Phronesisaical

We Haven't Had a Photo In a While

2012-01-27T09:38:00.000-05:00

Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, looking more or less north (maybe northwest) from near Georgia O'Keeffe's house.

Bits and Pieces - January 26, 2012

2012-01-26T22:32:00.000-05:00

Here's an article with some helpful information about those experiments on air-transmissible H5N1 influenza virus. Dr. Yoshiro Kawaoka, one of the two scientists whose laboratories produced the viruses, says that the virus his laboratory produced is not highly lethal. But I still don't agree that all the information should be freely available to everyone. I'm not worried so much about terrorists as I am about some idiot working in his basement.

Is there anything we need on the Moon? Probably not.

The Big Reveal

2012-01-25T15:22:00.003-05:00

John Cole of Balloon Juice has posted a photo of himself.

Just Wondering

2012-01-25T12:34:00.001-05:00

As I read Ronen Bergman's piece in the New York Times, the latest breathless exposition of why Israel's leaders want Armageddon, I'm wondering how much Mossad contributed to the breathless expectation of WMD in Iraq. That's q, not n.

A rant on Bergman's useful idiocy and more links at Nuclear Diner.

Bits and Pieces - January 23, 2012

2012-01-23T17:47:00.000-05:00

There was a gigantic solar flare a few days ago, and those who live further north are seeing some wonderful auroras. Here's a photo gallery. (h/t to RG)

Once diseases have disappeared because of vaccines, it's all too easy to believe that the hazards are mainly in the vaccines.

President Obama's proposed reorganization of business-oriented departments would remove the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from the Department of Commerce and put it in the Department of the Interior. Is this likely to be a problem?

An interview with Mikhail Prokhorov, who plans to challenge Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency.

Prime Minister Putin's statement on ethnicities in Russia. Dealing with the various ethnic groups that made up the Soviet Union was one of the problems that Mikhail Gorbachev didn't spend much time on while nationalistic groups made plans to leave the Union. Russia still has that problem, and Putin seems to be hoping that strong words about patriotism will deal with it.

Peter Beinart wants to know why the media aren't pointing out that the same Republicans who are calling for war with Iran also were all for war with Iraq.

The European foreign ministers have agreed to impose an oil embargo on Iran starting July 1. That means we'd better get negotiations going soon. Unfortunately, Iran hasn't formally replied to the invitation.

I won't pretend to understand all this, but the bottom line seems to be that divisions continue in the Iranian government. If people in the US government understood those divisions better, they might be able to lever them into negotiations. But it seems more likely that these divisions will just gum up the negotiations.

And, um, Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, is headed to Israel. The US's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a visit there last week. Must be the season.

A couple more good articles on the Iran situation by Tony Karon and Yousaf Butt.

A Quick Thought On The Meaning of the SOPA/PIPA Protests

2012-01-19T16:42:00.000-05:00

There's been some ruminating today, after the Wikipedia blackout and other actions, about the new power of the internet and such, but I haven't seen this thought anywhere else.

I would hope it is one of the lessons occurring to our representatives in Congress.

SOPA was brought to those representatives of the people by lobbyists from an industry that wanted to protect its earnings. Congressional representatives have many bills brought to them in this way. But this bill had the potential to damage a great many of their constituents and, likely, the American economy. Yesterday's protests should have brought that home.

Passing legislation that favors the few at the expense of the many is a misuse of the power that the voters hand to their representatives. One indicator of such legislation is its origin with those who expect to make money off it. Such people (and corporations, but I am repeating myself!) frequently use lobbyists.

Perhaps, oh congressional representatives, you might consider the repercussions on your constitutents of legislation brought to you by lobbyists.

Bits and Pieces - January 17, 2012

2012-01-17T18:51:00.000-05:00

Reactions to Rick Perry's charge that Turkey is "a country that is being ruled by, what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists," from Juan Cole, the Foreign Ministry of Turkey, and Turkey's ambassador to the United States.

Marc Lynch: No Military Option in Syria.

City dwellers in China now outnumber rural dwellers.

And now NATO helps some Iranian fishermen. I suggested a while ago that the two previous saves were likely a way to open a communication channel and to provide a tiny bit of confidence-building. Still looks that way to me.

Bits and Pieces - January 16, 2012

2012-01-16T19:20:00.000-05:00

If you read only one thing about Iran today, make it Gary Sick's analysis of the Obama administration's approach.

And, speaking of the Obama administration, Sick's analysis dovetails with Andrew Sullivan's broader analysis. Which has some similarities to my analyses that I can't immediately find links for.

Speaking of getting it wrong, here's a good analysis of what far too many people get wrong about Central Asia. My limited time there showed me very little Islam. My hosts said that they were Muslim, but they seemed to be in the same way that people who go to church only on Easter are Christian. But there were gigantic monuments in the Russian style, many of them commemorating those who died in the Great Patriotic War, World War II to us.

And, yeah, if you still want to read more about Iran, check out Nuclear Diner.

Martin Luther King Day - Lyndon Johnson's Speech on Civil Rights

2012-01-16T09:49:00.000-05:00

It's almost half a century now. This speech was made in 1965. There is so much win in it - read the whole thing.

In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation.

The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans--not as Democrats or Republicans-we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.

This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal"--"government by consent of the governed"--"give me liberty or give me death." Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.

Lyndon Johnson is well-known as one of the great political wheeler-dealers. There are any number of colorful stories about his exploits in that realm. But when push came to shove, his interests were for his country and for what was morally right.

That's quite a contrast to far too much of what we see in Congress today. And those guys (yes, mostly guys) can't even claim Johnson's wheeler-dealer chops. They've made a lot of money for themselves, but they haven't moved politics. And far too many of them are still fighting the same battles Johnson was trying to end. Read the section of his speech on voting rights, for example.

We owe great thanks to Martin Luther King and the others who fought for civil rights back in the sixties. But the fight isn't over, and now it's up to us.

