imaginable at any sailing race or Tall Ships event.

About the only realistic thing surrounding her existence and threat to the engineers and Zulu is the proposal to create a militia; although it seems pretty arrogant to base it on American methods and not on whatever survivors of the South African or tribal police or armed forces there are, if any. There are probably some, and they'd be FAR more likely to have weapons than the cruise ship folks.

At least Florman makes a token recognition of this arrogance, with the captain saying (unheard by anyone), "There are other democracies in the world...." His chronicler, Wil, also privately seems to recognize that the techno-philic obsessions his group has ignore much of their new reality, writing, "To hell with the scientific view and to hell with the demands of technology. ...Why have we survived if we do not carry on, if we do not reproduce...?"

But events showing such recognition of their situation are few and far between. Florman talks blithely about turning lactic acid from corn into plastic, in blatant denial of the fact there wouldn't BE any surplus corn. He has the "good guys" predictably defeating the pirates and planning year-long sailing voyages solely for the sake of exploration around the world ... rather than fishing or some other survival function. (Where are the supplies coming from? Who can be spared to go? what if there really ARE other survivors... and some are pirates? What about basic bad weather, which would probably be VERY unpredictable for YEARS after a massive comet strike? Yes, such trips should eventually happen, but NOT in the first year.) He has sewer and water lines beign built as if by magic, but out of what? Brickworks, sawmills, blacksmithies, and other enterprises "were busy day and night" within the first six months ... despite the fact that many survivors would be in shock, hungry, injured, and have little access to any of the materials for such enterprises. Ninety percent of the planet BURNED, remember?!?

I could go on (and on and on) about how BAD this book is. But I'm sure you get the drift by now. Just file this one in the "don't bother" category.

by fire and ice and ...

2006-02-19T20:31:00.000-05:00

The Life and Death of Planet Earth
By Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee
Henry Holt/Times Books, 2002
RATING: **1/2 (of 5)

How many ways can the Earth end?

Probably more than anyone with anything less than a (slight) obsession with the concept is willing to consider.

Just so happens, I guess I have such an obsession, at times anyway. So do Ward and Brownlee, who spend over 200 pages exploring just about every possible doom the Earth will eventually face over the next 6-8 billion years.

Before I get into analyzing what they say, I'll give a quick timeline as they see it (not quoted from them, but culled from various places in their book. The quotebox layout is simply for display. All dates, obviously, are estimates.):

Next few centuries: Global warming sparked in part by human actions.
2-10 MY: Ice Age resumes, with periods of warming just like last million-plus years.
100 MY: Continents begin to re-coalesce into a new Pangaea.
250 MY: New Pangaea firmly established, with extremely arid interior and stagnant oceans, sparking large-scale extinctions.
500 MY - 1 BY: Solar warming moves habitable zone beyond Earth's orbit.
500-700 MY: Plant photosynthesis ends as CO2 levels gradually fall below 10 ppm, with periods of oscillating plant expansion and dieoff; growing heat causes life to retreat to poles.
approx. 15 MY after that: Atmospheric O2 levels have fallen to about 1% of present, extinguishing what's left of animal life. Beyond 60 deg. C, only bacteria, algae and some fungi survive.
1 -1.2 BY: global mean temp. is about 70 deg. C. Oceans begin evaporating, causing the "moist greenhouse effect" that features brutal storms. Plate tectonics comes to a halt from lack of water, eventually resulting in a global ocean. Last bacteria fry around 235 deg. F. @
2.5 - 3.5 BY: "Runaway greenhouse effect" takes over at about 200 deg. C, after all water is gone. Earth becomes like Venus.
3 - 4 BY: Andromeda Galaxy (M31) merges with Milky Way. Gravity and other forces might sling solar system into deep space, or might not.
6 - 7 BY: Sun expands to giant size, possibly reaching Earth orbit. Solar effects cause Moon to swirl back to collision with Earth & possibly cause Earth to spiral into Sun. If not, Earth ends up scorched cinder orbiting white dwarf after Sun goes nova.

Whew. Anything I left out?

Oh, yeah, the "accidental armageddon" causing events -- huge comets or asteroids (it took one about 10 km across to cause the K/T extinction 65 MY ago, and would take one about 100 km across to sterilize all life) or supernovae in the galactic neighborhood (think Sirius; when it goes, its gamma rays will have some serious effect on everything within about 30 light years. We're 12 LY away).

This catalog makes nuclear war look like a game...

Now, I can't realistically refute most of what they say; it seems pretty plausible that, essentially, Earth's life path from here on will retrace its path of the last 4.5 BY, as they propose. But I do take issue with some of their assertions within the various future periods.

First off, obviously, is the near future. There, they allege that the combination of global warming and subsequent ice age return will cause survivors to be "starving" even "thousands of years forward." I strongly doubt that; human gene-lines flexible enough to survive the coming few centuries will have adapted to the new conditions and created or found new food sources. Yes, the short-term will probably see extensive starvation as our ability to fuel modern agriculture runs dry (assuming we don't get our collective head out of our ass very soon and change gears completely), but the population will eventually decline to a stable level. I suspect we'll still have agriculture in some places, maybe even cities, but having people recall what the Space Needle or global warming is (p.71) after a few thousand years is nonsense.

The resumption of ice age doesn't mean civilization has to vanish, although there's little doubt large swaths of the planet will be inhabitable only by the most intrepid folks, as in Antartica today. I could see people having outposts on the ice caps, even towns if we have the foresight to plan technology for that purpose. I'm not the first to think of this, BTW; Michael Kube-McDowell envisioned the Weichsel people with whole cities on the ice, and even an ice-based construction technology, in his novel Empery.

It will, however, mean major changes. Most humans will have no choice but to retreat toward the equator and change how, where, and maybe even what we farm, but I think we're capable of that. Earth will be a drier place, but we've lived through such times before. We can do it the same way we did it then -- by having very dispersed paleolithic-sized (or maybe medieval) populations or by taking the genuinely global outlook that is today struggling to be born and nurturing it. The former would be a likely consequence of nations feuding over dwindling resources; the latter is the only way to face our future and still retain those elements of civilization that are actually beneficial. Not all of them are.

What we do and which elements we keep may determine how long humanity survives as a species, because events AFTER the ice age are likely to be far less hospitable, if Ward and Brownlee are right.

As they note, "we must either take steps to sustain the habitability of our own world or find another at a younger stage of planetary life. ...If we can't engineer or evolve our way around our planet's inevitable decline, then we'd better go planet shopping." (21-22).

The former is, is the sense of planetary time, a band-aid approach -- it's necessary if WE want to stay alive over the short-term, but won't have much effect on life's overall path; only planet-hopping can keep us alive indefinitely, if that's even possible or desirable. In general, I think it is, at least for the next several millennia; as I've said elsewhere, it's necessary if we want to evolve AND maintain civilization. The neo-paleolithic option above will allow for evolution, but not civilization.

If finding other living worlds proves to be effectively impossible, survival will require us to change our attitude to one that sees our talents as being in the service of Earth-life as a whole -- a change we really need to make anyway, since other Earths won't be accessible for a long time.

This outlook flies in the face of a thread that pops up occasionally in this book. On several occasions, Ward & Brownlee express a clearly biased view of other lifeforms. For example, they note "human-level intelligence and technology would never develop on a water-covered planet. There would be neither the need nor the opportunity" (31) -- How would they know? This assertion might be true of technology, but not necessarily true of intelligence; they admit whales and dolphins have "large brains and some level of sophisticated communication," but aren't willing to acknowledge that much of our complexity is cultural, not due to basic intelligence. We have the advantage of being FIRST, but not (hopefully) the only Earthlife to become technological; I strongly suspect we can help other species to do at least some of what we've done.

Elsewhere, they attribute the fact that our current climate "norm is not normal" (79) to long-term causes -- a 70 MY greenhouse gas cycle, orbital cycles#, and continental drift (specifically, the creation of a land bridge between North and South America). While all are indeed factors, they never mention a factor that at least needs to be considered because it's far more timely -- agriculture. Starting just after the Wisconsin/Wurm glaciers receded, people made major changes to the tree cover around the world in an accelerating manner. Apparently, the use of fossil fuels for 150 yrs or so will have a long-term climate effect more profound than 10,000 yrs of slash-and-burn agriculture? That may be true, but evidence would be far better than simply asserting it as fact.

Speaking of evidence, their attribution of sources seems very unprofessional. Yes, they have a pretty lengthy bibliography, but have almost NO references within their text: No footnotes (except to some photos), no direct quotes, and few references to other scientists by name. In several places, I found comments that were clearly referring to something they'd read, but there's no way to actually find out what that was without reading EVERY bibliography source. In some cases, I've seen sources that contradict them (for example, they assert that Ice Age America included "huge deserts and sand dunes" (74), but an Oak Ridge Nat'l Lab map I've seen says only one pocket of America was sandy desert then), and I'd love to see their source. Same's true of their core point that earth's biological fecundity peaked around 300 MY ago and is now slowly declining; Science Daily says the oceans experienced a huge peak 4-6 MY ago.

While I understand they're writing for a popular audience, that's not an excuse for inaccuracy and dumbing down the text. They have a lot of material to work with and the thesis makes sense, but the inaccuracy, occasional redundancy, and spots of arrogance only weaken their ideas.

________________

@ -- This figure is how they wrote it (it stood out as one of two Fahrenheit references, p. 143, amid all of the other Celsius and metric references. I'm not sure if they meant F or C, but there is a significant difference between them.) For scientists, their phrasing is woefully imprecise in other places, too. On p. 34, they write, "Earth's proportion of water to its weight is small ... less than one-tenth of one percent." Weight means nothing in science; the term is mass, and that figure is accurate, but WAY off -- the actual figure is 1/50 of a percent (.023%), if I'm calculating the figures here properly. Saying that is similar to saying "Earth's population is less than 30 billion" -- true, but it gives an extremely distorted impression of the facts.

# -- There are three orbital cycles -- of 95,000, 41,000, and 22,000 yrs. Regarding the first of these, they contradict themselves. On p. 80, they say we're currently at a position where Earth's orbit is closest to the Sun in January and farthest in July, meaning that "summer [sic] snows may last longer than the long-term norm." On p. 82, they note that a previous interglacial (i.e. WARM period) was at a time when "orbital eccentricity was at a minimum" and "just such a pattern of minimal orbital eccentricity is underway now." Huh?!? Only one of those assertions can be correct. For more info, see the Naval Observatory's orbital cycles page.

Back in the game...

2006-02-12T17:18:00.000-05:00

Hi, all,
(If anyone's still visiting this blog...)

I know it's been months since I last posted here. Some you have seen comments on your blogs, so you know I'm still alive; and I've seen a few blogs I used to visit vanish. (Tara? Tonya? Where'd you go? Hope you're still OK.) My day job has pretty much coopted much of my writing inspiration, but I'll try to get back to posting here at least weekly or so...
Anyway, that said, on with the show...

Today, I got a post from a list I'm on that included the following line:

"Reduction to a mere physical survival will reduce our
existence to pure boredom. And what do we do with our souls then? We
have to live and, if necessary, to die for what we believe in."

I basically agree, but think the issue we need to isn't so much personal survival as collective survival. If we as a species don't correct the problems that are now fueling ecological destruction, religious apocalypticism, and the ever-present risk of nuclear war, the whole concept of revolution will be meaningless. Of course, making those changes is itself revolution.

The key as I see it is showing how such changes will increase the well-being of future generations. People need to learn that surviving this year, while important, is less so than ensuring our grandchildren & beyond have a world they can live in, be a part of, and, more crucially, have a role in, rather than separate from & superior to, as our culture not-so-subtly teaches. We need to be able to frame the changes, which will be very culture-shaking and to many people demoralizing, as positive and growth-allowing (not in the overpopulation, economic or material senses, but in the long-term, intellectual, spiritual, health, and other senses).

For that to work, people need to see a wider goal, have an outlet for pent-up frustrations that Taker society breeds. I believe that outlet is space: We need to change our attitude regarding Earth to one of nurturance AND to tap the adventurous elements of human ability.

Some people may say such expansion just exports Taker attitudes, but I disagree -- LIFE itself expands whenever it has the chance, and there are VAST spaces out there with little or no life that may be perfectly suited for colonization without any need to invade and impose a rapacious culture on them. In Earth's history, life has done this without our help, but for Earthlife to survive long-term, our help is necessary, because eventually Earth will become uninhabitable by any lifeform. Homo sapiens will certainly be long gone by then, but whatever species are our intellectual descendents deserve an opportunity to live. Maybe they'll thank us, maybe not.

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee #, and others, suggest that Earth's overall capacity for harboring life has already peaked and is in its long, slow slide toward death, just as an individual person eventually gets old and dies as body systems shut down. I believe that's one reason intelligence, language, and tool-using capabilities evolved when they did, as the only long-term hope for life to continue, and human adoption of that kind of responsibility would certainly be a far more uplifting philosophy than the object-centered, self-centered, or imaginary-being-centered philosophies/religions/political systems that have dominated human civilization.

Some see a Leaver philosophy as being diametrically opposed to civilization (see, for example, most of the writing here), but I don't. It's just opposed to a certain KIND of civilization, and for change to be successful, people need to see that they aren't losing the benefits of civilization, but gaining benefits of another kind that will make up for some of the challenges the transition period will inevitably bring. The change ahead needs to be a conscious effort to change, to select what we keep and what we discard of Taker society.

We CANNOT let that transition be a "collapse" on a global scale in which most of humanity that survives returns to medieval, neolithic or hunter-gatherer lifestyle; doing so would be a denial of the gift of intelligence evolution has bestowed upon us and our responsibility toward other lifeforms long-term. Given how much of Earth's fossil fuels we've used, it might also make it impossible for a future species to do what we haven't yet done, since fossil fuels are reasonably a crucial stepping stone to space travel. (It might not; Ward and Brownlee suggest Earth has maybe 500 million years in which animal life can continue to flourish. That might enable the fossil fuel supply to replenish itself, but wouldn't our doing it right when there's room for error be better than forcing a future species to do it out of desperation, or, worse, to evolve the intelligence to realize Earth's dying and can do nothing about it?)

BTW: Taker and Leaver are references to Daniel Quinn's Ishmael & related books. In brief, "Taker" refers to a society that believes its way is the only way to live and that humanity has the right (even the duty) to dominate other lifeforms for our own benefit. In other words, our mainstream society. "Leaver" by contrast is an attitude of "live and let live" in which the fact of their existence gives other cultures and species their own value and right to survive independent of whatever usefulness they might have to us. For more info, visit Quinn's main site or one of many forums, such as IshCon.

#-- I'm almost done with this book and will be reviewing it here soon.

ALSO: Having glanced over the old posts, I see a LOT of spam, so I think it's time to enable that word-verification-thingy (of course, they aren't real words, but *shrug*)... Hope it's not too much of a hassle.

will this never end?

2005-09-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

Now that Hurricane Rita's weakening over Louisiana and Arkansas and everyone's beginning to take stock of the damage (fortunately not nearly as bad as it could've been had Rita stayed a Category 5 storm), the NWS is already getting worried about TWO more potential cyclone-developing areas in the Atlantic.

Are "Stan" and "Tammy" gestating while everyone watches Texas? If the past few months are any indication, the northern one will visit Florida and the Gulf while the southern one will sail off into the Atlantic harmlessly.

With two more months of hurricane season left, how many more of these will we see?? I'm betting we see "Tropical Storm Delta" before we're finally done... in other words, at least four storms beyond the end of the year's list of names.

new nuclear weapons doctrine...

2005-09-13T19:45:00.000-04:00

... includes preemptive use against nations or groups threatening attacks.... or just possessing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. I haven't read it in detail yet, but this seems like a HUGE step in the wrong direction. What jumped out at me from a quick scan was the repeated reference to the fact that using nukes isn't technically illegal under international law -- blatant self-serving justification if I've ever heard it.

Obviously, this administration doesn't care that some things that are legal simply should not be done. But we all know that by now.

Anyway, read the document if you have time; I'll do so sometime soon and post on it in more detail.

Until then, here's the Washington Post article about it, with my emphasis and comments:

Strategy Includes Preemptive Use Against Banned Weapons
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 11, 2005; A01

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Apparently, it doesn't matter that these weapons aren't USED, may have been there for years, and may even have been given to said nation BY US.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

At a White House briefing that year, a spokesman said the United States would "respond with overwhelming force" to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, its forces or allies, and said "all options" would be available to the president.

That's NOT what this says. It says we'll INITIATE nuclear war if President Caligula determines nation X has WMDs, even if they aren't attacking anyone. Couldn't possibly be aimed at IRAN, could it?!?

The draft, dated March 15, would provide authoritative guidance for commanders to request presidential approval for using nuclear weapons, and represents the Pentagon's first attempt to revise procedures to reflect the Bush preemption doctrine. A previous version, completed in 1995 during the Clinton administration, contains no mention of using nuclear weapons preemptively or specifically against threats from weapons of mass destruction.

Titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" and written under the direction of Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the draft document is unclassified and available on a Pentagon Web site. It is expected to be signed within a few weeks by Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, director of the Joint Staff, according to Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer in Myers's office.

Meanwhile, the draft is going through final coordination with the military services, the combatant commanders, Pentagon legal authorities and Rumsfeld's office, Cutler said in a written statement.

A "summary of changes" included in the draft identifies differences from the 1995 doctrine, and says the new document "revises the discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations."

The first example for potential nuclear weapon use listed in the draft is against an enemy that is using "or intending to use WMD" against U.S. or allied, multinational military forces or civilian populations.

How do they determine INTENT? By this doctrine, we should immediately nuke about half a dozen countries who have promised to used WMDs if attacked under various circumstances. And if directed at non-national groups, how do we distinguish between them and the innocent populations they live within? Wouldn't using nukes against such groups violate this concept itself?

Another scenario for a possible nuclear preemptive strike is in case of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy."

That and other provisions in the document appear to refer to nuclear initiatives proposed by the administration that Congress has thus far declined to fully support.
Last year, for example, Congress refused to fund research toward development of nuclear weapons that could destroy biological or chemical weapons materials without dispersing them into the atmosphere.

No surprise there. This admin couldn't care less what Congress wants.

The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations including WMD, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."

But Congress last year halted funding of a study to determine the viability of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead (RNEP) -- commonly called the bunker buster -- that the Pentagon has said is needed to attack hardened, deeply buried weapons sites.