H/T to Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice.

Bits and Pieces - January 12, 2012

2012-01-13T20:08:00.000-05:00

The United States no longer has heavy-duty icebreakers, and the delivery of fuel oil to Nome, Alaska, couldn't take place before the sea froze because of an unusual monster storm. So now Russia is helping us out, but it's touch-and-go for the people of Nome.

A Nordic-Baltic bloc is forming in the EU. It's been an obvious move for influencing Germany for some time, but it seems to be firming up. And I love to think about snow in Estonia.

Rumours of a coup in Pakistan may be exaggerated. The army may be satisfied with a political change of regime.

Since a focus of this blog is philosophy, I'll point to some links having to do with the morality of the assassinations of Iranian scientists and the use of the word terror over at Nuclear Diner. Plus lots of other good stuff.

A Warning to Israel? - Updated 1/15/12

2012-01-13T15:49:00.003-05:00

The latest assassination of an Iranian scientist took place a day or so after American Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton released a statement condemning the Iranian Government’s decision to begin enrichment operations at its Qom facility but also calling for a return to negotiations. One interpretation of the assassination is that it was intended to disrupt the possibility of negotiating.

The Israelis are widely believed to be behind the assassinations of Iranian scientists, possibly with the cooperation of the Mujaheden-e-Khalq, an opposition group within Iran that has been designated a terrorist organization by the American government.

The murder was rapidly condemned by the American government:

The United States has denied any role in Wednesday's killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said the United States had “absolutely nothing to do” with the blast that killed Mostafa Ahmadi Rosha, and said the U.S. strongly condemns the attack and all acts of violence.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated the White House denial.

“I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

President Barack Obama called Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. This report tells us that Obama assured Netanyahu that he is committed to Israel's security. Added later: Some say that Obama demanded some explanations from Netanyahu.

The condemnation of the attack is extremely strong. Obama's assurance to Netanyahu is pretty much the usual, which would make sense in balancing out the condemnation. And, of course, we don't know what else may have been said in their phone conversation. Added later: Some say that Obama demanded information about the killing.

Today this article appeared in Foreign Policy. It's a blockbuster: Israeli intelligence agents passed themselves off as CIA agents to recruit members of a Pakistani Sunni terrorist group that wants to overthrow the Iranian government. President Bush is reported to have been furious when he found out about it, as were members of the CIA.

"We don't do bang and boom," a recently retired intelligence officer said. "And we don't do political assassinations."

Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. "They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads," one highly placed intelligence source said, "and we say to them -- 'Don't even go there. The answer is no.'"

That would seem to underscore the White House's condemnation of the latest assassination, as does the article's timing.

Is Washington trying to tell Israel something?

Update (1/15/12): A missile defense exercise between the United States and Israel, scheduled for April, has been canceled. This seems to have been done rather suddenly. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, will visit Israel on Thursday.

Israel's Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon says he's ' disappointed" with President Obama and says that ‘election-year considerations’ are behind U.S. President’s caution over tough Iran sanctions. That's pretty undiplomatic.

Here's an interview with Mark Perry, who wrote the Foreign Policy article on Mossad's false flag operation with Jundullah.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Bits and Pieces - January 10, 2012

2012-01-10T19:56:00.001-05:00

I don't want to be able to search Google+. Or Facebook. Possibly Twitter. What I write on Google+ and Facebook (Facebook more than Google+) is mostly trivial. If I write something there that I think is worthy of further distribution, I'll write it here or at Nuclear Diner. So give this up, Google!

This is a longish article, the large middle part of interest mostly to air-power wonks. But the beginning few paragraphs and ending few paragraphs say all you need to know about the role of lobbying in our defense spending.

So who's a terrorist? A thoughtful consideration of the way law enforcement officials use words.

Reeling in a nuclear whopper. Very cool photo for us nuclear remediation nerds.

Update: Just had a Twitter uproar (1/10/2012, 8 o'clockish EST) over this Washington Post article, which started out quoting an anonymous American official as hoping that sanctions will lead to the overthrow of the Iranian regime. The article now has a correction right up front; corrections are usually at the bottom. Here's an early reaction to it.

Now I see Twitter speculation that that's what the official said and had to walk it back. Or it could be the reporters; the WaPo folks don't seem quite as eager for war with Iran as the NYT folks do, but both have been extremely careless (I'm being nice) in their writing, implying that Iran definitely intends to produce nuclear weapons or has one already. That's not true, not even close.

So now we can only wait and see what the mullahs think the case might be. Or what they choose as the most beneficial to their situation.

And all this in the middle of the always-intricate dance of setting up another round of negotiations. Thanks a bunch, WaPo!

The Pentagon and R&D

2012-01-08T20:09:00.001-05:00

One of my longer-range projects, which may never get done, is to write up some of the history of research in government laboratories, as seen from my perch at Los Alamos. It would be a broader history of something that was felt to be important in the 1950s and 1960s and got whittled away by any number of factors after those plummy days. The 1970s weren't too bad, and we even got some good stuff done in the 1980s, but it kept getting more and more difficult.

I was inspired in that enterprise by Hugh Gusterson's excellent article (sadly, now behind a subscription wall; this is an excerpt) on the decline of science at Los Alamos. But there was a history of decline before Gusterson's start in the 1980s that, in some ways, says more about the country's attitude toward research than the history after.

Now comes the New York Times with a paen to the Pentagon as the fount of R&D. Well, they have lots of dollars. A number of people have written about what's wrong with that idea and article; here's one that hits some of the points. I saw another somewhere along the way, the link now lost, that mentioned the corruption of the Pentagon's system of describing research, the 6.x system, where 6.1 is pure research. Some time ago, the greed of the defense contractors started pushing development and procurement, the big moneymakers (the higher numbers, like 6.5) back into the lower numbers so they could loot those categories. I suspect that very little pure research is done any more in 6.1.

But I really do have to note Robert Wright's article. The Times mentions Charles H. Townes, father of the laser, who apparently had some DoD funding at some time.

I don't know anything about Charles H. Townes, but if he's a Nobel Laureate who laid the groundwork for compact discs and laser eye surgery, here's my guess: Even if he had never gotten whatever DOD support he got, he would have done something pretty productive with his mind. He might, for example, have done research in the private sector, maybe starting his own company or going to work for one.

Mr. Wright is new to blogging, although he seems to have practiced journalism somewhere in his past. Mr. Wright, teh Google is your friend! Here's Townes's Nobel biography, obtained a little faster than I could type his name into the Google box.

Townes worked at Bell Labs, an institution that Mr. Wright, born in 1957 (teh Google again) may be unaware of. It was indeed private, as is Columbia University, where he worked later. Bell Labs was an important part of the country's research and development; the transistor was invented there. But that Bell Labs (I think there continues an institution by that name) is long gone. That's part of the story of the breakdown of research and development in America. There was also an ethos that held that research was important, teaching was important, and so people like Townes remained in institutions of higher education rather than creating their own companies, favored as that path and phrase are today.

Wright goes on from there to contrast private-sector and defense department R&D, seemingly oblivious that today's private-sector R&D compares to Townes's Bell Labs or what he did at Columbia as assembling Legos does to writing a novel. The Defense Department funding that Townes received was very likely 6.1 funding when that really meant research.

His admitted ignorance of history derails all the rest of Wright's post. I guess I'm going to have to write my long-range post, although I have another intensive one under way.

Science and Secrecy - III

2012-01-04T17:49:00.000-05:00

More about the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and its limitations. The bottom line seems to be that nobody really thought out beforehand how something like this might unfold.

Reinforcing what I said about nuclear weapons secrecy actually keeping information out of the hands of those who would use it badly (that includes both terrorists and semi-competent amateurs playing at WMD), Alex Wellerstein examines The Nth Country Experiment. The Livermore Laboratory employed a couple of recent Ph.D.s and told them to design a bomb from open-source materials. His conclusion, through a heavily-redacted version of the report, is that there's some question as to the potential effectiveness of the design they came up with.

That was in 1967, long before the internet. I see the claim frequently that "all the information is out there," but I have my doubts about that. And, as Wellerstein points out, the design is only the first step.

I won’t even bother pointing out that “designing” an atomic bomb on paper is, of course, nothing doing compared to actually producing the fissile material, casting explosives, fabricating the right shapes of things, assembling the whole device, all the while not killing yourself in the process. Headlines aside, these guys did not build an atomic bomb in any sense of the term “build,” which I think most thoughtful nuclear observers realize.

Much of that information is classified too.

Peace, Not Non-Intervention

2012-01-03T18:49:00.000-05:00

Well, I see that since I posted Bits and Pieces a fight that I'd like to join has broken out on the internets.

Ron Paul has suggested that America has been wrong to participate in wars. All wars. Ever. He would bring American troops home from everywhere and eliminate military action as a response to anything short of an invasion, and maybe not even that.

Some liberal commenters, who would like to see less American intervention, have latched onto Paul's non-intervention meme, perhaps just the word. Do they really think it was a bad thing for the United States to participate in World War II? And I guess that maybe even an attack on American soil (Pearl Harbor, remember?) isn't enough to justify military action for him. And then there's Robert Wright, who finds that the issuer of racist newsletters has "moral imagination" in his foreign policy.

I thought Kevin Drum got it right the other day: don't leave your message to crackpots to carry. If you look beyond non-intervention, as Kevin does, Paul is crazy. I would argue that he carries his non-intervention to a point of crazy as well.

I would like to change that framing, by reference to the much saner op-ed penned by Nicholas Burns. Let's look at peace as an objective. Not just withdrawing troops from everywhere, although troop withdrawal would be part of it. What would it take to bring peace in the places where the United States is involved? Yes, we're involved everywhere, so that would be peace to the world. (Didn't we just have a holiday with something about that?) That would require prioritizing some things: Iran and Israel would be near the top of the list, and things like relations with Russia might be framed differently.

Yes, I understand that we are going into the campaign with the candidates we have, rather than the candidates we might want, and Paul's non-intervention sounds sorta kinda like peace. But thinking it out suggests that Paul's preference are likely to lead to less peace, not more: let the Iranians get a nuclear bomb. Let the Israelis slaughter Palestinians and take their land. Confine the relationship with Russia to commerce.

And that's only the nonintervention part. Kevin outlines the rest.

It looks to me that if we want peace, we need to be thinking about peace and encouraging the candidates. Stephen Walt has pointed out that to get ahead in Washington, young international relations graduates have to be hawkish in either political party. To press for peace, we've got to do some thinking about it and then lean on the candidates. Ron Paul has done none of that. His foreign-policy ideas are just as crazy as his goldbuggery.

Bits and Pieces - January 3, 2012

2012-01-03T17:34:00.000-05:00

A bunch of nuclear-related stuff, but why don't I bring on the peace first?

Nicholas Burns links to his excellent Boston Globe op-ed on how we've forgotten about peace as an international objective and suggests that maybe we might think about this during the upcoming presidential campaign. Sounds like a good idea to me.

How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers?

What an EMP blast might actually do. Listen up, Newt!

Oak Ridge's mercury problem.

Pakistan doesn't want to talk about controlling fissile material production (continued).

Mark Hibbs on how Iran gets the HF and F₂ for its UF₆ production and the difficulties the Nuclear Suppliers' Group has dealing with this. Very wonky and very good.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeks public comment on a report updating preliminary assumptions for an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) the agency will develop to analyze the effects of storing spent nuclear fuel from the nation’s commercial power reactors for as much as 200 years. The link tells you how to comment, if you are so inclined.