I think I've already posted links showing how RNEPs don't work as they claim. The Bushites don't care how effective it is; it just has to make some of them millions and/or further their armageddon-fueled religious delusions.

The Joint Staff draft doctrine explains that despite the end of the Cold War, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction "raises the danger of nuclear weapons use." It says that there are "about thirty nations with WMD programs" along with "nonstate actors [terrorists] either independently or as sponsored by an adversarial state."

To meet that situation, the document says that "responsible security planning requires preparation for threats that are possible, though perhaps unlikely today."

That's true... but promoting more US policy reliance on nukes is not responsible and doesn't promote security. It promotes destabilization, by ENCOURAGING more nations to seek nukes. That's what's a big factor driving the Iranians -- they're afraid of US. I don't want my country feared; I want it respected, but Bush is incapable of comprehending the difference between those. (Drunks usually are.)

To deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, the Pentagon paper says preparations must be made to use nuclear weapons and show determination to use them "if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use."

Hmmm... prevent WMD use by USING the world's worst WMDs. Why didn't I think of that?!?

The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using such weapons, that adversary's leadership must "believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective." The draft also notes that U.S. policy in the past has "repeatedly rejected calls for adoption of 'no first use' policy of nuclear weapons since this policy could undermine deterrence."

Technically true. We adopted a "no first STRIKE" policy, saying we wouldn't launch ICBMs first. But the distinction means shit if our use of tactical weapons causes someone else to launch ICBMs and/or causes the same kind of destruction and death using ICBM warheads does. Any nuke weapons use is likely to make Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Katrina look like games.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has been a leading opponent of the bunker-buster program, said yesterday the draft was "apparently a follow-through on their nuclear posture review and they seem to bypass the idea that Congress had doubts about the program." She added that members "certainly don't want the administration to move forward with a [nuclear] preemption policy" without hearings, closed door if necessary.

This issue is way too important to the world for such hearings to be closed-door. Secrecy is what has gotten us into this mess.

A spokesman for Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said yesterday the panel has not yet received a copy of the draft.

Hans M. Kristensen, a consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council, who discovered the document on the Pentagon Web site, said yesterday that it "emphasizes the need for a robust nuclear arsenal ready to strike on short notice including new missions." Kristensen, who has specialized for more than a decade in nuclear weapons research, said a final version of the doctrine was due in August but has not yet appeared.

"This doctrine does not deliver on the Bush administration pledge of a reduced role for nuclear weapons," Kristensen said. "It provides justification for contentious concepts not proven and implies the need for RNEP."

One reason for the delay may be concern about raising publicly the possibility of preemptive use of nuclear weapons, or concern that it might interfere with attempts to persuade Congress to finance the bunker buster and other specialized nuclear weapons.

If that's their thinking, they're right, it will. (I hope!) But I suspect they're trying to give themselves time to come up with something convincing and/or something that will distract the public from this issue. Release now might do that, with Katrina on everyone's mind.

In April, Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate Armed Services panel and asked for the bunker buster study to be funded. He said the money was for research and not to begin production on any particular warhead. "The only thing we have is very large, very dirty, big nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said. "It seems to me studying it [the RNEP] makes all the sense in the world."

Sure it makes sense to him. Bizarre things always make sense to delusional people.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Oil Crisis 2005: A Timeline

2005-09-12T02:56:00.000-04:00

As many observant people worldwide have known for some time, we have been skating on very thin ice for a long time due to our addiction to petroleum. Starting August 28, 2005, that ice began to crack for real, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, which peaked as a Category 5 storm packing 175 mph winds and pummeled the US Gulf Coast only slightly weaker. En route to and on land, it ravaged the eastern half of a region that supplies & processes 25% of the US's oil and around 12% of our natural gas.

If that seems redundant with other recent posts, it's intended to be. I'm postdating this blog entry to 1/1/06 purposely, because I intend it to serve as a chart of gas prices, relevant events, predictions and commentary sparked by Katrina, which could become a major turning point in US history.

What happens from here forward depends as much on humans as on the weather. The National Weather Service is predicting 3-5 more major (Cat. 3+) hurricanes this year, and that fact defines the key weather parameters we're probably facing. As I see it today (9/1/05), the best case scenario is this: The NWS is wrong, and there are no more hurricanes, or all of those that form follow the path of Hurricane Irene to a harmless death in the Atlantic. The worst case scenario is that NWS is right, and one of those major storms is Katrina's twin, only this one heads west to plaster the Houston area, shutting down that major oil port. In Mexico, a similar effect would happen if the Tampico area gets hit.

For the sake of simplicity and clarity, these parameters don't address hurricanes that pummel non-oil regions, no matter how strong they are. Yes, such storms will add to the oil crisis burden indirectly and may cause major suffering on the Atlantic coast, in the Caribbean, or elsewhere; they'll certainly be noted in the timeline. But for the most part, the timeline will have capsule summaries of two things: social & political events here and abroad related to the US's quest for her next oil fix, and how the crisis is affecting me and the people I know. I'll try to update the gas prices at least every few days, but will only include key events.

In the comments, I would really appreciate you periodically jotting down your reflections on the situation wherever you are. That's especially true if you're not in the US. What America does could easily help or hurt people worldwide, but we Americans have a notorious tendency to ignore those effects when we're in crisis...

*****************************************

DATE......PRICES OBSERVED......EVENTS

8/29/05......$2.47-$2.54..........Katrina comes ashore in very early AM
8/30/05......$2.93-$2.99..........First talk of possible shortages
8/31/05......$3.03-$3.09
9/1/05.......$3.00-$3.47 (mostly ~$3.20)
9/2/02.......$3.09-$3.39..........60M barrels released from SPR, European sources
9/3/05.......$3.18-$3.43 (mostly ~$3.20)
9/13/05......$2.96-$3.39 ........ Prices falling. Good sign, but for how long?

Because prices have been stable and/or falling lately, I think I'll take this off the top of the pile. But I might bring it back if things start getting bad again...

9/24/05.....$2.75-$3.09....... Hurricane Rita hits East Texas, running through the western half of the Gulf's oil/natural gas fields. MSM predicting $5 gas by next week. Maybe time to start following this again...

photo ops while cities suffer

2005-09-04T13:46:00.000-04:00

Have you seen this commentary from LA Sen. Mary Landreiu:

“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

Or this, in Biloxi, as reported by German TV ZDF (copied from The Carpetbagger Report; a slightly different translation is at DailyKos):

On the ZDF web site, see

video is here

text is here

The relevent paragraphs are labeled
"Räumarbeiten nur für Bush?" My (non-expert)
translation follows.

Wo der US-Präsident das Katastrophengebiet besuchte, räumten Hilfstrupps vorher ordentlich auf - aber nur dort. Aus Biloxi zitierte ZDF-Korrespondentin Claudia Rüggeberg verzweifelte Einwohner, Bush solle in seinen Limousinen statt lauter Bodyguards und Assistenten lieber Hilfsgüter herbeischaffen.
Entlang seiner Route hätte Räumtrupps vor Bushs Besuch Schutt weggeräumt und Leichen geborgen. Dann sei Bush wieder abgereist "und mit ihm", so Rüggeberg, "die ganzen Hilfstrupps". An der Lage in Biloxi habe sich sonst nichts verändert, es fehle an allem.

------
Whevever the US President Bush in the catastrophie
area visited, helpers cleaned up beforhand, but
only there. In Biloxi, ZDF correspondent
Claudia Rüggeberg quoted demoralized residents
who said that Bush should bring food and water
in his limosine instead of bodyguards and
assistants.

All along his route, before his visit,
debri was cleared and bodies removed. Then
Bush travelled on and with him, according to
Rüggeberg, the entire troup of helpers.
As for the situation in Biloxi, otherwise
nothing changed, everthing is lacking.

I don't know German, but my stepmother IS German, so I'm going to send this text to her for translation. If it's very different, I'll post it here.

Fucking incredible. Bush and his stage managers piss me off so much I don't even have words for it. Both of these events are crass frat-boy selfishness on Bush's part, but SO typical of his entire admin. Make it look like things are getting done, but when the cameras shut down, go back to playing games and leave the suffering to the everyday people he abuses. How come there are prison terms for spousal abuse and child abuse and animal abuse but not nation abuse?

When the people in danger are once again in a position resembling stability and safety, We the People need to do some homeowrk and find criminal charges to throw at Bush and company. One that seems plausible is negligent homicide, defined generally as "Unintentional killing(s) in which the actor(s) should have known they were creating substantial and unjustified risks of death by conduct that grossly deviated from ordinary care." Ordinary care in this case would've meant funding the levee reinforcements, ensuring the poor city folks had a practical form of transportation out of the city, ensuring the Guard and supplies got into the city without delay immediately afterward and other things. This horror, as I noted in a previous post, had been predicted in detail years ago, and those warnings were ignored.

What excuse does FEMA have for dilly-dallying? Other than its leader's ineptitude, I mean.

According to the N.O. Times-Picayune, LA is turning to a real FEMA administrator to clean up the mess, rather than some shmuck who got fired from tending horses:

Blanco Appoints Witt

Gov. Kathleen Blanco has appointed former FEMA Director James Lee Witt as a special adviser to help her manage the recovery and restoration efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Witt was FEMA director under former President Clinton, serving in that position from 1993-2001.

*********************

From Der Speigel's English version (the quote's from the cover story):

This isn't just any old city sinking into the water like some reincarnated Atlantis before the eyes of a horrified and still seemingly paralyzed America. It's one of America's legendary cities. It's New Orleans, "The Big Easy," the place Americans have always flocked to whenever they wanted to get a dose of sinful pleasure in the Deep South, a place whose seemingly well-functioning multiculturalism, whose largely harmonious blend of black, white and Latino has always been a beacon for the rest of the world.

I've always wanted to see that, but now doubt I will. We all hear talk of rebuilding N.O., but I'm not sure that makes much sense where it is. Maybe we should rebuild on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, where the land's a lot more stable, and build a big canal from there to the Mississippi River for the boat traffic. Since the French Quarter was largely unflooded, maybe that area can be cleaned up and reinhabited as a town in its own right.

Given people's tendency to be rather superstitious about visiting places of terrible calamity, it will take a long time for N.O. to get back on its feet even if it is rebuilt, and that points to something that hasn't gotten much discussion yet. That city, and LA in general, benefited hugely from tourism. Was that included in the official pronouncements that Katrina wouldn't have a long-term economic effect on America? As usual, they're talking just about money (even if it is $100 BILLION and rising), not about the impossible to measure things that make up the culture of such a city as N.O and the other devastated areas. It's almost impossible to rebuild that, because it wasn't manufactured; it evolved over 200+ years.

Also, did they include the ripple effects on such things as food prices? Probably not.

NOTE: Biloxi & negiligent homicide material added Monday early AM. I had to convert Carpetbagger's original written-out links to hyperlinks to make them fit.

this was predicted... years ago

2005-09-03T15:04:00.000-04:00

Before I vent a little steam, let me suggest an idea my girlfriend came up with to help the stranded people in N.O: Have the various cruise ship lines send their ships to the city to provide floating housing. It'd be a lot more comfortable than the Astrodome or any other refugee camp, and would also serve as a form of transportation for maybe 1,000 people per ship (far more than any bus!). Maybe they could then arrange to take the groups to various cities nationwide so that the cost of helping them doesn't all fall on one region.

I understand the Navy is sending a carrier there, and that would provide space for many more people than a cruise ship, but the Navy's noted for pretty spartan accomodations. Given how much these people have already suffered and the poverty many of them have been facing for years, it's long since time they got treated well for once.

OK, now for the rant:

Anyone who's awake is sad at the suffering in New Orleans and/or mad at the fact that this could have been prevented. Obviously, Katrina herself couldn't have been, but the fact that N.O. flooded could have.

The following comes from National Geographic, Oct. 2004 (yes, 2004):

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are,"
(Hurricane expert Joe) Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."

Suhayda also comments in some depth in this PBS transcript from 2002.

Also, they had a "dry run" of this last year, with Hurricane Ivan, and apparently learned nothing...

Of course, Bush doesn't bother to read, especially anything that might have some semblance of science behind it. Instead, he told the world Tuesday he'd magnanimously cut his vacation short on FRIDAY, and when he did go to N.O., he flew OVER the city, but didn't bother to land in it. Any REAL leader would've gotten off his ass immediately and taken the next possible flight there. (Same's true of Dick(head) Cheney -- he apparently doesn't feel the loss of an American city by "merely" natural catastrophe is enough to even tell the country where he IS for six days. SO, wait... If BOTH Bush and Cheney are vacationing at the same time... who is running the show?!?

Oh, BTW, he apparently believes he can shut down food deliveries at will, :

Bush visit halts food delivery
By Michelle Krupa
Staff writer

NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.

The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.

The more this goes on, the more convinced I am that Bush and others who took funds from the Army Corps of Engineers' plans to strengthen the levees should be prosecuted for the deaths the flooding and chaos have caused -- many counts of negligent homicide, at least. Politically speaking, Bush is a kind of father figure, and his treatment of the American people can be considered neglect, at best. Any real father who was warned that his children were in a situation that would harm them but did nothing about it would be prosecuted, and so should Bush & Cheney.

Oh, and if THAT's not enough to be pissed about, the Houston Chronicle reported that Halliburton is making money off the disaster by cleaing up the region's Navy facilities.

!@#$%^&&*^%$#@!!!!!

OK. Enough venting for now.

If you haven't already visited them, here are a couple of good sites on the unfolding crisis in The Big (Un)easy:

The Tattered Coat
The Interdictor
Broken Windows
Larry King interview re: Red Cross not being allowed into N.O.

And a list of major places to donate here. but if you go here, PLEASE ignore "Operation Blessing." That's terrorist preacher Pat Robertson's outfit, and if that's not enough reason to avoid it, see this.

NeoCon arrogance...

2005-09-01T16:13:00.000-04:00

In response to Alternet's article A Declaration of War, about the Bush/Bolton assault on the UN, a Canadian calling himself "JohnnyM" posted the following:

I fear this is the beginning of the end. WWIII is just around the corner, started by your arrogrance(sic), but declared by us out of necessity. My government may side with Washington, but us citizens will not.

Bring it on NeoCon...

That's something that I've thought could happen for some time. Eventually, the rest of the world will feel it has no choice (and may indeed not) but to combine militarily to oppose the US's aggressive attitudes and contempt for international cooperation and law.

Such a war would probably be an unmitigated disaster for most people, but could result in the citizens of many countries realizing what many already know: That everyday people have far more in common with each other regardless of nationality than we have with those who are power-obsessed and/or ultra-wealthy. Given the global issues we need to deal with and the potentially destructive technology we have, isn't it long overdue time for us to think of ourselves as human beings and Earthlings first, and Americans or any other nationality second?

Obviously, I'd like to see us do this without war, but I'm afraid some people have a too selfish, delusional view of their own importance to let that happen, because it would prove something they've been hiding from themselves for a long time: the fact that they and their worldview are unnecessary impediments to most of humanity.

Political mess is a family crisis

2005-08-29T15:43:00.000-04:00

The following was inspired by a post at Distance, where a version of it is also posted. It's admittedly speculative, but I think it suggests things that could in fact be scientifically tested...

Today's sociopolitical situation in the US is a lot like having a very weak parent (the Dems & moderate Repubs) to turn to when a strong parent (the right-wingers & corporate cronies) is brutalizing you.

In the past, such conditions would've sparked the growth of third parties, but corrupt electoral laws and widespread self-absorption today make such parties very difficult things to get off the ground. It doesn't help that the courts and government watchdog agencies have largely been corrupted, social services are underfunded, and the wingnuts are constantly screaming that liberals are "traitors" (or worse). That kind of atmosphere is much like that found when an abused child tries to run to an outside adult, only to have the door slammed in his face because the parent has already passed around word that the child is "a troublemaker" or just "making it up."

The right wingers often decry the common focus on self-improvement, therapy, psychological exploration, and the like, but they seem to be benefiting from it at least in the short-term. I'm sure, if such a study could be done, we'd find that those who are most likely to seek therapy & otherwise try to deal with their past are also most likely to be of a progressive bent culturally. In effect, such self-exploration takes progressives out of the loop ... but only temporarily. Often, they return with a vengeance to use the knowledge thus gained to help others, b/c it almost invariably results in finding common ground with lots of other people struggling with the effects of this dysfunctional society.

Our best hope is that we can forestall the right-wing agenda long enough to give a new generation of self-aware and socially/ecologically connected people a chance to act.

The right-wingers don't care about facing their demons -- in fact, they tend to deny they exist internally, thereby projecting them onto everyone else. They, however, are probably more likely than progressively-raised folks to have actually experienced serious trauma during childhood, not b/c conservatives are by nature more vicious than progressives (they're not), but b/c conservatives have a much greater tendency to keep other people out of "family business" and are more likely to see children as being subordinate to their parents. That attitude sometimes approaches paranoia the farther toward the right fringe you go, especially when it gets wrapped up in supposedly literal religious proscriptions, social isolation, and lack of education.

When abuse does exist in such an environment, it's much more likely to be hidden for longer -- and thereby have more severe impact -- than when children are raised "by a village" and seen as having rights separate from but dependent on their parents. In the latter case, openness gives the kids and stressed parents somewhere to turn and tends to minimize (although not entirely prevent) abuse.

Today's politics represent these two attitudes writ large: A "go it alone" view that cloaks itself in morality while projecting its pain onto other countries and segments of society and a "reach out" view that seeks to engage the outside and learn from it while accepting the real cost of our history to ourselves and others.

Katrina presages energy woes?

2005-08-29T13:04:00.000-04:00

Hmmm...

Woke up this morning and caught some of the news. Although I didn't hear anyone say it before the hurricane hit land, today, NBC's Today Show talked about the possibility that Katrina could endanger the oil refining & shipment facilities in Louisiana that supply 25% of America's oil.

The NBC anchor said speculation on the storm would cause gas prices to climb 20 to 30 cents this week. If damage to those facilities is minor, that price will probably fall again; if not, we could be in for a very long winter.