Micah Zenko's eight questions for the Obama administration if it decides to attack Iran.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T02:00:00.000-05:00

Western goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)

The World Health Organization Warns About Those Engineered Flu Viruses

2011-12-31T19:08:00.000-05:00

The United Nations health body said it was "deeply concerned about the potential negative consequences" of work by two leading flu research teams who this month said they had found ways to make H5N1 into a easily transmissible form capable of causing lethal human pandemics.

[snip]

The WHO said such research should be done "only after all important public health risks and benefits have been identified" and "it is certain that the necessary protections to minimize the potential for negative consequences are in place."

A poor post to end the year with, I know. But I am optimistic about 2012. I'll greet the New Year with something better tomorrow.

Blog The Halls

2011-12-26T17:23:00.001-05:00

ZenPundit (aka Mark Safranski) has given us a bit of holiday nostalgia in a blog challenge.

I’m not sure that’s the proper name for it, or if the custom ever had a name. It’s a throwback to the early days of blogging, say 2004, when I started. We bloggers were eager for links and clicks, and one way to get links was a sort of chain letter: here’s what’s on my desk, and I challenge blogger1, blogger2, and blogger3 to do the same. Those were linked, of course, and when those bloggers wrote their posts, they would link back to you.

The blogworld has moved on, at least the parts I frequent. Some of the bloggers from back then like Praktike (aka Blake Hounshell) and Marc Lynch have moved on to bigger things, and some have stopped blogging altogether. Some of us, like Mark and me, have stuck with it, augmented by Facebook and Twitter. The MSM have encroached with media they frequently call blogs, but, since those documents are generated by paid staff and presumably edited for conformity with the parent publication’s policies, they’re not quite what I would call blogging.

So okay, here’s what’s on my desk. I never did pass these challenges on to others, just as I don’t send chain letters on, but that never has stopped Mark from listing me.

It’s hard to delineate exactly what constitutes my “desk.” I have a wrap-around set of shelves and worktable that, for the most part, contains the usual things: papers, office supplies, the small mechanisms necessary to working with paper and computer (stapler, postage scale, hand calculator), and a telephone. More paper. At least two cameras have temporary residence on the worktable, sometimes migrating to the windows through which I can see birds and other wildlife in the yard. Materials for the next Nuclear Diner meeting. For now, Christmas cards and associated address labels and stamps. Material to be organized into scrapbooks. Android being recharged. A cup of pens, pencils, envelope knife, and scissors, the cup from a flower arrangement someone sent me a long time ago.

Copies of Sky Calendar from the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University. This is very worth subscribing to for information about interesting stuff in the sky, like eclipses and meteor showers. An Iittala glass paperweight with a picture of birch trees in the fall that I bought in the Helsinki Airport. And a cube with glass sides containing sand, driftwood, shells, and rocks from the Oregon beach. I can turn it different ways to get different scenes. The paperweight and the Oregon beach scene are in the photo above, along with the cup of pens.

Peace on Earth

2011-12-24T18:07:00.001-05:00

Seems to be something we've sort of forgotten. Nicholas Burns asks if the word "peace" is disappearing from our national conversation.

Stephen Walt points out that only those espousing a muscular (read: military-driven) foreign policy need apply for posts in Washington.

Christmas is, as Walt points out, looked upon as the season of peace. The Prince of Peace. Peace on Earth. Peace to all our readers, and let's share it in the coming year!

Science and Secrecy - Continued

2011-12-23T11:27:00.001-05:00

Here are some thoughts on the subject from Michael Eisen, who knows a lot more about building viruses than I do. His uncertainties are worth considering, although I disagree with his bottom line and will explain why.

One of the things I should have written, but didn't, in my previous post (I know, no credit for that!) was that we don't know how well these modified viruses will survive in the real world. It's possible that their modifications also damage their ability to survive in some way. That hasn't been tested. He doesn't address that directly, but I suspect that it's behind this statement (my emphasis):

Although it is impossible to know how this virus would affect humans, its behavior in ferrets establishes a non-trivial possibility that the evolved Rotterdam virus could cause a lethal global pandemic.

He argues that it is likely that the existing virus constitutes more of a danger than that terrorists will develop a similar virus. Laboratory accidents are not unknown, and the incubation period for influenza assures that others would be exposed. But he is working through some arguments on publication of the full preparation of the virus. And I'm not so sure that this comparison is relevant to that argument.

Later in the post, he continues this line of reasoning:

But the thing that really really annoys me about this whole debate, is the disproportionate attention paid to mitigating the risks of these experiments compared to the far greater risks that surround us. It seems insane for a government to spend so much time wringing its hands about publishing the results of a few potentially dangerous experiments, when it does things every day that entail a far, far greater risk to its peoples’ health and well being. For example, we continue to ship massive amounts of arms to sketchy “allies” across the globe, many of which are destined to end up in the hands of terrorists, who would have a far easier time using them against us than they would any H5N1 virus. And we have done little to address the sorry state of our public health infrastructure – something that is an indispensable part of our response to major pathogen outbreaks, whether of natural origin or otherwise. And let’s not even talk about our stubborn refusal to deal with global warming…

I'm weighing into the argument because it's analogous to arguments that have been made regarding nuclear weapons. And we have some experience there with controlling information. I would also argue that the fact that bad, perhaps worse, things happen does not negate our responsibility to deal with the case at hand.

I would argue, however, that controlling specific information about how to do some things is both responsible and effective, and that the history of restricting nuclear weapons information supports this. It is true that knowing that something can be done is useful for someone who wants to repeat that something. But in chemistry (my field) and, I'm sure, in virology, details are enormously important. As the dimensions of nuclear weapons components are necessary for building a bomb, so are the exact mutations and how to arrive at them for the production of these new flu viruses. And that is the information that needs to be held closely.