New York Newsday reports roughly the same thing, saying that seven refineries have shut down in that area:

Wholesale gasoline prices in the New York and Gulf Coast markets soared by 25-35 cents a gallon on Monday following reports that about 8 percent of U.S. refining capacity had been shut down ahead of the storm. One analyst said pump prices nationwide would likely average more than $2.75 a gallon by week's end, up from about $2.60 a gallon Monday.

snip

Unlike last year's Hurricane Ivan, which only hit the edge of the oil and natural-gas producing areas in the central Gulf of Mexico, Katrina is plowing right through the heart of that region.

PVM Oil Associates in Vienna, Austria, said Katrina had the potential to do more damage to southeastern Louisiana than Ivan, which damaged seven platforms, 100 underwater pipelines and shut down production at some facilities for several months.

Some analysts have said the only way to rein in surging prices would be for the United States to tap some of its petroleum reserves. A Department of Energy spokesman said the U.S. government was in touch with oil companies in the region and that a decision on whether to release oil from emergency stockpiles would likely be made in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Forbes.com reports that Standard & Poor's initial estimates have put refinery shutdowns at 12% of U.S. capacity, while evacuated offshore facilities are expected to affect 42% of Gulf oil production.

That could be a major problem, since Reuters reports that "Dealers are particularly concerned about damage as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is already pumping at near its full capacity, leaving it little room to make up for any lasting outages."

That doesn't leave the US much wiggle room, since our Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a capacity of just 727 million barrels. That may sound like a lot, but The Dept of Energy's own reports show that we consume about 20.7 million barrels per day and get 12.1 million BPD as imports while producing only 5.1 million BPD here at home. (By reading the chart, I'm not clear on what makes up the difference -- synthetics? recycled oil? oil shale and similar low-producing sources?-- but its something other than crude oil.)

That gives us a 35 day supply.

According to a different Reuters article, Katrina also affected natural gas production, which was reduced in preparation for the storm:

Natural gas pipeline operators reported that at least 5.6 billion cubic feet per day of offshore production had been cut from their systems, or nearly 60 percent of the 10 bcf total produced daily in the Gulf.

Gulf of Mexico natural gas output accounts for about 20 percent of the nation's total production.

And, as a footnote, Katrina also shut down three nuclear plants, but those will probably be up and running shortly.

Sounds like June's movie Oil Storm, which I wrote about here and here, might be coming true...

As if that's not enough, we still have nearly three months to go in the hurricane season. The National Hurricane Center warns "for the remainder of the season, we expect an additional 11-14 tropical storms, with 7-9 becoming hurricanes, and 3-5 of these becoming major hurricanes" (that is, category 3 or above). If they're right, we'll be into next year's name list before it ends...

Stay tuned, sports fans.

Development distress...

2005-08-23T20:28:00.000-04:00

Today, I spent some time touring my old hometown (Grafton, MA) in preparation for a new job I'm starting 9/6. Although I already knew about it, it never ceases to amaze me how much development is going on there and in other communities around central Mass. What really stood out, though, were two things.

The first and most obvious: how cookie-cutter most of the subdivisions are becoming -- one development had dozens of townhouses that were almost exactly identical, every one of them huge and beige. Blech.

It must take a certain mindset to buy such a place, one I don't share, but that unfortunately seems to be widespread. While I was in Arizona (1997-2001), I remember seeing a story about this neighborhood that totally blew a gasket over one family's painting their house a different shade of stucco by accident. They claimed the paint they bought dried into a different color than they expected, one that wasn't very far from the typical beige everyone else had. IIRC, the color turned out yellowish; it wasn't like they selected bright red, blue, pink, or even white.

Here in Mass., you CAN find all of those colors side by side except in some newer developments... and nobody complains. It's your house, paint it however you like. There's also something called variety in styles: colonials beside Victorians beside capes beside duplexes beside Spanish villas, and I realized I missed it when I came home. Down there, whole blocks of the map are covered with identical Spanish style-homes#, each of them walled off from its neighbors as if the neighbors were planning a seige. In Mass., even though we coined the phrase "good fences make good neighbors," a large percentage of houses here have no fences at all, and most of those that do have fences that are no more than decorative.

The second point was a little more subtle... and that makes it that much more annoying. I am sick of people who build subdivisions and name the damn streets after themselves, their kids and their dog. Sure, some of that has happened for a long time, but it's become epidemic since 2000 in almost every town. When I went to high school, there were about a dozen first-name streets in Grafton; now there are about 50 of them. Just a look at the J names says it all: Janet Cir., Jay St., Jodi Ln, John Dr., Jordan Terr., Joy's Rd. Janet, Jay and Jordan were around when I lived there, the others are new. Or imagine how easily emergency services can confuse these names if spoken in panic: Ann Dr., Anthony Dr., Alana Dr., Mary Ann Dr. All but the last one are new.

It's long overdue time for some creativity in street names. What about tapping the volumes of mythology (other than Greek and Roman) for new names: Ceredwen Road (Celtic), Sedna Ave. (Inuit), Brahma Terr. (Hindu), etc? Or astronomy (except planets and Zodiac signs): Rigel Road, Antares Dr., Mizar Terr., Centauri Dr. Or oddly-named characters from books -- fantasy and scifi have thousands of them. Any of those would be easy to remember and interesting and might even prompt curious folks to find out what they actually mean. A handful of developers do this, but the majority don't and many local planning boards don't encourage thought about such things.

That's not surprising, since most towns haven't really thought about what they want in development since the 1970s or earlier. It shows in how the subdivisions form: lots of curving &/or dead end streets, garages, and cookie-cutter homes that take up as much space as possible, usually with the most beautiful lots built upon first... rather than left open as parks for the entire community to enjoy.

Again, there are exceptions. Some, like Woodstock, CT., are following a more eco-friendly path. In my day job, I recently wrote about the fact Woodstock's planning folks approved subdivision regulations that promote cluster development, in which all of the actual building is done in one section of the property near an existing road. Their regs had some other interesting features that other towns could duplicate, where possible:

* Developers must build with preservation of existing and future agricultural use in mind.

* A minimum of 50 percent of the buildable acreage must be set aside for conservation to be "protected in perpetuity." (They were talking about a 30 year plan to develop a trail network linking these lands.)

* "Streets shall be laid out with an east-west orientation so as to facilitate the use of solar collectors" whenever possible.

* Developers can get extra building lots if they include affordable housing or accessory apartments.

That sounds like a step in the right direction.

*********

# The area these pictures depict is a particularly egregious example of corporate development run amok. Called Anthem, it was built where it is -- about 15 miles north of anything else in the Phoenix valley, in the middle of nowhere -- specifically because it was outside the city's jurisdiction and thus could avoid even the minimal development control Phoenix has. It's totally corporate-controlled; as far as I know, the place doesn't even have an elected government even though around 70,000 people live there. Of course, the developers expect the public to ultimately pay for extending things like water & sewer lines, to deal with the increased commuting traffic on I-17 & the subsequent increase in air pollution, and to accept further degradation of the desert. (That's unfortunately not unusual there; while I lived there, government in AZ was a corporate lackey, especially of developers and mining firms, and I doubt it's changed much.)

To be fair, though, I did find one of my favorite street names in AZ (not in Anthem, but Mesa) -- Magic Canyon Dr. Their naming issues don't involve using first names; what they overuse are numbers, but that's not unique to the Phoenix metro area.

Time for a little laughter

2005-08-20T18:50:00.000-04:00

I know, this blog's subject matter can be kinda dark... so you might want to check out this revelation from central intelligence... (Thanks to Arms Control Wonk for leading me there)...

People’s Harvest targets hunger

2005-08-19T11:41:00.000-04:00

The following article ran today in the Worcester MA Telegram & Gazette. I thought I'd post it here as an example of people trying to solve the problems many of my other posts discuss. The original article had a chart and photo, but those didn't pick up.

People's Harvest doesn't yet have a website, but I've added other links.

*******

By Gus Steeves Correspondent

AUGUST 19, 2005

POMFRET (CT)— Food is something many people take for granted: Go to the store and it’s there.

Most people don’t see it quite the way Carl W. Asikainen and Lisa M. Hart do. They want others to consider how that food got there, where it came from, how those who can’t buy it will eat tonight, and what people can do locally to promote food security.

To help accomplish that, they founded People’s Harvest last spring. The all-volunteer group grows vegetables and collects produce from area farms to donate to local food kitchens, senior centers, shelters, and similar organizations that feed the needy. They made their first deliveries last month and have so far distributed about 700 pounds of produce, most of it donated by other farmers, to 15 nonprofit agencies.

“The average distance our food travels to get to the grocery store is 1,500 miles,” Mr. Asikainen said. “By emphasizing local (farming), we can call attention to hunger that exists close to home.”

Of Windham County’s 110,000 people, about “one in 10 are food-insecure, meaning they don’t know where they’re going to get their next meal,” he said. About 3 percent occasionally go without that meal.

As site coordinator of the food kitchen at the North Grosvenordale Methodist Church in Thompson, Shirley A. Wilbur was one of the first recipients of the distributions by People’s Harvest. Her kitchen serves about 50 meals every Monday, one of five area kitchens that does so on an assigned day every week. The other four are Methodist churches in Moosup, Danielson and Putnam, and a retreat center in Wauregan.

“We don’t get many fresh vegetables” from places other than People’s Harvest, she said, although some of the other sites do.

“It’s a good project. They help spread (fresh food) around so everyone gets a little of it,” Ms. Wilbur said.

People’s Harvest has a small garden at the vacant Averill Farm in Wolf Den State Park. This year they are growing squash, tomatoes, eggplants, and a few other vegetables, and plan to expand that to include fruit trees, corn, and other crops over the next year or two. Eventually, Mr. Asikainen said, they might seek certification as an organic farm, but are satisfied at present with simply using natural farming methods without fertilizers or pesticides.

The crops themselves, however, take a back seat to the organization’s primary role: educating about hunger and how people can grow their own food.

“In a few years, we’d like to see discrete gardens all over the county,” Mr. Asikainen said. “I don’t really want to be a food bank or a shipping organization. I want it to be more of a model and an opportunity for education on these issues.”

Mrs. Hart was more direct: “We hope to bring (people) back to what gardening is,” she said, by turning the site into a center for exhibits, classes, workshops, and hands-on experience with plants, and bringing some of those events to local schools and other agencies.

“You don’t need a very large garden,” she said. “Even a four-by-eight or a three-by-six (foot) garden can produce a lot of food.”

One of their donors, Wayne M. Hansen of Oneco, agreed, saying, “I wish more people would learn to grow stuff because if you do that, you’re less disconnected from the Earth and other people.”

Mr. Hansen runs Wayne’s Organic Garden, a hand-tilled vegetable farm. He likes the fact that People’s Harvest exists because it enables him to donate food that he cannot sell, either because he’s got too much of it or because it “doesn’t look quite right.”

“I hate to see stuff go to waste. Some years, I don’t have anything extra, but this year I did,” he said.

For both founders, this project is an effort of love. Neither intended to be farmers, but realized this idea combined their areas of expertise, according to both Mr. Asikainen and Mrs. Hart.

For Mr. Asikainen, of Eastford, this project is a natural outgrowth of his full-time job with End Hunger Connecticut; in fact, that organization gives him time off to do it, although he said they can’t afford to pay him to do it. For Mrs. Hart, of Woodstock, it’s a somewhat more focused expression of her experience as a math and science teacher and former 4-H farm educator.

The foray into farming was actually a stroke of luck. Both grew up in Pomfret and thought the inactive state-owned farm would be a great place for their project, but were afraid to ask for it specifically when they raised the subject with the park ranger.

Fortunately for them, the ranger offered it to them.

“It took so long to get the ground ready this year because it hasn’t been farmed in so long,” Mr. Asikainen said. With other volunteers, they had to rip out extensive tree roots and pull up large swaths of poison ivy, among other challenges, he said.

They also hope to get Historical Commission funds to renovate the farm and barn, which date back to 1796 but have been vacant for at least a decade.

********

Edited 8/20 to add: You'll notice three deleted comments. I appreciate comments from folks who actually READ my blog, or even just visit it out of curiosity, but not from spam-bloggers trying to get me or others to visit their junk sites.

African hunters on US plains?

2005-08-18T14:16:00.000-04:00

Today, the BBC ran an interesting story -- Cornell University scientists are seriously considering the idea of importing cheetahs, lions, wild horses, elephants and other big lifeforms to run wild on the Great Plains.

By introducing living counterparts to the extinct animals, the researchers say, these voids could be filled. So, by introducing free-ranging African cheetahs to the Southwest, strong interactions with pronghorns could be restored, while providing cheetahs with a new habitat. ...

Other living species that could "stand in" for Pleistocene-era animals in North America include feral horses (Equus caballus), wild asses (E. asinus), Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus), Asian (Elephas maximus) and African (Loxodonta africana) elephants and lions (Panthera leo).

"Obviously, gaining public acceptance is going to be a huge issue, especially when you talk about reintroducing predators," said lead author Josh Donlan, of Cornell University. "There are going to have to be some major attitude shifts. That includes realising predation is a natural role, and that people are going to have to take precautions."

Yeah, Dr. Donlan, it'll be a huge issue. Did you forgot that this is part of the country where people still object to the idea of reintroducing native predators like wolves... by killing them? Or that the big native herbivore, the bison, still only counts a small number of wild survivors in pockets of what was once a vast range, the vast majority being raised on private ranches?

I agree that average people need to learn that predation is a necessary part of the ecosystem, but we should focus on re-establishing the wolves first. I suspect introducing African species won't result in filling the voids, it will create more problems for a native species' population web that has stabilized without them. They have, after all, been gone around 13,000 years. While that time isn't enough to create significant genetic changes, it has certainly allowed for some behavioral adaptation that new predators will upset. Besides, the newcomers would most likely go after the easiest prey they can find... namely, domestic cattle. Why chase down an antelope at 60 mph when you can munch on much slower fare?

That said, I think the effort to save African species is important and the image of lions stalking prey in sight of New Mexico's I-40 would be an interesting one. But how would they react to the traffic? Today, their homeland has cars, sure, but not the kind of freeway network or the sheer traffic volume the US has. Likewise, these animals come from a climate that tends to be warmer than our plains are; although summers would probably be just fine, how well would they adapt to the Chinook blizzards of winter if they lived in Nebraska or Kansas? In Africa, some of them migrate seasonally, but that would be a problem on our Plains because of the fact that so much land is fenced up into farms and ranches, likely requiring those who get released in one area to stay there.

It's pretty obvious to me that this idea needs a little rethinking.

Debating the absurd

2005-08-09T02:50:00.000-04:00

I came across a couple of very interesting blogs that discuss some of the issues I cover. They are Arms Control Wonk and DefenseTech.

Before reading this post, you should jump here for the start of this "thread" and here for the post I'm actually responding to.

At the latter site, 21st Century Schizoid Man (which, BTW, is a King Crimson song title), John Opie writes:

Target sets have nothing to do with deciding to use a nuclear weapon: rather, a decision to use a nuclear weapon is first and fundamentally a political decision that has nothing to do with target sets.

First off, I need to define "target sets." Simply, that's the list of targets a given nuclear attack plan will hit, as defined by the intended effect the attack will have on the people of the other country. Even if the intent is limited to, say, destroying their military capacity, the vast destructiveness of nuclear weapons dictates that a decision to use nukes SHOULD include agonizing over the effect on the people (esp. civilians) near the target. Taking into account the effects on people is the definition of a "political" decision, and refusing or being unable to do that may not be "inhuman," but it's certainly inhumane.

These devices are not and cannot be precision weapons whereby we can take out a tank factory next to a school (the example is from the DefenseTech article) with minimal civilian deaths. If a nuke goes off, it's all but guaranteed to vaporize that factory AND the school AND obliterate everything else within several square miles, minimum, with the VAST MAJORITY of the dead being civilians.

When nukes are in play, the expression "a minimum of force and destruction" is simply a denial of reality. Minimum destruction would be an attack that destroyed the tank factory without touching the school or any nearby homes, something that is impossible with nukes.

Mr. Opie later writes:

Target 69 weapons if you want to have a 94% kill probability of a hardened target under those conditions. Period.

What exactly is the point of such massive overkill? Doing that only serves to turn a wide swath of land into black glass forever and kicks up massive quantities of fallout that poisons millions downwind. That's not "minimal" destruction by any sane definition of the term (if there is one).

Even if the target is technically not destroyed, it only takes one or two explosions to ensure that nobody can use the place for the foreseeable future.... b/c anyone who tries will cook themselves getting there (or getting out). Survivors inside will be effectively trapped, probably until they starve or suffocate.

A perfect example is the US's own NORAD HQ -- The Russians or anyone else wouldn't need to pummel it into dust (which might indeed take dozens of warheads); they just have to drop one or two beside the main entrance and nobody inside is getting out. NORAD is, de facto, dead.

Of course, so is most of Colorado Springs, which goes right back to my original point. There is no such thing as a "nuanced" use of nuclear weapons. They are designed to destroy indiscriminately and to inflict as much terror as possible.

He's right when he says that everyone abstracts various aspects of life and decision-making to some degree, and it is almost necessary when comprehending geopolitical issues. But the level of abstraction and demonization necessary to actually use modern nuclear weapons is pathological given what we already know about the deaths, destruction, and long-term suffering "small" nukes caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima III: Never again

2005-08-07T13:59:00.000-04:00

Quote from Alternet's "Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed" (emphasis mine):

...Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern ... directed the U.S. military filmmakers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.

"I always had the sense," McGovern (said), "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. ... They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because ... we were sorry for our sins."

As the article goes on to point out, this past weekend some of those censored images are being broadcast for the first time. One of them is on the Sundance Channel.

The Discovery and History channels also have documentaries including older footage and some modern computer-created graphics depicting the horrors that happened in Hiroshima.

I caught some of two of them yesterday, flipping between the two channels during ads. There really are no words that do justice to such scenes as: the blast wave rolling over and demolishing everything in sight; the horribly burned victims staggering down blasted streets in creepy silence; the charred remains of the dead with just bones amid ashes; suffering survivors so desperate for water they drink the oily, lethal black rain of fallout; the summer sunshine instantly replaced by stygian darkness lit mostly by flames; doctors later describing people as "rotting" while alive from radiation sickness.

One survivor noted, "Suddenly, a strange creature appeared out of nowhere. Since it was summer, if it had been human, it would've been wearing white. But what I saw was black from top to bottom." That, of course, was one of the thousands charred by the bomb's intense heat, face and skin seared off, still alive at that moment but only to collapse and die at the speaker's feet.

Do we need to see these things for ourselves in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles before we wake up and demand the end of nuclear weapons? Before we treat those who advocate building more of them as the madmen they are?

If you haven't already read it, please read my earlier column on Bush's plan to build more nukes. I know it's long, but their own plans show just how dangerously blind these people are to this madness.

It's not just them, after all... if these weapons ever get used again and we haven't tried to stop it, we are responsible. They are being funded with our tax dollars, by our government, in our name. If we continue to roll over and play dead, eventually we will be.

Edited 8/10 to add: Apparently the French paper Liberation agrees with me: It writes, "Because the longer it lasts, the more likely the nuclear era is to pass from 'Never again!' to 'Sooner or later ...'" and that's exactly what I'm concerned about. They also link to some 1946 footage from Hiroshima and the Bikini tests, but it's not very useful & the sound cuts out a lot.

Skeptic's Circle

2005-08-05T00:40:00.000-04:00

The latest issue of The Skeptic's Circle (lucky #13) is out over at Be Lambic or Green featuring my "Prophetic Nonsense" and links to a host of other freethinking articles casting light into dark corners of pseudoscience, mysticism, ignorance, and general weirdness. The circle beckons...

Also, I should've posted this weeks ago, but "The Big Chill" (also below) and a LOT of others are up for perusal as part of The Tangled Bank. Go check out the other contributors if you're interested in science (especially biology). TB "meets" every two weeks, with new articles, with a new host each time.

Prophetic nonsense

2005-07-31T19:18:00.000-04:00

OK. I know I said I won't have anything to do with the warped fundy wackiness of so-called "Christian" apocalyptic "literature" like the awful Left Behind series. Truthfully, I probably can't criticize those books as effectively as Fred Clark at slacktivist can, so go visit his weekly LB series archive when you're done here.

But, I couldn't resist a free shot at such nonsense when I came across this BS at the books' website (I just hope going there didn't give me a virus):

One of the hardest things for American prophecy students to accept is that the United States is not clearly mentioned in Bible prophecy, yet our nation is the only superpower in the world today.
-- Tim LaHaye

What explains this scriptural silence? Mark Hitchcock, contributing editor to the Left Behind Prophecy Club, outlines four possible explanations on why America is not specifically referred to in prophecy.

Possibility 1
America will still be a powerful nation in the last days, but the Lord simply chose not to mention her specifically.

This is possible, but it seems unlikely. In Scripture, the dominant political and military power in the end times is centered in the Mediterranean and in Europe. This scriptural silence concerning America seems to indicate that by the time the tribulation period arrives, America will no longer be a major influence in the world.

Possibility 2
America is not mentioned specifically in Scripture because she will be destroyed by other nations. She will suffer a fall from the outside.

Those who hold this theory are quick to point to the notion that America will be crippled by a nuclear attack. However, in recent days the terrorist attacks on our nation have led some to conclude that our own freedom and technology will be the Achilles' heel that brings us down.

Possibility 3
America is not mentioned in Bible Prophecy because she will have lost her influence as result of moral and spiritual deterioration. She will suffer a fall from the inside.

As you can imagine, this is a very popular view today in light of the moral malaise we see all around us. Proponents of this view have no trouble citing alarming statistics related to drug use, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, children born out of wedlock, divorce, pornography, abortion and on and on.

Possibility 4
America is not mentioned in Bible Prophecy because she is brought to her knees by the Rapture.

If the rapture were to happen today and all the true believers in Jesus Christ were whisked away to heaven in a split second, America would be devastated. It is estimated that America will lose somewhere between 25 and 65 million citizens: Christians and their small children. Not only would the country lose a minimum of 10% of her population, but she would also lose the very best, the "salt and light" of this great land (see Matthew 5:13-14).

These people need a very loud wake-up call.

This line says it all: "the dominant political and military power in the end times is centered in the Mediterranean and in Europe." The scriptures these people like to quote were written at least 2000 years ago. America isn't mentioned because she didn't exist.

Many of the Old Testament "prophecies" refer to Assyria, Persia, or Babylonia not as symbols but in reality because those nations dominated the Middle East for long periods of time. The Book of Daniel and other "prophecies" have nothing to do with 21st Century life.

Similarly, the New Testament "prophecies" refer to ROME, which was then the superpower, and are largely veiled political statements slamming the imperial regime and its occupation of Judea. At best, they were somebody's reasonable assumptions that, in the then-not-too-distant future, the tensions in Judea would boil over and spark a massive Roman backlash. Such a thing did happen in CE 70, culminating in the infamous seige of Masada and the sacking of Jerusalem. At worst, they were an expression of someone's serious psychological disorder; we often see such pronouncements coming from the disturbed minds of schizophrenics.

When valid, such predictions need no divine guidance, just a good grounding in politics and social issues. "Prophecies" that are so grounded are more likely to be clearly expressed and accurate, or at least disprovable. That's also true of some of the things we've been talking about in this blog -- peak oil, nuclear war, etc. I don't believe in prophecy, but I do believe in reasonable predictions based on fact.

Anti-occupation "prophets" and "messiahs" pop up frequently when a people is undergoing severe cultural crisis. Anthropologists and historians have documented this phenomenon very clearly among several Native American tribes in the late 1800s (Wovoka's Ghost Dance was the most famous), the Cargo Cults of Papua New Guinea, Mayan end-time prophecies that date back to interaction with the Toltecs, and elsewhere. I'd bet that if we looked at a random selection of cultures who faced oppression by an expansionist society, we'll find similar stories in most of them.

Stories that claim to peer centuries into the future really come in two types. The best of it exists in modern science fiction. Those authors make no claims of prophecy, but our distant descendants might find what they wrote to be true and affix the label of "prophet" on some of them long after the fact. If their insight into how today's technology and society may change stands the test of time, they should be honored then, but hopefully not in a religious sense. The thought of somebody finding the works of good SF writers like Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, or David Brin "sacred" in CE 3000 is unnerving & ridiculous... probably even to them.

I do not, BTW, consider Left Behind to be SF, even if it's shelved as such in stores. To be science fiction it has to be based in some conception of science, even a mistaken one, not nonsense.

The vast majority of stuff purported to predict the future is so confusing it could mean anything, or nothing, and is very easily twisted into any form proponents wish to twist it. That, of course, is particularly easy if the "prophecy" was written a long, long time ago, in some language nobody can now read, or one that wasn't written in the first place. That's the big problem with most biblical "prophecy" and New Age distortions of the legends of various Native peoples.

The most obvious case is Nostradamus. Have you ever tried reading his weirdness? It's a mishmash of (mostly) French, Latin, Spanish and words the guy made up himself. There are several translations (I'll admit, I once owned Erika Cheetham's version), but they often disagree. Even when they do agree, what they say frequently makes no sense.

There's more like this nonsense all over the Web, and such BS riddles prophetic communication throughout history. Certainly, "prophecy" is communication, and at times it's done with good intentions, usually as part of an effort to renew the culture it comes from.

But Left Behind and similar claims of modern bible-prophecy (Hal Lindsey, the so-called Dominionists, and their ilk) represents the worst kind of chiliasm. Instead of being creative and forward-looking, today's fundamentalists steal and distort their prophecy from a culture (ancient Judaism) that's not their own. Unlike Wovoka and the others I noted, they do not promote renewal of the culture that gave them birth; in fact, they promote its destruction as a requirement for their own narcissistic salvation. Although they talk about fighting cultural decay, they are actually a cause of it, because they impede and reject genuine efforts at renewal.

Such peddlers of "prophecy" & distorted reality need to be reined in by the rest of us before their delusions become self-fulfilling and cause a lot of suffering.

Hiroshima redux

2005-07-25T13:46:00.000-04:00

This week's Guardian has an incredible spread on the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, with an edited version of John Hersey's original article (later lengthened into the book Hiroshima), interviews with survivors who were then kids, etc. Be sure to read the various articles linked to part two.

Once done... write your senators, congressmen, etc., telling them to stop the madness and oppose new nuclear weapons. We can and should make changes now... but part of me is afraid it'll take another Hiroshima before we do and that if that happens it won't just be one or two cities. Prove me wrong.

Misc. news links

2005-07-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

This shouldn't surprise anyone...

Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely

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Poll results like those couldn't possibly have anything to do with events like this could they?...

Senate Debates New Nuclear Bunker-Buster Plan

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire (7/23/05)

WASHINGTON — U.S. senators today debated a renewed effort to block a feasibility study on developing a new earth-penetrating nuclear weapon (see GSN, July 1).

Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) placed an amendment to the fiscal 2006 Defense Authorization bill that would transfer $4 million designated for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator to the D.C. National Guard for use on mass casualty event training and equipment.

Voting on that and other amendments to the bill is not expected until Tuesday at the earliest.

A similar amendment to the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations bill that would have redirected the money toward paying down the national debt was defeated 53-43 in June, despite support from several Republicans.

The House this year has approved no appropriations for the bunker-buster study. It did, though, authorize in its version of the authorization bill money for the Air Force to conduct a study on the weapon. Democrats say that would allow analysis only of a conventionally armed penetrator. Republicans say the authorization would allow study of the nuclear option.

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study was until last year conducted by the Energy Department. Congress provided no funding for the program for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The Bush administration this year requested the $4 million to conduct a crucial field test of the weapon that would involve slamming a mock version into a large concrete block.

Kennedy said the Bush administration’s interest in funding the study shows “they do not have their priorities straight,” and that the money could better be spent on defense against conventional terrorism such as this month’s bombings of London’s mass transit system.

Pursuit of the weapon also “threatens to launch a new nuclear arms race” by undermining efforts to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and a suspected Iranian effort, he said.

“The administration would like us to develop something that we don’t need. That would endanger us by its very existence,” he said.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), who sponsored the Defense Authorization bill, said continuation of the study does not mean the United States would necessarily build the weapon. Specific approval from Congress would be necessary for advanced development, he said.

“I assure my colleagues, I assure the American public, that Congress is monitoring each step of this program,” he said.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said the study would not fuel an arms race, noting the United States has reduced its nuclear arsenal by more than 13,000 warheads since the late 1980s.

The study “certainly does not indicate that we are in a warmongering mode,” he said.

The Bush administration disclosed last year a plan to develop, with congressional approval, the penetrator over five years for an estimated $486 million.

A National Academy of Sciences report in April concluded that a high-yield nuclear penetrator used to strike a deeply buried target could produce up to 1 million casualties if detonated near a populated area (see GSN, April 18).

Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said that in response to the program, potential adversaries would be tempted “to put that deeply buried target under a city, under a historic or religious site,” making use of the weapon improbable.

*********************************

Lockheed Expects to Test Bunker-Buster This Year

SOURCE: Global Security Newswire 7/14/05

Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control is expected to test four prototypes of a new U.S. bunker-buster bomb later this year, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, July 1).

Lockheed is working with U.S. Navy scientists as part of the Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Initiative. News of the tests was first reported in the British weekly New Scientist, according to AFP.

The missile is designed to create an air pocket in front of the weapon as it falls to the ground. In theory, this pocket will force the earth to the sides once the weapon reaches the surface, creating a hole for the missile to penetrate. This would allow the weapon to reach buried targets, such a WMD storage facilities

The idea of an air pocket comes from torpedoes that create gas bubbles around themselves, allowing the weapon to move faster because it is traveling through water vapor as opposed to liquid water, AFP reported.

“Lockheed Martin hopes the supercavitating missile will reach 10 times the depth of the current Air Force record holder, the huge BLU-113 bunker-buster, which can break through seven meters of concrete (22.7 feet) or 30 meters (100 feet) of earth,” AFP quotes New Scientist as saying.

A thinner casing on the conventionally armed weapon would allow it to carry more explosives than the existing version, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo News, July 14).

**********************

from The Guardian, 7/21/05, letter to the editor:

The myth that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Japan to end the second world war and thus save lives is still prevalent. Winston Churchill later asserted: "It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the bomb fell." The US had two main goals. One was to dominate the Far East after the war. The other was to gain advantage over the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement. This was a criminal act and a massive human catastrophe which must never be forgotten - and never repeated.

Kate Hudson
Chair, CND

DOE report is height of delusion

2005-07-23T18:11:00.000-04:00

Title: Recommendations for the Nuclear Complex of the Future
Authors: Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force (David Overskei, Chair)
Draft report from US Dept of Energy, July 2005.

**************

"As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities." ~Voltaire

**************

Amazing. Just when I thought public policy regarding nukes couldn't get more absurd, I found this DOE task force report released July 13.(All quotes below, unless clearly stated otherwise, come from the report, but all emphasis in them is mine.)

The absurdities and, worse, blatant contradictions litter the reports 36 pages (excluding appendices, which go on forever). Repeatedly, the task force writers argue a need to support non-proliferation efforts by developing a new generation of nuclear weapons based on what they call the "Reliable Replacement Warhead." and more than that, instituting a system by which the US can continuously develop new weapons over time once new ones get old.

"To demonstrate the US is committed to arms reduction, the Task Force recommends that Pantex focus on the aggressive dismantlement of the Cold War stockpile, while the Complex begins replacing the Cold War stockpile with the sustainable stockpile of the future." (vii)

WTF?!? This is a lot like taking the print version of Hustler away from the kids but giving them internet access to the VoyeurWeb. How does this promote arms reduction?

At one point, they acknowledge that the existing Moscow Treaty calls for reduction to a total of 1700-2200 "operationally deployed strategic nukes" by 2012. That number, however, DOESN'T include the rest of the stockpile, much of which can be made operational very quickly. Later, the report says the total will be "substantially smaller" than present, but also says DOD requires a stockpile "if force augmentation is needed to meet an expanding threat." In essense, the DOD is saying we have to be ready for another arms race, even though the whole objective of this report is to ensure more accurate, effective wpns, which would make huge quantities irrelevant.

Obviously, you know where I stand -- we need to abolish them as soon as possible. But even if we assume there's a need to keep the ability to produce them (as, for example, some of James Morrow's characters suggest in This is the Way the World Ends), we do not need more warheads. With just the existing submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), the US is perfectly capable of dealing unprecedented damage and suffering to any nation who threatens us. (Not that any really do.)

"Cost-benefit" stupidity

The report often talks about cost savings by creating a new Consolidated Nuclear Production Center (CNPC) to replace the several locations that now manufacture nuclear weapons and parts. And "cost-benefit" talk is rife, as in, "A risk-informed cost-benefit analysis should be performed on all programmatic, safety and security recommendations. Rational decisionmaking should balance risks and benefits while implementing change."

"Cost analysis of designs should extend from inception to disposition," they write. That makes sense if you're talking about toasters or computers, but it leaves out some very important calculations when the item in question is intended to obliterate whole cities. Will this analysis include the low-probability but incredibly high-negative-outcome risk that the things might be used?!? If it does not, then anything the "cost-benefit" report says is bullshit.

To me, this nonsense is similar to their various references to "margin", as in creating "high margin conservative designs." What does THAT mean? I assume they intend it to mean "high effectiveness," but since there's no benefit to ever USING them, the only "high margin" I can see in this process is high PROFIT margin for the industries they want to make them... but I'll come back to that.

The way the entire report is written strongly implies that they intend to build a ton of new nukes, let them sit there for a few decades, then dismantle them without ever using them. Obviously, we should never use them, but if we design them intending to never use them, then let's not build them at all.

This is an economic black hole of limitless depth, a perpetual siphon for billions in taxpayer funds with no redeeming cultural value.

Instead, let's save the money, resources, scientific time, unnecessary risks, and other things wasted by their production for use in more socially beneficial scientific pursuits like the space program or cleaning up our environmental errors.

In fact, they claim that "implementing all recommendations now will increase near-term costs substantially, but with substantial future cost reductions" once the CNPC is fully operational. However, the very next line is directly contradictory: It says the plan assumes "accelerated dismantlement rates" and "no reduction in the currently supported stockpile." Which is it? How can you assume both???

"The CNPC should be designed to handle 300 weapons per year" including "producing and dismantling at a rate of 125 devices per year" by 2030 on just one shift, with the possibility of a second (and third?) shift if more wpns are desired. I don't see how that's going to reduce our overall number of nukes, even if the existing site (called Pantex) is devoted solely to destroying old weapons. They later note the entire system is 20+ years behind in dismantling existing wpns "under current planning of dismantlement rates."

Industrial follies

As I noted earlier, the Task Force aims to hand off much of the production process to private industry. That's scary, especially since they argue, "The DOD should work to relax the military chracteristics of its nuclear weapons" so they can be more easily manufactured. WTF??? There should never be anything BUT military characteristics of nukes! This sounds (unintentionally, I'm sure) like they want civilian nukes. Can I buy one? I'll take the blue one on that shelf there. It's a little heavy so make sure you double-bag it.

Snark aside, they mean that the process should be simplified so that fairly common automated industrial processes can build future nukes, thus reducing the number of people actually handling dangerous materials, making the weapon parts more interchangable, and supposedly reducing costs. That's great in theory. But I have a problem with that, too, for a few reasons.

I. Simplicity: They want "pit designs that are simpler to fabricate and thus conducive to lower production cost and higher throughput." Translation: easier to make lots of them for fewer bucks. Sounds like a market for terrorists, who would find it easier to steal the ideas than the weapons themselves.

The effort to convert most of the process to an automated one is ostensibly to reduce costs, increase efficiency and reduce human exposure to the toxins... But I think this will simply further dehumanize the horrors nukes present. If a human is actively building these things, there's always a chance they'll realize how awful they are and begin to fight for a nuke-free world (maybe even sabotaging production so it doesn't explode at all?), but more distance will make them more likely to just see it as "another job." Building nukes should NEVER be seen as "just a job" any more than serial murder or dumping toxins in rivers should be.

II. Security: The report is probably accurate in saying that the current system of "guards, guns and gates" at the 8 wpns-related facilities "increases cost with no apparent limit." By consolidating the system, it would certainly be easier to maintain security of the weapons and facilities, although the weapons' existence is itself the cause of that insecurity.

They want to improve security, but why is the "more economical industrial security" model better? As we've seen, computers have been responsible for numerous false warnings due to errors or outside hacking that could've led to nuke war if a human being hadn't been there to prevent it. Likewise, industrial computers are often being hacked, as the recent spate of "identity theft" cases proves. Industrial security is no panacea. Given the horrible nature of these devices, we should have both technology and well-armed human beings guarding them. Again, the fact that they exist at all means insane wackjobs will want them because of the destruction they can do.