In the case of nuclear weapons, we can consider the latest wannabe, North Korea. The yields of their nuclear tests suggest that they didn't get all those dimensions to where they wanted them to be. They can probably get closer the next time around. But keeping that information from them made it more difficult for them to build a bomb. And they may well have had the help of A. Q. Khan.

Part of the difficulty is in the handling and preparation of materials. That may account for North Korea's low yields as well as design specs. I think, although I am not quite convinced, that producing a virus to spec is less difficult than producing a nuclear weapon. Producing a virus requires fewer specialized talents, but what I am unsure of is whether keeping from being infected with the virus is more difficult than making sure that the explosives don't blow up as you machine them.

I recognize that free dissemination of information is something of an article of faith for academics today. Certainly censorship can be badly misused. But I think there are two issues here that have to be considered together in a way that extraneous issues like global warming don't need to be. Those issues are the responsibility to avoid harm to the public and the need to maximize the availability of information. I am not sure that the obligations toward informing one's colleagues are at the same level of avoiding harm to the population.

As I've argued the unlikelihood of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons, I think there is an analogy to their producing this flu virus, with my reservation above that this flu virus may be easier to produce. I agree that the danger lies in the currently existing virus, and would add the danger of some amateur looking to score some points who doesn't properly contain the virus.

And this brings us to another question I had: whether this exercise was genuinely in the pursuit of better ways to deal with viruses or a way to call attention to the researcher. Another quote:

Here’s where things get complicated for me, because truth be told, I think these were really stupid experiments that have little practical value. The ostensible reason for carrying out and publishing these experiments is that they tell us important things about what a human transmissible H5N1 virus will look like, allowing us to better detect and prepare for a future pandemic.

I think this is very wrongheaded, and exhibits an almost willful ignorance of the ways that viruses in general, and flu in particular, evolve. RNA viruses like flu have very high mutation rates, and sample an astonishing diversity of variant sequences even in the course of infecting a single individual. The best demonstration of this is the rapidity with which drug-resistant strains emerge whenever any of the available anti-influenza drugs are used. It is because of the rapid emergence of resistance that use of these drugs is largely restricted to managing outbreaks in places with highly susceptible individuals, like nursing homes.

For me, this tips the balance, along with the history of restricting nuclear weapons information. Eisen remains unconvinced:

But I remain uneasy that the quick censorship trigger being pulled here with the easy acquiescence of most of the scientific community augurs future restrictions on science that will do real harm to one of the few things with the potential to protect us from deadly viruses and the other real and imagined perils of our future.

Update: Ivan Oransky argues that removing some information from these papers isn't censorship.

Science and Secrecy

2011-12-21T16:46:00.000-05:00

Biological weapons have a serious drawback: they consist of entities that reproduce themselves. That means that they can get out of control and infect everyone, not just those they are aimed at. This is the reason that bioweaponeers look for diseases most of us find exotic: they want bacteria that will infect the targets but not spread so easily that they are a danger to those using them.

The big news of the past few weeks has been that Dutch and American researchers, Ron Fouchier and Yoshi Kawaoke, and their teams have made new influenza viruses that kill most of the organisms they infect and are easily spread through the air. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has advised the journals (Nature and Science) to which the papers describing the preparation of these viruses have been submitted to publish the papers with key passages relating to the preparation of the viruses deleted. The purpose, of course, is to keep the critical information of exactly what the operative mutations are and how to induce them out of the hands of amateurs and terrorists.

Because of their communicability, these viruses present much greater danger than the anthrax attacks of 2001. If an amateur tried the prep and messed up, infected his family, things could get ugly. We have the previous example of SARS that shows that something like this could be contained, but people would die.

On the other hand, if researchers know the components that make these viruses so virulent, they may be able to come up with defenses against them, maybe even a vaccine against all varieties of influenza.

I feel strongly that the NSABB has made the right call. Some people feel that information wants to be free, or something like that, a libertarianism of the intellect. Consequences be damned, I guess. And that link has it wrong: specifics of the mutations and how they are induced make it much easier to produce the viruses. Knowing that such a thing is possible is useful to those who would reproduce the process, as is any additional information in the papers. But it's some distance to figuring out the exact steps in the laboratory.

The people who discovered fission in the 1930s and realized its implications faced the same sort of dilemma. Here's a historian who discusses how that worked.

It's impossible to keep this sort of information secret forever. I'd be happy if we could damp down idiotic attempts to do it in someone's garage until we have some idea of how to make a vaccine.

Solstice

2011-12-21T12:56:00.001-05:00

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

T. S. Eliot, East Coker

The photo is mine, of New Mexico's Ortiz Mountains this morning.

Bits and Pieces - Vaclav Havel Edition

2011-12-20T17:23:00.000-05:00

Some very good material in these three links and their links. Havel retained his integrity under the Soviet regime and then helped to remove it.

Vaclav Havel on Intellectuals in Politics.

Vaclav Havel's Critique of the West.

Vaclav Havel on true leadership in times of crisis.

Bits and Pieces - North Korea Edition

2011-12-19T18:40:00.000-05:00

With Kim Jong Il dead, and his twenty-seven-year-old son his immediate successor, although probably with some sort of regent/advisor, nobody knows what is likely to happen in the short or longer run. South Korea has gone to alert status, because one way North Korea has historically dealt with uncertainties within has been to provoke someone else.

If you want to follow the speculation, here's some.

This is more a news article. The United States was just about to offer another round of food aid to North Korea, which is verging on famine conditions once again. That might have led to further talks on North Korea's nuclear program, but it appears that there will be a month of obligatory mourning in North Korea while those in power reassess their situation.

A broader look at the nuclear talks.

More links at Nuclear Diner.

North Korea at night, illustrating the oppressiveness of the regime and consequent lack of economic development, the same factors that lead to famine.

Lots of biographical pictures of Kim Jong Il.

From the BBC: a lineup of people and nations affected by Kim's death.

Steve Clemons lists people who are among the best placed to provide some insight. None seem to have published anything on Kim Jong Il's death yet.