III. Staffing: "The enduring key to maintaining a safe, reliable stockpile of nuclear weapons is the quality of people who make expert judgments and their sustained dedication to their work." In general, that's true, but given what we're discussing, it's also incredibly absurd in two key ways:

1. Reliable nukes are by definition NOT safe for civilization to have. Period. They're only somewhat less dangerous than unreliable nukes, especially if the unreliability might cause the bomb to go off in storage. Of course, if the unreliability would prevent the bomb from detonating at all, that's a different issue!

They argue their proposed changes "should lead to a new family of nuclear weapons ... incorporating state-of-the-art surety requirements." Huh? Do they mean certainty of explosive effectiveness, or safety of handling? I suspect latter, which makes this incredibly delusional. That feeling is reinforced elsewhere by references to older weapons containing beryllium and other toxic materials "now subject to environmental, safety, and health restrictions." Let's see... the builder can go home sure he's not being poisoned except by the knowledge he's building a thing designed to kill millions. If he has any conscience, that's a great trade-off -- healthy body with a traumatized mind.

(Oh, and I also love the "family" reference. Mr. Bomb, can I take your daughter to the prom? I promise she'll be home by two minutes to midnight...)

2. A key goal of this report is to automate as much of the system as possible, thus eliminating the human element, at least from direct production. Having fewer people consolidates expert judgment into the hands of those who have more vested interest in continuing the insanity and usually those who can't see how absurd their work is. The world can do without that kind of "dedication."

Logically, nobody should have first-hand experience of how these weapons work, b/c thet means they've been used. Unfortunately, as we all know, they have been. But the fact that we've had a test ban since the early 1990s and nobody's used one in combat since 1945 is seen as a problem by the nuclear delusion squad.

They wrote, "In some critical skill areas, this on-the-job training takes 5 or more years to gain sufficient experience, and such training may not be possible in the future." (I sure hope so!) Specifically, they note the declining numbers of people with testing experience, saying, "This reinforces the absolute necessity of resuming design activities now...."

That would give the upcoming generation of weapons scientists opportunity to train with those who tested the existing nukes, a rational thing to do if we were talking about anything but nuclear weapons. With nukes, however, we run into an obvious moral quandary: How will that give the upcomers, or future generations, test experience themselves? At some points they mention that computer tech makes it possible to design "for certification without (underground tests)", but elsewhere say the new CNPC will have the capability to put a new weapon through such a test w/in 18 months of starting design work and recommends keeping the Nevada test site operational.

To me, this seems like a between-the-lines suggestion that resuming testing is itself the "absolute necessity" in their eyes. Between real tests and Chernobyl, we've had decades of experience in what that does to people...

There were several other disturbing points, but I think I've made my point. This is a bad plan from any genuinely long-term point of view, since our survival may require eliminating nukes altogether.

They claim centralizing the process will enable them to "Record lessons learned from the past." Obviously, though,they haven't learned much, have they? They clearly slept through the crucial class in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wiped off the planet. Yes, they were rebuilt, but that's only b/c there were outsiders to provide care who hadn't experienced the Bomb firsthand. Encouraging this plan only makes future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis more likely.

"Off the Grid"

2005-07-16T12:46:00.000-04:00

An episode of the FX series "30 Days"
Aired week of July 13, 2005

Without preparation, for most people transition to a post-industrial culture will be a shock. The "guinea pigs" of this show, Vito and Jahari, are no exception.

Typical Americans from the Bronx, they live a high tech, energy-guzzling, unsustainable lifestyle that would require 12.5 Earths to support humans if everyone lived that way. That's called the ecological footprint.

I assumed while watching that they were tallied together, or 6.25 each, but maybe not -- I tried the test purposely putting in all of the most energy-using answers with a randomly selected Manhattan zipcode (10080) and came out to 13.5. When I took the test for my own lifestyle, it came out better than that, but still falls well into the unsustainable realm:

CATEGORY... ACRES
FOOD... 5.4
MOBILITY... 2
SHELTER... 6.9
GOODS/SERVICES... 5.9
TOTAL FOOTPRINT... 20

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON. WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.6 PLANETS.

Not good! I know a fair part of my lower than average score is because I try to recycle a lot, have a fairly fuel efficient car, try to make sure things get turned off, and basically like natural darkness. But I also drive a LOT more than I want to -- there's no public transit near home, and as a freelance reporter I have to go where the news is, although the plus is that I frequently work from home and don't have a daily commute.

A few days ago, a thunderstorm knocked out our power for about 4 hours... and I liked it. No background hum, no idiot box squawking, plenty of candles for light. I actually grumbled when it came back on, but know it wouldn't have been easy for a long period since our well is electrically-pumped, most of our food's in the fridge, our stove's electric, etc.

In short, my lifestyle is beholden to the grid... and I don't like that. But I don't have the money to install solar panels (if the trees around my house would even let enough light in for them to be useful) or to reinsulate the house more efficiently. I'd love to live in an ecovillage like the show's Dancing Rabbit village (outside Kirksville, MO), and want to convince Jenn (my gf) to do so... but she's a lot less concerned about this stuff than I am.

Anyway, back to the show:

Despite what some naysayers argue, ecovillages are NOT abandoning modern technology & trying to live like ancient people. Common sense says we cannot practically do that, for several reasons, including our much larger population and the fact that most people know about as much about our ancestors' methods of surviving off the land as they do about particle physics.

Instead, many ecovillages & similar groups espouse what is in fact high technology, but not wasteful technology -- things our ancestors would still find to be magical -- and combine that with practices our ancestors would indeed recognize. For the Dancing Rabbit folks, that's solar panels, fluorescent lights, a computer, and a car fueled by biodiesel and alcohol alongside hand-hoed crops fertilized by "hu-manure," insulation based on straw and plaster, heat and hot water provided by wood fires, and indoor lavatories resembling old-style outhouses with sawdust(?) as deodorizer.

The one thing I have a little problem with is their veganism; while our ancestors probably did have a much higher percentage of vegetable food in their diet than we do, they also had meat. I like meat. I understand and agree with the DR point that corporate husbandry practices are notoriously bad for the environment and that beef-raising is especially wasteful, but there are other ways of raising meat, and hunting it wild is something people have done since we came down from the trees.

I might be wrong, but my feeling is that a vegan lifestyle is something that can only be sustained in an advanced society. In times of subsistence, meat is usually the fastest way to get most of the nutrients the body requires for survival. I seriously doubt there's ever been a tribal culture that avoided meat in some form (including fowl or fish) when they could get it, and in some climates meat is the only food source capable of supporting human life. (The Inuit tribes before Europeans came are agreat example; the Arctic has almost no plant life, and their food supply was almost entirely hunted.)

Vito had a problem with that; and both "guinea pigs" had issues with several elements of the DR lifestyle. For them, however, there was always the knowledge that the change is temporary -- if they choose to, they could go back to their consumptive ways once home in the Bronx. # Losing the products and ease of our everyday lifestyle upset them, and if it were permanent, would make even those of us who are sympathetic to a DR-like lifestyle realize just how addicted to the complex web of national/global commerce we are.

# Vito & Jahari said they'd adopt some conservation methods, but I found Jahari more likely to actually do it. It would be interesting to see how they live a month or so after returning from DR.

Two Ozzy songs

2005-07-09T19:22:00.000-04:00

Artist: Ozzy Osbourne
from the album "The Ultimate Sin" (1986)

A few songs on this album are about variations of our subject; I'm just posting the two most appropriate songs here. I don't really agree with the second one, but the imagery in both is strong...

*********

"Killer of Giants"

If none of us believe in war
Then can you tell me what the weapon's for?
Listen to me everyone:
If the button is pushed
There'll be nowhere to run.

Giants sleeping, giants winning
Wars within their dreams
Till they wake
When it's too late
And in God's name blaspheme.

(Chorus:)
Killer of Giants
Threatens us all
Mountains of madness
Standing so tall...
Marches of protest
Not stopping the war
Or the Killer of Giants
The Killer of Giants.

Mother Nature
People state your
Case without it's worth
Your seas run dry,
Your sleepless eyes
Are burning red alert

Killer of Giants
Threatens us all
Mountains of madness
Standing so tall...
Rising so proudly
It has nowhere to fall...
This Killer of Giants
This Killer of Giants.

(Chorus)

**************

"Thank God for the Bomb"

Like moths to a flame
Is man never gonna change?
Time's seen untold aggression
And infliction of pain...

If that's the only thing that's stopping war...

(Chorus:)
Then...
Thank God for the Bomb (X4)
Nuke ya, nuke ya.

War is just another game
Tailor made for the insane
But make a threat of their annihilation
And nobody wants to play

If that's the only thing that keeps the peace...

(Chorus)

Today was tomorrow, yesterday.
It's funny how time can slip away
The face of the doomsday clock
Has launched a thousand wars.

As we near the final hour,
Time is the only foe we have.

When war is obsolete,
I'll thank God for war's defeat,
But any talk of Hell freezing over
Is all said with tongue in cheek.

Until the day the war drums beat no more...

(Chorus)

Two articles: oil & nukes

2005-07-04T13:44:00.000-04:00

These pretty much speak for themselves. Two long-running global situations that could very easily combine to create huge problems in the not too distant future...

**********

When the oil wars blow
The more China flexes its economic muscle, the more American
politicians are crying foul

Will Hutton
Sunday July 3, 2005

The Observer/Guardian Unlimited

Occasionally, there are tipping-point moments and we are witnessing one at the moment. Seismic change is afoot. As oil prices breach $60 a barrel and pessimists warn that the world could be as little as 10 years away from a first-order resources crisis, China's largest oil company, CNOOC, has launched a £10 billion bid for one of the US's juiciest medium-sized oil companies, Unocal.

The world's two biggest continental economies are suddenly head to head over who controls increasingly scarce oil. The stuff of pulp novels at airport bookstalls is a reality.

The reaction in the US has been immediate, aggressive and hypocritical. Much Congressional sound and fury has been vented on Russia for not opening up more to US oil companies which want to buy strategic reserves. Now that the boot is on the other foot - China buying an American oil company and its reserves - US congressmen and senators are deploying President Putin's arguments as their own. America's oil, jobs and national security are at issue, they blaze, and an investigation is already
under way to see whether China's bid should be blocked on national security grounds. It is rigged to take months.

The Chinese, for their part, implausibly plead innocence. Assuming the improbable rhetoric of a Wall Street investment banker, the chairman of CNOOC, 71 per cent owned by the communist People's Republic of China, says that the bid will be good for shareholders on both sides of the Pacific.

It certainly offers Unocal shareholders more cash than rival American oil company Chevron was offering, but only because the Chinese government has lent CNOOC a $2.5bn interest-free loan to support the loan and subsidised billions more. This is hardly fair play but Unocal shareholders aren't complaining.

Nor will CNOOC sack any Unocal workers in America as Chevron plans, it says, and promises not to export any oil and gas from the US to China. It portrays itself as a benevolent, wronged and misunderstood good fairy.

What it wants, and is paying well over the odds for, is Unocal's oil reserves. It plainly calculates that today's $60 a barrel oil price is just the beginning of a sustained rise in oil prices that will make Unocal, even at £10bn, a snip. China's interest is obvious. After the US, it is now the world's largest oil importer and acquiring some strategic reserves is vital.

CNOOC's full name is telling; the China National Offshore Oil Company - an organisation committed to offshore exploration. China is the world leader in developing robotic underwater exploration submersibles; in 1994, it built a robot capable of working at depths of 3,000 feet. Now, according to the People's Daily, it has one that can work at up to 20,000 feet. The Chinese want oil very badly.

And they want it to be imported into China by oil pipeline and not by tankers from the Middle East under the watchful eye of the US navy. The US controls the sea lanes and thus the viability of China's economy, as it regularly lets the Chinese know by shadowing Chinese oil tankers.

The US has pre-empted China's attempts to build oil pipelines from the Caspian into China. Unocal's attraction is that its oil reserves are all in central and southeast Asia, and once owned by China can be moved into China overland.

This is a new great geopolitical game and neither the Chinese nor American military are impressed by arguments that the market must rule and that great powers in today's globalised world no longer need strategic oil reserves. The US keeps six nuclear battle fleets permanently at sea supported by an unparalleled network of global bases not because of irrational chauvinism or the needs of the military-industrial complex, but because of the pressure they place on upstart countries like China.

Japan's decision this year to abandon its effort to build its own oil company and attempted strategic reserve was an overt acceptance of its dependent position. China is not ready to make the same admission of defeat.

No country has offered such a comparable challenge to the world order since Germany's rise at the end of the 19th century. Like China today, it wanted markets and raw materials; like China today, it confronted a world ordered around the needs of the existing powers; like China today, its gigantic size and explosive growth could not be ignored. Germany built fleets and scrambled for colonies in Africa. Today, China builds fleets and scrambles for oil reserves. The open question is whether it will end in another 1914.

The optimistic reply is that China is being much cleverer than the Kaiser's Germany. It has expanded by opening up to the world, so giving its great power rivals a stake in its growth; 400 of the US's top 500 companies manufacture in China. Wal-Mart, the US's largest retailer, is founded on cheap Chinese imports. China may have built up immense foreign currency reserves, but it judiciously lends them to the US, so financing the US's trade deficit.

Although oil prices are troublingly high, some experts like Erasmus University's Professor Peter Odell believe that, far from oil reserves running out, the earliest world production might peak is well after 2050, and that takes no account of more efficient energy use. Today's upward oil price spike won't last long. There is more than enough oil for China.

The pessimistic reply is that's not how it feels or how the game is currently being played. Even if there is enough oil, it is in parts of the world that are endemically volatile. As Paul Roberts points out in The End of Oil, the geological formations that create oil have already been identified and the easily exploitable reserves are rapidly depleting.

There is a Panglossian tendency to overstate oil reserves by oil-producing countries and oil companies alike, as we have learned from Shell. Oil production is set to peak much earlier.

In any case, what matters is less reality than perceptions of reality; the European powers didn't need colonies in Africa to ensure their prosperity, they just believed they did, as China believes it needs oil reserves in Asia today. And there are the third, fifth and seventh US fleets as a constant reinforcer of its instincts.

Nobody knows how this drama will play out. The optimists could be right. But judge the vitriolic tone of the letter from 40 congressmen to President Bush complaining about CNOOC's bid; look at the disposition of US naval power; recognise the force of China's conviction that it must never again be humiliated as it was in the 19th century and its will to catch up with the West; and plot the growth of China's oil demand as its economy doubles again.

The best way of avoiding war is not to dismiss its possibility as outlandish; it is to recognise how easily it could happen and vigilantly guard against the risk. Too few in Washington or Beijing are currently doing that.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

**********************

Coming to grips with doomsday

Tom Plate / Syndicated columnist

Seattle Times, Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 12:00 AM

LOS ANGELES — The policy of the United States, at the moment the world's only superpower, lacks an overall sense of urgency about the spread and possible use of nuclear weapons. In all probability, this lapse will someday lead to immense tragedy.

The world has been sitting on a ticking time-bomb for six decades. It is an inexplicable miracle rather than superior national-security policy or international-control management that a nuclear weapon hasn't exploded on one or more population centers.

Don't, of course, run this superficial observation by the Japanese, who still have the painful memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not for nothing that this technologically brilliant but overpopulated nation remains, despite recent militant uptick emotions, on the whole anti-nuclear and pacifist.

But Japan someday will go nuclear if North Korea establishes itself as a palpable nuke power, as with Pakistan and India, a pair of competing nuclear powers. Russia still has piles of nukes; the British and the French have not relinquished their stockpiles; Israel denies — unconvincingly to many — that it has the bomb; Iran denies — equally unconvincingly to many — any intention of developing a nuclear capability. And so it goes.

The U.S. takes the prize, though. It maintains (on 24-hour alert, hair-trigger status, no less) more than 10 times (at least) as many nuclear warheads as there are nations in the world. This absurd and risky overreadiness has drawn new fire here from warriors old and new.

The late President Ronald Reagan, though anything but a dove while in office, appears to have been a passionate nuclear abolitionist both behind the scenes and deep in his heart, in the view of author and academic Paul Lettow. His "Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" has been raising major eyebrows in circles liberal as well as conservative and has been helping generate a sense of national unease about the defects of our non-proliferation policy and the lack of a serious nuclear-reduction/disarmament policy.

The newly aroused anti-nuclear campaign in America has been joined with octogenarian vehemence by Robert McNamara, now 89 no less. The former defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has in newspaper interviews and op-ed essays been a one-man band warning of the inherent (or, as he puts it, "insane") dangers of so many ready-to-blow nukes in so many countries. His regrets about the Vietnam War and his unmistakable intellect have added a touch of establishment credibility to the abolitionist position.

This has enhanced the credibility of enduring firebrands like Helen Caldicott, the near-legendary Australian physician who has all but dedicated her life to the anti-nuclear campaign. Take a look, for illustration, at the astoundingly energetic Website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, with whom Caldicott and many others are allied.

There's a feeling in the air that the anti-nuclear movement is gaining traction. The war in Iraq is obviously going badly and the hawks and neo-cons in Washington, if not exactly in retreat, seem not to be pounding their chests with such prideful arrogance these days. The recent endless United Nations summit-retreat on advancing the venerable Non-Proliferation Treaty was a colossal and embarrassing failure. The United States — which has brutally tabled the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and even raised the probability of funding further nuclear-weapons research — refuses to conform to the NPT's call for drawing down existing nuclear arsenals.

As Alyn Ware of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy has put it, "... It is impossible to prevent nuclear proliferation while the nuclear-weapons states insist on maintaining large stockpiles of weapons themselves. It's like a parent telling a child to not smoke while smoking a pack of cigarettes in their face. It's not going to work. ... "

The smoking gun is North Korea. We have invaded a country that possessed no weapons of mass destruction at the cost of more than 1,700 U.S. lives, unknown U.S. treasure and countless Iraqi lives, while fumbling big-time as Pyongyang played hardball on the nuclear issue. We have obviously got our national security-policy priorities upside down.

Thus we desperately need those fearless non-governmental organizations like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation — not to mention old warriors like McNamara and Caldicott — to continue to campaign tirelessly if we are not to realize the kind of nuclear calamity that, present trends unchecked, seems increasingly predictable.

UCLA professor Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is founder and director of UCLA's Media Center.

Trauma & apocalyptic thinking

2005-07-02T02:44:00.000-04:00

In response to my last post, T wrote in part:
We are living in an age of lost humanity. We no longer know the definition of reaching out and seeing a friend in the eyes of a stranger

I think there are still many people who can reach out that way, but there are certainly forces in society that are pushing people apart, forces that need to be confronted. Some of them have been around since civilization began and gain force periodically due to civilization's unfortunate tendency to create a relative handful of people who believe (wrongly) that they can most benefit by taking as much as possible from others.

This handful of people isn't the same every time -- no "Illuminati" or other wacky conspiracy theory here. But they are often of a similar personality type, namely, sociopathic.

Often, the perpetrators are authoritarian fundamentalists of various stripes, sometimes religious, sometimes political, sometimes both (not that there's much difference in practice; generally, only the names differ). Personally, I believe that most fundies react the way they do because they have themselves been traumatized in some major fashion but refuse to acknowledge that and instead have absorbed the victim/abuser ideology. The two cannot exist separately and are often seen in the same person depending on the current situation. Such folks do not really trust or care about others b/c they do not trust themselves (if they did, they wouldn't ID themselves and everyone else as "sinners," for example.)

While those folks DO most clearly demonstrate the problem, they are actually symptoms of it more than the causes. (That doesn't excuse their actions when they manipulate and/or brutalize others, however. We are not responsible for what happens to us, but we are responsible for what we do because of it.)

Unfortunately, since trauma afflicts a large number of people, it has large-scale social effects. especially when unacknowledged. Nobody is entirely free of trauma in some form, but only a relatively small percentage of people are actively trying to see how it might be affecting them and each other. Many have internalized the belief that they are "bad" for the horrors that befell them, that such horrors are "human nature", but feel/have been taught they cannot do anything about it. That can make it easy to turn a blind eye to hypocrisy, to promote violent "solutions," to react without enough thought, and to accept as "normal" situations of long-term fear, secrecy, and oppression (such as the world's possession of enough nuclear weapons to kill us several times over).

I believe the traumas people inflict on each other aren't due to some flaw in humanity, but to the fact that we have been trying to live in crowded, hierarchal, sedentary, impersonal cultures that clash with the way humanity and human emotions evolved over most of our species' history. Emotionally, we're still (semi-)nomadic hunter-gatherers who react best in small groups and in circumstances where changes aren't happening too quickly. That doesn't mean we can't adapt to modern circumstances, just that it takes time to do so, and the kinds of changes today are overwhelming the adaptability of too many people.

For some of them, the feeling of being overwhelmed breeds individual mental and/or physical illness. For some, it breeds addiction to ideologies that promise "salvation" in religious, political, technological or other form, often including violent destruction of an extremely generalized abuser (personally, I see that as a collective mental illness). But for others, it serves as a wakeup call to take action ....

Insanity II

2005-06-30T02:31:00.000-04:00

Caught a bit of 60 Minutes earlier and noticed one of the ways our society really is insane:

Somehow, we determined it was a good thing to send new high school grads, who haven't been anywhere and know nothing about the world, into the military, where we'll pay tens or, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach them war, KNOWING some will be quickly killed...

BUT...

We require people to be older and have college degrees to join the Peace Corps, for which we pay substantially less in training despite the far more crucial tasks they have, such as teaching people how to farm or educating children. We essentially expect them to learn it on their own beforehand or in the field.

We advertise war in countless ways -- real ads, violent movies, military parades on certain holidays, recruiters visiting high schools -- but I can't recall the last time I saw a Peace Corps ad, and the last Peace Corps-related show was actually about the murder of a volunteer in the 1970s, not what they were actually doing.

I think this might have something to do with the apocalypse obsession that forms a constant but not always visible undercurrent to American thought, especially in this era of nuclear weapons where any war has had the potential (even if minimal) to spiral out of control into a nuclear exchange. But whether it's a cause or an effect, I don't know...

Stop the insanity!

2005-06-29T15:30:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,
I have just read and signed the petition:

Oppose New Nuclear Weapons Today

Please help by signing this petition because there's NO long-term benefit to anyone if we restart the arms race. Although the Cold War arms race was equally stupid, it could be argued that the US buildup helped bankrupt the USSR and maybe prevented a bigger war. This time, however, there is no opponent to bankrupt... just ourselves.

For economic, political, tactical and ecological reasons, nuclear weapons are horrendous failures, and are much, much worse -- they're devices of mass murder and/or mutual suicide -- if they're ever used by ANYONE. Making them smaller only makes it more likely they'll be used, and various non-proliferation experts are already predicting a 29% chance someone will use one (or more) within the next decade. We should've learned enough from Hiroshima & Nagasaki to know this path is one of madness, but it's not too late to do so now.

If you want some more info, visit my rather quiet "alter-ego" blog's post Fantasies of Apocalypse It's a little old, but still relevant... Much older (1993, I think), but with lots more detail from sources directly involved in the Cold War is this Centers for Defense Information transcript.

Study: World at Risk for Major Attack

2005-06-27T01:41:00.000-04:00

Source: NY Times by way of the NucNews email list. (links added)

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 22, 2005
Filed at 9:58 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The world faces an estimated 50
percent chance of a nuclear, biological, chemical
or radiological attack over the next five years,
according to national security analysts surveyed
for a congressional study released Wednesday.

Using a poll of 85 nonproliferation and national
security experts, the report also estimated the
risk of attack by weapons of mass destruction at
as high as 70 percent over the coming decade.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee surveyed
analysts around the world in late 2004 and early
this year to determine what they thought was the
threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

The study was commissioned by committee Chairman
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., whose nonproliferation
efforts in Congress have been credited with
helping the states of the former Soviet Union
lessen their stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons.

''The bottom line is this: For the foreseeable
future, the United States and other nations will
face an existential threat from the intersection
of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction,''
Lugar said in a statement.

Committee aides sent out surveys asking
respondents the percentage probability that a
biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological
attack would occur over the next five and 10
years.

''If one compounds these answers, the odds of some
type of WMD attack occurring during the next
decade are extremely high,'' the report said,
using the acronym for weapons of mass destruction.

The study said the risks of biological or chemical
attacks were comparable to or slightly higher than
the risk of a nuclear attack. However, the study
found a ''significantly higher'' risk of a
radiological attack.

It also said:

--Three-fourths of those surveyed said one or two
new countries would acquire nuclear weapons during
the next five years, and as many as five new
countries could have such weapons over the next 10
years.

--Four-fifths of those surveyed said their country
was not spending enough money on nonproliferation
efforts.

--Survey respondents also agreed that
terrorists -- rather than governments -- were more
likely to carry out a nuclear attack.

**************

Of course, the process of making things safer isn't helped by proposals like the one criticized here.

"Ill Wind"

2005-06-26T18:12:00.000-04:00

Authors: Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason
Apocalypse Type: Economic collapse
Rating: **1/2 (of 5)

********

This is a plague novel, but not your typical one. There's no mad scientist-produced virus that wipes out 99% of humanity as in The Stand or Earth Abides. Instead a bacteria called Prometheus attacks the underpinnings of our economy directly, by consuming oil and many oil-based products.

Most of us don't realize just how many oil-based products we rely on in everday life, and this book's ever-expanding list of affected products is just a drop in the ocean. Just looking around me now, I see a lot: the computer I'm writing on, maybe the desk that supports it, the CDs I'm hearing, the phone, file crates, maybe the chair I'm in, my glasses lenses, the window moulding, the vacuum cleaner, various wiring, the potato chip bag, the window blinds, maybe the wallpaper, the paint & varnishes, the cat box & dishes, the broom...

And that's just the things I can see at the moment, never mind the dozens of things around me that aren't oil-based themselves, but required oil in some stage of their creation or shipment: my notebooks and books, beer glass, wooden furniture, metal file cabinets, etc. (For a longer but still incomplete list, see this site.)

Since I could probably list almost everything I own in one of these two groups, if this happened, I'd have to change lifestyles VERY fast. No more blog, no more freelance journalism, no more Echo & the Bunnymen, no more electric doo-dads, and some very blurry vision. I could probably salvage the beer, but I'd have to make it myself, and since I've never done that, it would be some pretty bad swill at first, I imagine...

Of course, causing such an economic meltdown wasn't the intent of Prometheus... or was it? As a desperate solution to an oil spill worse than Exxon Valdez, in a much more public locale (San Francisco Bay), Prometheus is sprayed on the water to eat the oil slick. It works. Too well.

That's entirely plausible, since we have developed bacteria that break down pollution -- the still controversial process is called bioremediation. In fact, most of the book's science is plausible, including the efforts of some survivors to restore an experimental solar station in NM that receives power beamed down by satellite daily. We have some of the technology to do that.

The book's portrayal of martial law being imposed in cities (with some revolting against it) to control urban chaos is also quite probable, although the authors generally skirt the issue of what that chaos would actually look like. The fact that such martial law might breed a "Napoleon of the Apocalypse" like General Bayclock, who brutalizes Albuquerque in the name of restoring order, is also possible. Although they mention that characters expect urban fires and looting, etc, none of the characters actually experience such things except to portray Bayclock's viciousness; in most cases, the characters escape the cities all too easily.

Also realistic: a government in Washington that thinks it has control but in fact does not. Violent local attacks on people the attackers blame for the crisis (in this case, the oil company). Brief mentions of overseas hostility to US representatives (including the stranded president) as the oil plague spreads around the world. Disparate communities forming to survive semi-independently, some of them very agrarian, some seeking to restore what tech they can.

One thing these communities have that seems a little questionable is the "Atlantis Network," a network of shortwave radio communications. Don't such radios use petroleum-based components (at least, if they're not decades old) and need electricity? The latter could be created in several ways that don't require oil; the former might be harder to come by. It could happen, but I doubt it would spring up so quickly.

Also questionable is the fact that two Navy pilots are flying across AZ when Prometheus consumes their fuel and their planes explode upon crashing. Common sense says that fighter jets flying across the US wouldn't be armed, and without those weapons, how do you explode without fuel?!?

Unfortunately, once we get beyond the science, there are some problems. Many of the characters are one-dimensional stereotypes or have no character at all, with repetition of their full name, title or a slogan replacing any real development. The Mayor of Albuquerque is the most obvious example: despite the fact that he must've had enough personality and leadership skills to get elected, he's totally spineless, with only the repetition of his title giving him any legitimacy at all. Gen. Bayclock is the other extreme: a caricature of what "liberals" see in military figures, a very unsympathetic bastard who hates scientists and other "weenies," a catagory that includes anyone who tries to question him. (Was he modeled on Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe?!?) Sgt. Morris is a stereotype of military women, lacking any semblance of femininity or even intelligent thought, and most of the other military people are just there.

Todd Severyn, one of the heroes, is a semi-steretyped cowboy/oilman; the authors mention that he regrets his role in spraying Prometheus, but we don't actually see it in his behavior. He escapes to an old hippie commune/farm, but is repeatedly portrayed as criticizing them as "weird" or "loony" despite the fact that they are farming and he spends a lot of time riding around rather than helping. (The whole commune's protrayl is itself conflicted: the authors note it has been surviving off the land for years, yet the group spends a lot of energy trying to pull together the "last big rock concert," so we learn nothing about how they farm.) In fact, there's little or no psychological exploration of the characters at all, except, to some degree, with the tanker's captain -- he at least is protrayed as having changed from a voluble guy to a taciturn one and trying to hide his identity due to guilt/responsibility for the oil spill, which he didn't actually cause.

It would've been a lot better if the authors kept us guessing who he was until he re-encountered the spill's cause, Connor Brooks, who is portrayed as having absolutely no redeeming qualities and no sense of responsibility. By the second time he was mentioned, I hated him, far more than Bayclock, who at least had a warped sense of duty motivating him. There are such people, but even sociopaths aren't usually quite so obviously self-centered assholes as this guy is.

Come on. Having minor characters be one-dimensional is expected in a book, and I understand that getting too psychological can slow down the flow of the story. But having almost everyone be a caricature of a real person becomes trying.

So, too, is the ultimate plotline: barbarian with real military training gets defeated by civilized (mostly) civilian heroes who travel all over the place and somehow manage to avoid starving, or, in this case, dehydrating to death. (They do, after all, cross the deserts of the Southwest....) There are way too many of those plots in apocalyptic lit; see for example, The Stand, Swan Song, or Wrath of God, to name a few. I'd much rather see an exploration of what it might take to survive such a crisis, the variety of communities that develop, and how people adapt to the changes.

"Cherry Blossom Baptism"

2005-06-25T02:02:00.000-04:00

A song obviously inspired by images seen only in Hiroshima & Nagasaki...

Artist: Monks of Doom
From the CD "Meridian" (1991)

*********

I was swimming in the cool waters of an oasis
I was swimming in a mirage
I was wondering just where this road would take us
It’s the same one that we have been on

From the city of bosra to jerusalem
From the west into the east
Only one more sacrifice
Then we’ll finally get us all some peace

The man behind the man behind the curtain is working
Pulling levers by his crystal ball
He’s plowing the fields for crysanthemums
Waiting for the sun to fall

He threw a bone to the starving faithful
They got down on their knees
The man behind the man behind the curtain is talking
But he never betrays what he thinks

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism
Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

Now that the rose
Is gone from the garden
What will we do
With the thorn?

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

If I went down
To the river of jordan
Just to bathe my wearisome soul
If I could just touch the hem of his garment
Well then I know he’d take me home

To see the water in the river boil
To see the city consumed by fire
To see the man’s cast shadow scorched into the earth
And flies buzzing in the air like a funeral choir

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism
Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

Now that the rose
Is gone from the garden
What will we do
With the thorn grown on the grove?

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

"Wooden Ships"

2005-06-25T01:55:00.000-04:00

Artist: Crosby, Stills & Nash
from their self-titled album, 1969

(by David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner)

******

Stills: If you smile at me I will understand
'Cause that is something
Everybody everywhere does in the same language
Crosby: I can see by your coat, my friend you're from the other side
There's just one thing I got to know
Can you tell me please who won?
Stills: Say can I have some of your purple berries?
Crosby: Yes, I've been eating them
For six or seven weeks now haven't got sick once
Stills: Probably keep us both alive

Wooden ships on the water very free and easy
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be
Silver people on the shoreline let us be
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy

Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cries
Stare as all human feelings die
We are leaving, you don't need us

Aaaah ...
Go take your sister then by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don't need us

And it's a fair wind
Blowin' warm out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I'll set a course and go

Nagasaki pt 2

2005-06-21T22:25:00.000-04:00

Aha, I was looking for this. George Weller's original stories as published by the Japanese Mainichi Daily News, based on his notes. There are some weird phrasings and several notations that words are illegible. Given what we now know about nukes, they seem curiously out-dated, and Weller phrases some things in ways that strike me as not being journalistically neutral, but they're an interesting insight into an outsiders view of holocaust on a small scale.

Nagasaki

2005-06-21T12:51:00.000-04:00

Banned A-bomb horror reports found (emphasis added)

KENJI HALL
IN TOKYO

SOURCE: The Scotsman 6/20/05

CENSORED reports of the devastation caused by the Second World War atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki have been rediscovered 60 years after they were suppressed on the orders of US General Douglas MacArthur.

Award-winning reporter George Weller sneaked into the country - despite a ban on journalists - to provide an unflinching account of the "wasteland of war" and the horrific illnesses caused by radiation.

Mr Weller, who died in 2002, posed as a US Army colonel at one point to get into Japan in early September, about three weeks after the nation surrendered and a month after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Carbon copies of his stories, running to about 25,000 words on 75 typed pages - along with more than two dozen photographs - were discovered by his son, novelist Anthony Weller, at his father's flat near Rome.

The stories infuriated General MacArthur so much that he personally ordered that they be quashed, and the originals were never returned.

About 70,000 people were killed in the explosion in Nagasaki, and Anthony Weller said he thought wartime officials wanted to cover up stories about radiation sickness and feared his father's reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal of nuclear bombs.

In an article dated 8 September 1945, Mr Weller, who submitted his work to the US censors, told how he walked through the city.

Though thousands of burn victims had died within a week after the attack, doctors were stumped by "this mysterious disease X" which was still killing many Japanese people and also Allied soldiers freed from prison camps a month later.

"In flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki," he wrote.

One woman at a hospital "lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words", her legs and arms covered with red spots.

Others suffered from a dangerously high fever, a drop in white and red blood cells, swelling in the throat, sores, vomiting, diarrhoea, internal bleeding or loss of hair, Mr Weller wrote.

The next day, he met a Japanese doctor and X-ray specialist who thought the bomb had showered the population with harmfully high levels of beta and gamma radiation. But nobody could say for sure.

The journalist was 95 when he died in December 2002 at his home in San Felice Circeo, Italy.

He won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious journalism prize in the United States, for an eyewitness account of an emergency appendectomy carried out by a pharmacist's mate on a Navy submarine underwater in the South China Sea.

*******

Other stories of that event & Hiroshima:

BBC's original 1945 coverage

Common Dreams' look at the real story and the propaganda machine that tried to suppress it.

Yale's Avalon Project, Chap. 7 reports something I didn't know, buried in several chapters of pretty generic stuff about both Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

"During the approach to the target the special instruments installed in the plane told us that the bomb was ready to function. We were prepared to drop the second atomic bomb on Japan. But fate was against us, for the target was completely obscured by smoke and haze. Three times we attempted bombing runs, but without success. Then with anti-aircraft fire bursting around us and with a number of enemy fighters coming up after us, we headed for our secondary target, Nagasaki.

What was their PRIMARY target? According to Wikipedia it was Kokura, now part of the city of Kitakyushu (2005 pop. almost 1 million). It was probably chosen because of its status as a transport hub between Honshu and Kyushu plus the fact that it is HQ of Nippon Steel Corp., obviously a major player in Japan's wartime economy. I just wonder if anyone noticed the irony of the fact that one of its sister cities today is Norfolk, VA -- a major US Navy nuclear sub base. "The expression Kokura's luck became common in Japan for escaping a horrible situation without being aware of it."