Howard French: Crazy like a fox.

Christian Caryl: North Korea’s Not-So-Simple Succession.

Michael Hirsh: How Kim Jong-Il Became the Most Successful Dictator in Modern History.

The Christmas Bushtit

2011-12-18T16:13:00.000-05:00

These tiny guys must weigh less than an ounce each, but they keep going through the winter. They travel in flocks of twenty or thirty, and they swarm the suet feeder. They also check out the trees and bushes for bugs, which is what this one seems to be doing.

Christopher Hitchens - Updated 12/20/11

2011-12-17T12:31:00.001-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died this week. Death by esophageal cancer is ugly, and it must have been a terrible year for him and his family.

But he’s not one of the writers I’ve looked forward to reading. I’ve read many of his pieces because they were talked about, or because they appeared in magazines I read. They were smoothly done, and I appreciated an occasional phrase or sentence.

Of the articles I’ve read commemorating his life, two have been by women, and they were both interviews. “Let’s have a woman interview him,” I can imagine the male editor saying, pleased with the incongruity.

Esophageal cancer is frequently associated with smoking and drinking, Hitchens’s trademarks. And that is a good bit of what is being celebrated: his massive capacity for drink and the ability to write under its influence. And the polemics, which make me think of a nasty drunk, but perhaps that’s uncharitable.

I keep thinking of the phrase, “a man’s man,” which would go with the smoking, drinking, and anger. Yes, Hitchens claimed that all that made him creative, productive. Those celebrating his life seem to agree that this is a path to creative productivity.

But I’m of a different temperament. Let’s imagine paens to sitting quietly and meditatively, knitting, finding creative productivity there. Or walking in the woods. Yes, that works better: stretching our masculine muscles, striding along assertively. Certainly creativity there. But wait. I like to sit on a boulder, feel its boulderness, rub my hand against a crusty treebark, wait for a bird to pose or the light to reach its peak. And the ideas come.

I’ve been angry, but I can’t think of any time when it’s done me much good. Perhaps men’s anger is more useful in this world, although I can’t think of a lot of examples. Yes, it’s occasionally useful for someone to puncture the pompous or the actively dangerous. Too bad Hitchens was too busy making macho noises when that opportunity arose with George Bush’s adventure in Iraq.

It’s odd that the world that Hitchens and I grew up in marked women as the emotional sex. Those emotions, of course, were the ones not associated with masculinity. The masculine indulgence in another set of emotions was normed along with other things masculine.

But now we’ve seen through that, or have we?

For the past year or so, I’ve been running into writings and actions that seem shockingly unaware of how blind they are to anything outside a narrow band of experience, that sometimes further valorize that experience above all other possibilities. No, I’m sorry, I don’t have links just now; and I know this is awfully abstract. The tributes to Hitchens overlap with this category: experiences that are pretty much alien to me.

I’m wondering how much this sort of macho goes into the fictions currently permeating American politics: self-made men, don’t need help from the government, just let us live free. Not so different from Hitchens’s ethic, although backed by a Christianity abstemious in his drinking and smoking, not so abstemious in anger.

But you can’t run a country on adrenaline rush. Daniel Kahneman’s new book distinguishes between that rush and what makes us human: reflective thought. He calls them Systems 1 and 2. System 1 is automatic and easy; System 2 needs cultivation and protection.

I’m sure Christopher Hitchens was a great drinking buddy. I’m not sure how much further that goes than Saturday night.

Update (12/20/11): Okay, here's a good remembrance by a man.

Not What We Thought! Not That We Had Any Idea What We Were Talking About.

2011-12-16T12:58:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure how long ABC will allow its breathless foolishness to stay up, but the headline says it all. And I'm not sure how long ABC will let that stay up, so here's a screen grab:

And another warning: the breathless foolishness is the autoplay video so beloved of ABC alone.

Not Quite What It Seemed. Sigh.

The newsies at ABC got a report that radioactive material was stopped by Russian customs from being transported in someone's baggage to Iran. So a bunch of presumptions, aided and abetted by a shaky understanding of what radionuclides are, kicked in to produce a knee-jerk story about how Iran must be making a nuclear bomb. That's in the autoplay video that I expect to disappear from the ABC site.

Wrong.

It beats me why someone would pack a bunch of sodium-22 in their luggage. It's mostly used for medical diagnostics, and there are better ways to transport it, through channels. It's not at all useful for bomb-making.

OTOH, it's good to know that the radiation detectors at the airport caught it. Sodium-22 is a beta emitter, and beta radiation can be hard to detect. One of my colleagues used to say he could distribute beta emitters knee-deep and nobody would find them. But that was twenty years ago, and detector technology has improved.

AP did a better job at the news.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Game-Changers

2011-12-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

Stephen Walt suggests five game-changers in international relations:
*The United States Takes the Military Option "off the Table" with Iran
*Hamas Revises Its Charter
*The United States Proposes Reciprocal Global Nuclear Arms Reductions
*Israel Accepts the Arab League Peace Plan
*China Proposes Multilateral Negotiation and Arbitration over the South China Sea

Game-changers are badly needed in today's world. We've got a lot of nay-sayers who hold things back, and people who might be able to change the game who are afraid of the political damage the nay-sayers might do. I'm not sure I agree with all of Walt's suggestions. But far too many bad situations have simply festered.

Just Wondering

2011-12-12T17:01:00.000-05:00

If Conficker may have been a scout for Stuxnet, then how about this report from October and the Iranian downing of the RQ-170 drone?

Bits and Pieces - December 12, 2011

2011-12-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

Today's news:
Mikhail Prokhorov announces he will run for Russia's presidency against Vladimir Putin. Here's the announcement for those of you who understand Russian. David Remnick's take on the recent parliamentary election and the demonstrations in response. Gary Hart's piece is mostly a setup for an Atlantic series on Russia, but he raises the question I keep wondering about, namely why there is so much American hostility to Russia, with whom we have a great many common interests.