About.com has the following grim memory from survivor Fujie Urata Matsumoto:

The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean. Nothing was left of the whole thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman's head. I looked at the face to see if I knew her. It was a woman of about forty. She must have been from another part of town - I had never seen her around here. A gold tooth gleamed in the wide-open mouth. A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth. Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where the eyes had been burned out. . . . She had probably looked square into the flash and gotten her eyeballs burned.

For more survivors' stories, go here... or for their artwork, go here.

If those aren't enough to show that banning the bomb is the only sane course we can take, what kind of evidence does it take???

"Black Planet"

2005-06-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

Artist: Sisters of Mercy
from "First and Last and Always" (1985)

**********

(In the western sky)
(My kingdom come)

So still so dark all over Europe
And I ride down the highway 101
By the side of the ocean headed for sunset
For the kingdom come
for the

CHORUS
Black
Black planet
Black
Black world
[repeat]

Run around in the radiation
Run around in the acid rain
On a
Black
Black planet
Black planet hanging over the highway
Out of my mind's eye
Out of the memory
Black world out of my mind

Still so dark all over Europe
And the rainbow rises here
In the western sky
The kill to show for
At the end of the great white pier
I see a

CHORUS

Run around in the radiation
Tune in turn on burn out in the acid rain on a..

CHORUS[repeat to fade]

"The Big Chill"

2005-06-19T13:36:00.001-04:00

TV show; The Science Channel
June 2005
Issue: Climate change

Lots has been said about the global warming vs. next ice age debate. What this show points out, as other sources are beginning to, is that warming may cause an ice age, and possibly quickly.

To understand why that is, I need to briefly summarize a little oceanography for you (if you don't already know):

Normally, the Gulf Stream carries warm tropical water from the coast of South America north along the US coast, then across to northern Europe before losing enough heat to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic in the Barents Sea. At the bottom, it returns to the tropics to repeat the cycle. That's known as the Great Conveyor Belt, or, in technical terms, "thermohaline circulation."

But, as the globe warms, higher than normal quantities of meltwater from high-latitude glaciers and rainwater from rivers flows into the Atlantic and, being fresh water, it's lighter than the salty ocean. It dilutes the Gulf Stream at its northern end and prevents the water from sinking, causing the Conveyor belt to stop running, or at least to drop to the bottom at some more southerly point.

The Conveyor is the primary reason northern Europe is inhabitable at all. As one speaker on the show noted, it carries about "one million power stations" worth of heat to a part of the world that's at a latitude where Canada has polar bears and Siberia gets winter temps of -40 C on a regular basis. Look at a world map -- or, better yet, a night-time photo -- and you see a striking difference between Europe and other places at the same latitude: Europe is a beehive of cities, home to nearly 500 million people, while the rest of that strip of Earth (except eastern North America)is almost vacant by comparison. (I know the photo seems fairly bright, but a lot of the brightness in western Canada and Siberia is not from cities, it's from oil fields burning off natural gas.)

Right now, annual temperatures are rising, but how much is still debatable; climatologists predict a change of 1.5 to 6 C by 2100, and governments worldwide are to some degree planning for the effects of that heat. But, if this branch of research is accurate, the warmth will be temporary, followed in short order by a rapid cooldown that could last centuries.

Scientists have been finding that Barents Sea salinity is dropping, causing "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments," according to the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research. London's Independent newspaper, from which the above quote was taken, says this would cause "a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C" in Britain. The paper reports (link added):

When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.

Now, it seems really counter-intuitive to assume heat causes freezing, and that's where research by Thomas F. Stocker comes in (emphasis added):

He and colleague Andreas Schmittner looked at the problem through experiments with a simple, coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model in which a final carbon dioxide concentration of 750 ppm was attained over different time spans. They found that the thermohaline circulation weakens when the increase in carbon dioxide to 750 ppm is relatively slow, spanning several centuries or more. However, when the rate of increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases (expressed as CO2) is similar to today's rate of growth (1% per year)--or the concentration of 750 ppm is reached in 100 years--the thermohaline circulation permanently shuts down.

Hmmm... It permanently shuts down. That's not too encouraging, is it? I suspect he means for the foreseeable future, centuries or millennia, not for the rest of Earth's lifespan, but that's a detail that would make no difference as far as humans go.

Despite the fact that the Bush II administration seems to be ignoring, even demonizing, climate research, the US Defense Department shows some signs of taking it seriously. (Of course... this admin focuses everything on military issues, rather than all the other effects such a problem could have...) In a report by Peter Schwartz & Doug Randall, they found that, "With inadequate preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth's environment."

Schwartz & Randall admit their scenario, which is based on the events that caused a century of cooling 8200 years ago (and thus would NOT be as severe as an ice age), is "not the most likely, but (is) plausible." Overall, they predict, such a cooling could spark wars over food and water supplies and severely restricted energy availability due to frozen ports and increased storminess. "Unlikely alliances could be formed as defense priorities shift and the goal is resources for survival rather than religion, ideology, or national honor."

While reviewing the history, they note that at least eight sudden temperature drops have occurred over the past 730,000 years, and note that a drop like one of the most recent, the Younger Dryas (c. 12.700 yrs ago) or the Little Ice Age (CE 1300-1850), would have a much more serious effect on humans now than then because of our much greater population and, I'd add, the fact that so many people are not living off the land directly.

Their model falls between the two in severity, but still predicts "mega-droughts" in parts of Europe and Asia and less severe droughts in America and elsewhere that "overwhelm available (water) conservation options." Europe's climate becomes "more like Siberia's" within the first decade. Crop yields and growing season lengths in key agricultural areas, including the US but possibly not Australia, "fall by 10-25 percent." Social unrest and wars occur, especially in nations already under economic and political stress, as a "more severe have, have-not mentality" takes over.

"With 815 million people receiving insufficient sustenance worldwide, some would say that as a globe, we're living well above our carrying capacity (already)..." they write. I'm one of those people, as I've mentioned in previous blog entries. But I'm also semi-optimistic; I hope we as a species can realize that such a climate change can best be handled through cooperation, not conflict. But they predict the US and Australia will turn inward, creating fortress nations that keep our supplies for ourselves, while keeping out hungry folks from elsewhere.

...More to come on this, I'm sure...

"Radium Rain"

2005-06-13T13:26:00.000-04:00

Just thought this said something relevant to the blog's subject matter...

Artist: Bruce Cockburn
from the album "Big Circumstance" (1989)

They're hosing down trucks at the border under a rainbow sign --
The raindrops falling on my head burn into my mind.
On a hillside in the distance there's a patch of green sunshine
Ain't it a shame
Ain't it a shame
About the radium rain.

Everyday in the paper you can watch the numbers rise,
No such event can over take us here, we're much too wise
In the meantime don't eat anything that grows and don't breathe when the cars go by
Ain't it a shame
Ain't it a shame
About the radium rain

Big motorcycle rumbles out of the rain like some creation of mist.
There's a man on a roof with a blindfold on and a hand grenade in his fist.
I walk stiff, with teeth clenched tight, filled with nostalgia for a clean wind's kiss.
Ain't it a shame
Ain't it a shame
About the radium rain.

A flock of birds writes something on the sky in a language i can't understand.
God's graffiti -- but it don't say why so much evil seems to land on man
When everyone i meet just wants to live and love, and get along as best they can.
Ain't it a shame
Ain't it a shame
About the radium rain.

"Alas, Babylon"

2005-06-12T20:26:00.000-04:00

Author: Pat Frank
Lippincott, 1959
Apocalypse Type: Nuclear War
Rating: **** (of 5)

Overall, Alas, Babylon rightly deserves its place as a classic of the apocalyptic genre, but that's primarily because Frank's characters are so engaging and realistic. He writes with flair and color, and the people are ones you might meet in real life.

The social events are plausible, but readers have to realize that what happens to his fictional town of Fort Repose, FL, would in fact be the luckiest end of the spectrum of possibilities, with the book only barely making references to the far darker and more tortured reality that would be afflicting the vast majority of a full-scale nuclear war's survivors. Compared to most post-war places, Frank's setting is an edenic paradise -- very few deaths, very little radiation or disease, only minimal trouble finding food, only passing mentions of the horrors going on outside.

Actually, Fort Repose exists in a physically impossible bubble of safety. The characters can see the bombs go off over Orlando, which the book says is two hours away, one of them gets temporarily blinded by the bombs over Tampa, and one sees a distant flash that marks the demise of Jacksonville. All of those would put Fort Repose somewhere around Ocala or Gainesville, but at one point, they say they're lucky the Russians never hit Patrick AFB (aka Cape Canaveral), which is due east of them. That creates a little geography problem, since Canaveral is due east of... Orlando. Anyone living between them would be radioactive toast from Orlando's fallout.

Some of the book's scientific/technical problems exist because Frank didn't know about some of the things we've since learned, especially the possibility of climatic changes sparked by such a war. For him, Florida's climate is still the same... in fact, it's impossibly good, with no rainstorms dropping radioactive ash, no hurricanes, not even the unseasonable frosts that can hit the state in normal years. The story never suggests the possibility of nuclear winter or nuclear autumn, either of which would've made his characters' lives much harder even with Florida's low latitude probably tempering the effect. (That means temperatures around freezing rather than -30 F if nuclear winter theory is correct, almost certainly wiping out any crops then growing and probably preventing the next year's growth, too.)

It is clear from the events, social situation, and technology available to the characters that the book's action is set around the time it was written; there's no effort to imagine more advanced technology, and segregation is still running amok. But that conflicts with some of the things characters say about the US and Soviet nuclear capabilities, leading me to believe Mr. Frank bought into the then-popular propaganda of Soviet power.

At one point, for example, a character estimates the number of enemy subs at 600 to 750 ... numbers the Soviets have never come close to. A detailed chart at the National Resources Defense Council website shows the USSR's missile sub fleet peaked at 89 boats in 1978 and peaked at 2956 SLBM (sub-launched ballistic missile) warheads in 1989. The NRDC shows the Soviets had just 11 missile subs and just 33 SLBMs in 1959. Even if we assume he was counting subs that weren't carrying ballistic missiles, there's no way in hell they had 600 of them.

Likewise, there's a strong subtext that the Soviets were overpowering us in overall number of warheads, but in fact, they were very, very far behind.

Specifically,The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gives these figures, which include SLBMs, for the reality of 1959:

US stockpile = 12,298 warheads (2496 of them strategic) totalling 19,054.62 megatons (MT), or an average of 645 KT each.
USSR stockpile = 1050 warheads (283 of them strategic), total megatonnage unknown, but if we assume the Soviet warheads were even twice as powerful as ours on average (they did have some tendency to go for bigger bombs), that still means they only had around 1355 MT.

Of course, getting hit with 1355 MT would still make it the worst day in American history, with the damage probably enough to cripple us, as the story depicts. Make no mistake -- his list of destroyed cities is very long, including most of the places you'd expect (although Denver survives to become the new capital). But Frank does forget about the various side effects a war like that would have, including such things as shattered communications and loss of fuel, medical, and other supplies. He depicts those on the local scale with characters unable to use cars after a while and getting nothing but sporadic Conelrad announcements until the radio stations run out of power, but has the US government still flying heliocopters and jets a year afterward. I seriously doubt that would be true in all but a very limited nuclear war, largely b/c oil supplies would logically be major targets, and the war itself would make oil transport impossible. (He does hint at this at the end, when a character says the country's remaining nuclear power is its only hope, but nuclear plants require a very high-tech base which would not exist anymore, even if the plants themselves did.)

Frank also seriously downplays the psychological effects such a catastrophe would probably have. There are no major cases of mental illness in the Fort Repose population, no obvious signs of grief (even in the two kids who know their dad probably died in Omaha & have therefore lost their home & all their friends; that's a HUGE stretch of reality), no major addictions as ways to "cope" with the stress (in fact, the hero, Randy, gives up his booze entirely), etc.

In reality, studies have shown that although the majority of survivors of a traumatic event would recover within 6-16 months, about 34% of people who experienced a single bombing would develop the symptoms of PTSD -- that's a single bombing, never mind an event which they'd immediately recognize as horrific beyond anything ever experienced by anybody. Generally, the effects are worse for human-caused events than for natural events. The same website notes, "the following types of exposure place survivors at high risk for a range of postdisaster problems:

Exposure to mass destruction or death
Toxic contamination
Sudden or violent death of a loved one
Loss of home or community."

Nuclear war would almost guarantee ALL of those would affect almost everyone who survived.

With all of that said, however, the book IS a good read. There are none of the impossibly heroic or impossibly evil characters that seem to plague this genre, no overblown preoccupation with religion even though the title is a reference to the Book of Revelation. Even the characters' belief that the US government will come to help them is reasonable; we see that happen throughout history when a civilization falls but some people still remember its greatness & do the best they can under trying circumstances.

If it's about anything, Alas, Babylon is about that kind of survival.

The other coming crisis...

2005-06-09T21:33:00.000-04:00

From the Denver Post, 6/9/05:

Expert: water shortage inevitable
The Associated Press

Boulder - Water shortages in the Colorado River are almost inevitable by 2011 and could force feuding Western states to cooperate on managing the river, an expert said.

"All the states are at risk," said Jim Lochhead, former executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.

"And when all parties are at risk, there is potential for a mutually beneficial (resolution)." Lochhead spoke Wednesday at a University of Colorado symposium on the river's problems.

A long drought has left Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the river's two major reservoirs, dangerously low. Abundant snow last winter will raise both reservoirs, but not enough to replace what the drought and a booming population have drained.

"We wiped out the bad year of 2004 by having a wet 2005," said Terry Fulp of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. "But there is still an impetus to get some agreement." The 1922 Colorado River Compact divides the river's water between the Upper Basin states - Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming - and the Lower Basin states - Arizona, California and Nevada. So far, the river has been able to satisfy the demand, but population growth is expected to outstrip the available water, officials said.
The Interior Department has begun writing a drought management plan for the river after the seven states failed to reach an agreement. The plan is expected to be finished by December 2007.

********

Warning: serious snark ahead...

This is something that's been talked about for years in that part of the country, not to mention parts of the Great Plains and even in several foreign countries. Water, like oil, is a linchpin of civilization; even more important, it's crucial to life.

The problem in the American West, in a nutshell, is not just population growth in itself, but also idiotic use of water by those already there. Let's face it, most of the area the Colorado flows though is a desert, and has been for several thousand years at least. But in the past several decades, people have thought it cool (pun intended) to bring the trees, grasses, and lawn-ornament plants from more Northerly, wetter climes to places like Phoenix.

Fly into that city (I lived there four years, 1997-2001) and you'll see an immense trellis of brilliant green from miles away surrounded by greyish-brown scrubland. That's Phoenix & suburbs, sprawl central, with the trellis being roads that run arrow-straight for miles. It looks beautiful, but it's SO wrong where it is. Instead of adapting to the environment by decorating with local plants (which are beautiful, especially in Feb. and March when the desert blooms), too many places waste tons of water to grow that fashionable but utterly useless urban monoculture -- grass.

The worst violators are the ubiquitous golf courses; the only one I can think of that's truly a desert course is one in the fringe town of Apache Junction, well away from the ritzy hotels and wealthy neighborhoods golfers are more likely to frequent. Given what one golfer said when I lived there -- that the whole point of golf is to confront nature and win -- why don't they actually DO so on Nature's own terms, challenging themselves to fish their balls out of creosote bushes, rocks, cacti small and large, and avoid rattlesnake dens just like the hikers do?

A close second are the acres of cotton and orange groves, mostly on the fringes of the valley. Neither of those plants are native here, either.

Yes, there ARE people who encourage conservation methods such as low-water landscaping, and some of the homes built that way are beautiful (and expensive). Also, the valley boasts several big parks that preserve the desert's austere beauty, where I was able to easily escape from any sight of the sprawl if I wanted to. But when you contrast that with public authorities who, after draining all but the last drop of water from the Salt River (a tributary of the Colorado), proceed to spend millions to install inflatable dams and pump water back into the riverbed to create a boating lake (Tempe Town Lake) that's only going to evaporate without further pumping, you've got to wonder if some of the people were nuts when they got there, or just became that way from the heat.

"Oil Storm" part 2: the population problem

2005-06-07T15:53:00.000-04:00

Our addiction to oil is really a symptom of a much more serious problem: our system has been working under the delusion that we aren't subject to the same ecological rules that all other lifeforms are, so not enough people are thinking about what running out of oil will do to our population if we don't have a sufficiently strong energy source to replace it.

Given the short time frame we may have, it's not too surprising that many people see major problems as inevitable and often appeal to an outside savior (including deities, aliens, and technology) for escape. Such apocalyptic thought may in itself be a subconscious recognition that humanity's numbers are well beyond Earth's carrying capacity and are in practice violating natural rules that constrain population. Rule violations are often portrayed in religious terms as "sin," but what the religions define as sins are not the actual problems... they are in fact symptoms of the problem. This problem.

Sociologist William Catton explains the crucial concept of carrying capacity this way (emphasis added):

... For any use of any environment by any population, there is a volume and intensity of use that can be exceed(ed) only by degrading that environment's future suitability for that use. Carrying capacity, the word for maximal sustainable use level, can be exceeded--but only temporarily. Ecologically, Malthus's main error was supposing that it was not possible for a population to increase beyond the level of available sustenance. It can and does happen, but always the overshoot will be temporary.

The comparably tragic error of Malthus's latter-day critics has been to mistake serial traps for progress, i.e., to construe technological change that facilitates temporary evasion of carrying capacity limits as permanent elevation (or repeal) of those limits. When load comes to exceed carrying capacity, the overload inexorably causes environmental damage; then the reduced carrying capacity leads to load reduction (i.e., a crash).

I'd add that many people fail to note that Earth's timeframe for "temporary" can be vastly longer than any one human lifetime. Global human population has been growing for millennia, but really took off in the past two centuries largely due to the use of oil-based fuel and fertilizers and improved medicine (which is often dependent on oil), which prolonged lifetimes and with them the childbearing years. If we hadn't found such fuels, I imagine our population would've stabilized already; if we had an infinite supply of fuels (which the same site never mentions at all as a factor), future population might look like one of these.#

That crash will come when the decline in oil availability begins to really hit home because, as Oil Storm and other sources have noted, oil fuels modern agriculture and without it the big farms are history. Without the big farms, we can't support our society at the level of complexity we've come to take for granted, and, more importantly, can't support the skyrocketing global population we have. For years, we've prided ourselves on being industrial and able to conquer anything, solve any problem, but when it comes right down to it, we are as dependent on agriculture as was ancient Egypt or any other dead civilization of history. Maybe more so.

We all need to realize that the film's "No Harvest in '06" protests are not just hyperbole... eventually, they'll be reality. Violent reality -- not just protests, but revolutions of desperate people seeking food. Maybe not next year, but in the not too distant future, if oil peak predictions are correct. The film showed some people freezing to death, but that would be a tiny number compared to those who starve.

As an example of what could happen, Wolf at the Door notes the following (emphasis added):

The example of North Korea shows us what happens to agriculture when oil products are removed. After the Korean war, it had developed a modern farming system depending on machinery and oil-based fertilisers. After the Soviet Union fell, Communist aid to the country stopped and they were unable to purchase oil and supplies. Without oil, farm machinery was sitting idle (80% of its capacity by 1998) and large proportions of the people had to return to the agriculture. Unfortunately the soil had been drained of nutrients over the years and, without fertilisers, it was unable to produce the same output as before. Crop yields fell by 60% over the period 1989-1998. Unless it can get access to oil and fertilisers again, the population will decline until it reaches a sustainable level.

We've all seen coverage of just how desperate that country is, and eventually we could follow suit. I don't know if we have a way out of that, or if we have one we can implement in time. One thing that will help is to encourage local farming, gardening, etc. by buying locally, but many places don't have enough nearby arable land to support their existing population (esp. cities). Maybe it's time to pressure state legislatures to fund more grants for greenhouses, hydroponics, community farms, apartment-rooftop gardens, better education in horticulture, etc., and take the money from the billions we spend on roads (which simply means oil) as a true investment in the future.

*******

#-The charts linked here obviously don't take into account the population decline that almost certainly will happen when the crutch of oil is gone. In fact, the site says, "In the 20th century the human race began at last to declare victory over both famine-related and infant mortality, at the same time that significant advances in public health and medicine were applied." This "victory" may well prove to be as illusory as Hitler's 1000 Year Reich, and it's blatantly untrue as far as famine goes already.

The world presently grows enough food to feed the starving (in fact, almost certainly more food, as evidenced by our global population growth), but it very often doesn't get to them, and we're already seeing widespread declines in the fertility of farmland due to the repetitious use of a handful of crops. Such declines were being reported in the early 1900s in some places such as Kansas, but fertility was temporarily propped up by the development of petrochemical fertilizers, which, combined with booming profitability, promoted practices (especially monoculture) that have depleted key soil nutrients even more rapidly than was already occurring:

Call and Throckmorton {two U. of Kansas scientists in 1918} credited the declining productivity of Kansas soils to five factors: depletion of soil organic matter, failure to grow enough acres of leguminous crops for nitrogen fixation, depletion of mineral nutrients, the lack of proper crop rotations, and the erosion of fertile topsoil. These five factors are the subject of nearly every soils publication prior to the advent of inexpensive nitrogen fertilizers in the mid-1900's. They continue to be the basis of soil health for every farming system regardless of the use of commercial fertilizers.

*******

(Note: This entry has been edited over the last few days (6/7-9/05). Hopefully, it's more focused now... -- JD)

motivation & media portrayals

2005-06-07T01:28:00.000-04:00

Liz wrote: I'm also very curious about how media portrayal of apocalyptic scenarios affects people. Are they moved to think differently or even act differently?

I'm curious about that, too; that's one of the things I hope we will come to understand a little about using this blog.

I think some people use it as a warning, a way to understand what we need to fight against (that's my motivation, in part); others probably accept the idea as inevitable and are trying to predict how it'll play out. (I know I said in "Intro..." that I don't think it's inevitable, but I think part of me does, and if it happens, I intend to try to survive it, although I'm not into the whole "survivalism" thing per se.) Many have been conditioned to hear such tales as "Chicken Little-ism" and ignore them.... possibly at their peril.

Denial is a very serious problem in our society, and by ignoring this particular subject, people are in effect ignoring some of the serious flaws our society has always had but tries to keep hidden, often through religion and/or political repression. We as a society are denying both our fear and our recognition that we are NOT indestructible, nor even all that special in the grand scheme of things.

In recent decades, though, it has become increasingly difficult to pull off the convoluted dance steps denial requires, in part because the problems themselves are reaching boiling point, but also because the amount of knowledge about the reality of our situation and our alternatives has grown exponentially. In most previous centuries (and this problem has been developing for centuries, at least) and in most societies even recently, information was rigidly controlled or simply not available. People did not have the access we now have, and that both terrifies some people and emboldens others to work for change. Ultimately, apocalyptic literature of any stripe is about gut-wrenching, traumatic change and how people and societies deal with it (or not).

Personally, I got interested in apoc-lit in high school and have since realized it's both a reaction to the real-world threat of nuclear war and an exploration of the darker side of my own psyche after family disintegration ("nuclear (family) war," the other side of my motivation).

"The Cold and The Dark"

2005-06-06T17:04:00.000-04:00

Authors: Paul Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, et al.
Norton & Co, 1984
Apocalypse Type: Nuclear (Non-fiction)
Rating: **** (of 5)

The first major book to really explore the science behind the concept of nuclear winter, this is -- and should be -- disturbing.

In case you're just off the ship from Mars, nuclear winter theory is the idea that a nuclear war over a certain number of warheads will trigger temperatures to plummet, especially in Northern Hemisphere lands distant from the ocean, with drastic consequences to many species including humans. They don't specify what that threshold is because no one knows, but responding to questions at the conference this book records, Carl Sagan said, "I think that to take out all major fixed strategic targets reliably, you have to exceed the nuclear winter threshold" (p33).

Sagan's group, best known as TTAPS#, explored numerous scenarios of various severity including attacks solely on cities (called "countervalue" targeting), attacks solely on military targets (called "counterforce" targeting), and mixed attacks hitting both urban areas and military sites. Based on a wide range of variables -- many of which they admit they couldn't quantify, and simply labeled as "synergisms" -- and atmospheric effects partly modeled on the massive globe-spanning dust storms of Mars, they argued that almost any exchange will exceed this threshold. If that happens, the theory says it will spark average temperatures to fall and stay cold for a time in proportion to the size of the exchange; just a few degrees for small ones down to -47 deg. C for the most severe scenario, taking more than a year to return to normal in some scenarios. They theorize that a major part of the freeze is caused clouds of soot from fires making Earth's surface far darker than normal, possibly too dark for people to see or plants to photosynthesize.

There is good news here (if we can call it that): sparking a new ice age is highly unlikely. Still, "it's very hard to see in any of these scenarios a situation in which the impact on people mediated through the ecological systems would not be at least as severe as the direct effects," Paul Ehrlich writes (p65). (Ehrlich, a biologist, wasn't an original TTAPS member.)

What he means is this: a nuclear war's effects would harm humanity from two different directions. First, millions die from the direct effects -- blast, fire, and fallout. Those effects are fairly short-term. Much longer-lived, and far less predictable, are the climatic changes; the radiation-induced mutations causing new diseases and fertility problems##; increases in ultraviolet sunlight once the skies clear; widespread radiation & other pollution for years; widespread destruction of fertile cropland; loss of vast quantities of fuel, data and technology; and the ripple effects the massacre of large swaths of the world's mammalian, bird and other species we depend on for food and less obvious "environmental services."

"The total number of people afflicted would certainly exceed one billion and might include everyone in the Northern Hemisphere," Ehrlich writes (p52). (For a somewhat technical summary of why environmental services are important, see an article by Thomas Deitz and Eugene Rosa here.)

"The survivors will be back in a kind of hunter and gatherer stage. But hunters and gatherers in the past have always had enormous cultural knowledge of their environments; they knew how to live off the land," Ehrlich writes (p59). Given that most people today in the major target countries are city-dwellers, that kind of knowledge is pretty uncommon, a fact that will certainly result in the starvation of many of those who actually survive the war itself. I suspect, though, that people will cobble together locally-varying kinds of scavenging systems and maybe very basic agriculture once canned goods are depleted.

Obviously, this idea has detractors, some of whom have argued that nuclear winter is more politics than science. One of those detractors hs been author Michael Crichton, who said the following in a Caltech speech in 2003:

What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.

Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, "I really don't think these guys know what they're talking about," other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science but…who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?" And Victor Weisskopf said, "The science is terrible but---perhaps the psychology is good." The nuclear winter team followed up the publication of such comments with letters to the editors denying that these statements were ever made, though the scientists since then have subsequently confirmed their views.

That may be true; in fact, it's quite clear a major goal of the TTAPS group was to influence public perception of nuclear weapons and to express their great dislike of the weapons. As Yevgeniy Velikhov put it, "They are simply tools of suicide."

Brian Martin presents a pretty complete view of the politics behind the debate, but ultimately notes:

Just because 'politics' may be involved with nuclear winter research does not automatically mean that the research is scientifically wrong, tainted or inappropriate for use in policy-making. A straightforward response is to be aware of the political context of the research when evaluating it. For example, if the peace movement has provided the indirect or direct stimulation for doing the research, this may suggest that other social movements (or other strands of the peace movement) might have provided the incentive for different research or different emphases in nuclear winter research. If the background and experiences of key nuclear winter researchers lead them towards certain presuppositions in their model-building, such as an emphasis on worst cases, then this is something to be aware of, not necessarily something to be condemned. If nuclear winter research is defended on the basis of verifications (different scientists finding the same results from similar models) rather than attempted falsifications because verifications are better suited to promoting the theory, the implications of this for policy-making should be discussed.

Personally, I'm inclined to view the whole issue this way: even if the theory is seriously over-representing the consequences, can we afford to ignore it? If it's wrong but we get rid of nuclear weapons assuming it's right, we're in good shape. If it's right and we do the same, we're also in good shape. But we lose if we have a nuclear war whether it's right or wrong; the only difference is in the severity of the subsequent catastrophe. I suspect even the most severe war and its aftermath wouldn't cause our extinction, but would leave enough survivors for human populations to adapt and stabilize long-term at a neolithic subsistence level. What I doubt is whether we'd ever rediscover an industrial society afterward, since we've already used most of the fuel supplies that allowed us to create one this time.

*****

# TTAPS comes from its members' names -- Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan -- but is also a pun on the military music for funerals.

## Sloan-Kettering recently developed a drug that prevents this in female mice, although it would be just as hard to find as any other drug after a war.

(entry revised 6/13/05)

"Oil Storm": a fabric of holes

2005-06-06T13:59:00.000-04:00

Authors: n/a
FX TV movie, 2005
Apocalypse Type: Economic meltdown
Rating: *1/2 (of 5)

Before getting into anything detailed, I'll say this -- Since it's Fox and they generally suck when it comes to portraying reality in news, I didn't expect much from their "future documentary" Oil Storm. I wasn't too surprised. Also, this technically isn't an apocalypse tale, but something like this could happen and could indeed send our society into a major tailspin, possibly even spark war(s) that could become apocalyptic. (It made me think of the "Food and Fuel Wars" that form the backdrop to Michael Kube-McDowell's Enigma, where oil supplies have dried up and left civilization in a rather paranoid quasi-18th century state. I'll review this one at some point.)

Anyway, back to the movie. It should be subtitled "Many Unanswered Questions."

In summary, a nasty hurricane wipes out a major US oil processing port in Louisiana in late summer 2005, suddenly reducing the nation's supply by 2 million barrels/day, causing prices to spiral rapidly upward ($4.29/gal for regular within a couple days; peaked at $8+/gal later in the film, and returned to $4.29/gal at end). Obviously, those prices cause all kinds of problems, causing the gov't to draw 1 million barrels/day from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve and seek extra Saudi production.

The Saudi gov't agrees, their militants don't, we send troops from home to protect the oil fields, and all hell breaks loose, ultimately cutting Saudi production by a third. (There's only a passing mention of the troops in Iraq, and no mention of the fact that they'd be a lot easier to move to Saudi Arabia than would troops stateside. Nor does it mention the likely escalation of civil war there, or in other Muslim lands, when Iraqi rebels see the success of Saudi militants.) A bad accident closes Houston's port & oil processing facilities for months, leaving people freezing in their homes in winter. Thousands die in Boston alone.

(That in itself, sparked an observation: One character was a Boston EMT whose mother lived alone, was already ill, and died. Why didn't they move in together?!? That's obviously a solution -- it's a lot cheaper to heat one apartment than two...)

The suburbs start depopulating as people either head into the cities to be closer to services or into the countryside to get away from the protests and riots that have sparked martial law in some cities. (That's my guess, but the film all but ignores where they all go and what they do when they get there. Where do they live? How do they eat, esp. without jobs?) Farmers begin to agitate that if nothing changes quickly, they won't be able to plant come spring, since they can't afford fuel, farm subsidies have been cut, and many necessities based on petroleum are now scarce.

Bankrupties skyrocket in many business sectors, with one character saying "People are getting rid of anything that has to do with oil, which is pretty much everything." Stocks plummet, ultimately losing trillions.

The gov't turns to Russia and negotiates a new oil supply, China buys it with a higher bid while it's in transit, and the US buys it back with a $16B investment in Russian oil infrastructure improvements. Things begin to return to "normal."

Seems pretty mundane, huh? Well, it was.

But what was interesting was what they DIDN'T talk about, or barely skimmed over. Only once did they mention, in passing, the need to explore alternative energy sources, but there's absolutely zero effort to DO it. No funding increases to public transit, no mention at all of coal, solar, hydro, even nuclear power (even though Bush, who is supposedly still president in this film, has talked about hiking nuclear power), even though they make it clear nobody can afford to drive SUVs that cost $200 a tank to fill. (At those prices, even my Geo Prism would cost $90 to fill, and I get decent mileage.)

On several occasions, they talked about how much damage this was doing to the economy, but many overflight scenes of the cities show many cars on the roads. No buses or trains, even in Boston, which has a popular subway system. They said businesses were closing and stockholders were dumping oil stocks, yet somehow those firms are still in business & able to receive the Russian oil at the end. (At one point, they mention 30% unemployment, I think it was.) Tell me, how do you resume businesses when your employees have left town? When your stocks are junk & you have no money?

Too many things in this film are taken for granted -- one of them being the news media. The film's style is based on the news documentary, but how do you have news coverage if the reporters & cameramen cannot afford to get to the places were news is happening or fuel for newspaper distribution? I could see a lot of coverage via Internet, with people writing about their own areas, but mainstream media would be very hard pressed to maintain their coverage of anything outside the cities.

Also, although it mentions in passing that this crisis affects other countries, China is still somehow an economic powerhouse capable of paying "any price" for Russian oil. In reality, without our economy buying Chinese products, they'd be in worse shape than we are, and many other advanced countries would be far worse still. Japan would be starving, Europe would be in trouble. What would China's reaction be to our overbidding them? Maybe an invasion of Siberia to take the oil they couldn't buy? How would Europe react? As usual, Fox portrays the US as being almost in isolation, unaffected by most of the world.

And are we sure we'd bother trying a second bid for the Russian shipment? We'd be pretty desperate by then. I could imagine someone (esp. given Bush's penchant for using force) sending the Navy to hijack the Russian tankers, which is what I thought was going to happen during the commercial break.

Speaking of Russia, even if we did negotiate such a deal, their infrastructure is rusting and would need a fair amount of work BEFORE they could supply us with any substantial portion of the needs we now get from the Saudis. We might get an emergency shipment, but not a continuing supply, and even a supply still doesn't solve the problem that caused this crisis: Oil addiction. The film mentions protests against oil companies, but doesn't take that to its logical conclusion -- widespread protest vs. Bush himself because he's an oil man.

Our supplier may change, just like a smackhead will find a new dealer if his gets locked up, but he's still a smackhead. Typically, Fox didn't explore this issue at all. The ending only guarantees a similar, but probably more severe, crisis will happen in the near future.

Intro.../ Rating System

2005-06-04T15:54:00.000-04:00

For most people, the concept of doom, apocalypse, holocaust, the potential end of civilization as we know it, isn't high on their thought radar screen... but maybe it should be. We probably can't eliminate all life on Earth, but we have the capacity to eliminate ourselves and several other species, and that should cause serious reflection.

I for one LIKE living here, so I certainly hope it doesn't happen and believe we MUST do whatever we can to prevent it from happening. Despite this blog's title I am NOT a person who believes that such catastrophe is inevitable, that Earth would better off with humans extinct (as one old guy once told me while I was canvassing for Sierra Club), or that some god will come save his favorites and leave the rest of us to roast. As far as the latter goes, I find salvationism an incredibly irresponsible, narcissistic concept that in fact fuels the threats we face and divides us when we need unity to deal with them.

This blog is a look at the literature, film, and other expressions of apocalypse (mostly books, fiction and otherwise). We'll summarize and look at how realistic the story is in the light of modern technology and scientific knowledge, how well the story is crafted as a piece of writing, etc., or, if non-fiction, how accurate and clearly-presented the science and/or political arguments are. We'll also occasionally look at real-world events that might have an impact on our chances of having or avoiding a holocaust.

One caveat: I will review almost anything, and have several dozen books already, but have no interest in financially supporting fundamentalist ministries, so I will NOT buy books published by such ministries. If you already have an interest in this subject, I bet you can guess some of the ones I'm referring to -- the Left Behind series, for example. If someone wants to send them to me free, I'll read them, but I won't pay for them.

I'm doing this because, although there are several good apocalypse-related sites online (see some of them in my links list, and I welcome others), I've seen very few that do more than rank or briefly mention the books/films they list. Not here. I hope to spark some discussion of the concepts these tales contain and how they might help us find a way out of the mess we're in...

*************
ADDED MUCH LATER:
It finally occurred to me you might want some explanation of the rating system, so here it is. All reviews are rated 0 to 5 stars as follows:
0 = Unbelievable dreck with no redeeming qualities. Has to be REALLY bad to earn this one; I can't think of anything I've read in years that does.
* = Don't bother. Fundamentally flawed in numerous ways.
** = Fair. Its problems outweigh its good points.
*** = Good. Interesting and well-presented story and characters outweigh whatever flaws it has.
**** = Excellent. Strong characters and plot; plausible science (even if speculative) and psychology; realistic, etc.
***** = Masterpiece of the genre. Not just a great apocalypse story, but a great tale of humanity, fact or fiction, with some unique quality that stands out.