Newt Gingrich is convinced that one of the greatest dangers facing America is an electromagnetic pulse attack. He is also being bankrolled by a big-time American Likud supporter. Which probably explains his Likud-like performance Saturday night.

I have less sympathy for Edward Teller than this blogger does. But you should take note of this excellent blog if you enjoy nuclear history. And yes, Newt does sound rather Teller-like.

Culture clash: Chinese students discover American politics.

Do budding geniuses have to learn too much?

Eclipsed Moon Setting Over Jemez Mountains

2011-12-10T09:25:00.000-05:00

The lights at the lower right are Los Alamos.

Bits and Pieces - December 9, 2011

2011-12-09T12:04:00.000-05:00

Medical students that reject evolution.

This is very cool. Looks like irrefutable evidence of water on Mars at one time. That's the only way this kind of mineral forms.

Have we come to the end of history in popular culture? Some good comments on Kevin Drum's post on the subject.

When Does Public Disclosure Make Secrecy Moot?

Here are a couple more of my posts on the cost of nuclear weapons. The discussion continued, and then an e-mail was released.

Salak

2011-12-08T02:32:00.001-05:00

Photo: Menheer Ihsan, Flickr

Bits and Pieces - December 6, 2011

2011-12-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

I guess President Obama has been getting some good things done.

This seems to be the drone that Iran took down. Whether it was shot down or control intercepted is not clear, nor is its mission when it went down. This is the kind of thing that militaries really, really don't like to lose to the enemy.

Speaking of what we don't know about Iran, I've been working on a post about last week's explosion at Isfahan. But there's really not much to work with. Jeffrey Lewis notes that and then talks about the previous explosion at a missile base.

Some interesting graphs and a map and how an attack on Iran might affect the world's oil supply.

American crocodiles are off the endangered species list thanks to the warm water from the Turkey Point nuclear plant in Florida.

Bits and Pieces - December 5, 2011

2011-12-05T17:33:00.001-05:00

Racial discrimination hasn't gone away, at the local and federal levels.

What's under the ice in Antarctica.

Less than the Tehran demonstrators might have hoped to find at the British Embassy.

Both these articles on Iran are worth reading. At first, they seem opposed, but after I thought about it a while, they look like the same thing from different viewpoints. They are quite different from most of what is in the MSM.
Why Iran lashes out at the West
Interview with Robin Wright

How Much Do Nuclear Weapons Cost?

2011-12-02T15:40:00.002-05:00

When I was a student, I worked in a laboratory that separated plant pigments, like chlorophyll, from algae that had been grown in heavy water, so the hydrogens in those pigments had been substituted by deuterium. The amounts of pigment were small and carefully handled. One slow afternoon, some of us tried to calculate what they were worth, sitting green and yellow in their shiny glass vacuum ampoules. The growing had required heavy water, nutrients, and energy to keep the vats warm. Technicians had to monitor the growing and, at the right time, separate and dry the algae. Then senior scientists had prepared the algae and the chromatographic columns (four inches by two feet, filled with confectioners' sugar tamped just so) and did the separation, which entailed proper application of an algae solution to the columns, followed by careful excavation of the pigmented regions of the column with surgical-like tools and further preparation, winding up with those ampoules. Hours of expensive people time.

Nuclear weapons are further along in development than our plant pigment separations were, but not by a lot. Their production process is more like that of an exclusive car, the handwork that goes into, say, a Bugatti. Expensive components and hours of expensive people time. And then there are the delivery vehicles, whose production is more like, say, a Mercedes-Benz.

But if you want to account for what nuclear weapons have cost the country since they were invented during World War II, you would have to include the damage to the environment and people's health from poor judgements about worker conditions and waste disposal, the work that has gone into development of treaties to control them, and today's monitoring of other nations that hold them or may be trying to get them.

Stephen Schwartz, most recently with Deepti Choubey, has tried to reckon up that full cost. That number is useful for a great many things, among them ways to consider what nuclear weapons might cost us in the future and how we might deal with those costs.

During the Super Committee deliberations, an argument was made that the nuclear weapons budget for the next ten years could be cut by $200 billion dollars. This argument came mainly from organizations hoping to phase out nuclear weapons altogether, and was based on a total cost of nuclear weapons for the next decade of $700 billion dollars. That estimate came from the Ploughshares Foundation and was based on Schwartz and Choubey's numbers.

During the last Republican debate, an ad was aired that made use of that $700 billion figure. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" columnist looked into it and found some problems. I had looked into the Ploughshares numbers at about the time they came out and also had some questions (here, here, and here).

I was writing in the context of the Super Committee and the suggestion that $200 billion be cut from the "nuclear weapons budget." My concern was that taking such a broad approach would result in funds being cut from such things as environmental cleanup, worker compensation, and treaty talks, given the Republican love of weapons.

The past day or two, since Kessler's piece was published, has seen an uproar in the Twitter world over who's right. That's an unfortunate emphasis, since it seems to me that the problem is that Schwartz and Choubey are doing one thing, and Ploughshares another.

Schwartz and Choubey are trying to find what the cost of nuclear weapons has been. The paper I linked and other estimates that Schwartz has done are generally accepted as the most reliable. The purpose of the Ploughshares document is political, to argue for reductions in nuclear weapons via the Super Committee. With the demise of the Super Committee, that political purpose continues. So Ploughshares has vehemently defended its numbers, particularly that bottom-line $700 billion.

Schwartz has made the point again and again that we need to know what costs go into the nuclear weapons budget. The federal budget contains no such line item; the costs are largely, but not exclusively, in the Departments of Energy and Defense. Any such accounting necessarily makes arbitrary judgements as to where to draw the lines. The common meaning of "nuclear weapons budget," it seems to me, includes the manufacture and maintenance of the weapons themselves and their delivery vehicles. Schwartz's estimate contains many other costs, which makes that estimate very useful in understanding all the costs of nuclear weapons.

Some commentary has welcomed "a discussion of nuclear weapons costs," but that's not what I saw yesterday on Twitter. That came down closer to "I'm right, you're wrong" and stayed at that bottom-line number.

Extrapolating those numbers into the future should include assessments of the various categories individually, not just a bottom-line number. The question of what parts of the program are desirable to continue, like treaty development for further control of those weapons, is important. That is the discussion we need to have, and it was completely absent this week.

Update: Here are some specific suggestions for saving $45 billion from the nuclear weapons budget. Kudos to the Arms Control Association for looking beyond Twitter.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Good News, But Not For the Police

2011-11-29T09:21:00.000-05:00

There were no car burglaries in Santa Fe over the weekend. You would think that would be good news, and Geoff Grammer reports in The New Mexican that the police accede to this judgement. But they're still disappointed.

It seems that they set up a big SUV full of electronics and left it in the Walmart parking lot. Watched, of course, in the expectation that somebody would take advantage and could easily be swooped up and brought to justice.

Another sting. Like those FBI informers who ingratiate themselves with would-be terrorists and show them how to get the stuff to make bombs.

It's probably not all bad to warn the would-be burglars that unlocked SUVs full of tempting stuff may be a trap. But the non-burgling happened before we all knew that.

The Santa Fe police have broken a couple of theft rings in recent months. That probably has more to do with the weekend's absence of burgling than this bright sting idea. Real police work does make a difference.

Bits and Pieces - November 28, 2011

2011-11-28T17:05:00.000-05:00

Big headline story today is that the Fed gave the banks even more money than you thought. Here's Kevin Drum's reaction, which is pretty close to mine. And maybe the Fed could teach the European Central Bank a thing or two.

More economics: "1) do lower marginal tax rates on the rich result in higher income inequality, and 2) do higher taxes on the rich result in lower economic growth? Answers: yes and no."

Glenn Greenwald eviscerates Bob Schrieffer's journalism.

Why companies that insist on work uber alles, including being sick, are hurting themselves.

Some more of what we're not hearing about the Murdoch newspaper scandal in Britain.

You know that cyberattack on a water treatment plant? It wasn't.

Upper class dwarf throwing.

Lana Peters, nee Svetlana Stalina, has died. A small personal note: she looked remarkably like my mother.

An Update on Nature's Sexism

2011-11-25T17:12:00.001-05:00

Apparently Nature intends to stand by its editor and his buddy who wrote that sexist fiction piece. They haven't come out with any official public statement. And the fiction author continues to tell the rest of the world they're wrong - he's a nice guy and everything he said is entirely legitimate and the rest of us should just shut up.

No, I'm not going to link to any of the depressing swill. One of the hypotheses is that they're doing it as linkbait, which seems a cheap tactic for one of the world's foremost scientific publications.

But I have to wonder if some clicks are worth looking like retrograde jerks.

The good part of this furore has been that I've found Paleontologist Barbie and Michael Eisen's blog.

A Further Thought on Black Friday

2011-11-25T16:01:00.000-05:00

And I see others are having it too.

Kevin Drum traces this use of the term back to 1985, as that decline of the middle class was becoming obvious. It's probably also got to do with the rise of WalMart, which always seems to be the scene of Black Friday tramplings and now pepper spraying.

Many societies have found pleasure in watching the lower classes fighting each other. Slaves in the Roman coliseum, for one example. So today we have Black Friday.

Angry Black Lady points this out.

And a tweet from @rationalists:

We need to make this a meme.

Bits and Pieces - Black Friday Edition

2011-11-25T12:46:00.000-05:00

I keep wondering if others see the term "Black Friday" in any positive light. The "Black Day" phrase has been connected to bad events far too uniformly for me to feel good about it. And I hate shopping crowds, so there is nothing about today's shopping events that seems good to me.

Helmut has already linked the pepper spray incident in California. All's fair in shopping!

Kevin Drum, who seems as puzzled as I am about the nomenclature, tries to find how this linguistic perversion originated.

Also in the realm of vicious stupidity: commerce in chicken-pox-infected lollypops and infection parties. The authorities may be cracking down on these illegal activities.

Hard to tell whether this is good or bad: Nobody misses Murdoch's News of the World, but does it mean that newspapers are nonessential? And we may speculate what would happen if the Murdoch pox infects Fox News.

And a slide show of more attractive (at least on the outside) public toilets.

Onion-as-Reality Alert

2011-11-25T11:38:00.001-05:00

A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.The incident occurred shortly after 10:20 p.m. Thursday in a crowded Los Angeles-area Walmart as shoppers hungry for deals were let inside the store. [Link]

Bits and Pieces - November 22, 2011

2011-11-22T17:35:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to The Reaction for pointing out that this song (which I mildly liked at the time) is sung by the two guys who became known as Simon and Garfunkel. The record would have been a 45, though, with a bigger hole in the center.

An interactive map of US highway deaths. There really are a lot.

This is wonky and a bit convoluted, but the bottom line is clear: if you don't want your infrastructure hacked, insert an air gap. In other words, don't connect it to the internet!

Preparing for tonight's Republican debate: questions from Thomas Fingar, a China expert, and Jon Huntsman tries to get a leg up by writing a coherent article.

A reminder that we do have someone competent in foreign policy running things, and why he'll probably win next year.

Since this post is on what some have called "the nuclear taboo," and since this one of this blog's topics is philosophy, let's put in a few seconds of thinking about that. There are some very good points made in the comments that the idea that nuclear war is a bad idea does not amount to a taboo. And, in any case, it appears that many Americans have a fairly low threshold for using nuclear weapons.

Handling Protest

2011-11-22T16:07:00.001-05:00

President Obama is confronted with the human microphone:

Watch how he handles it: He lets the protesters have their say until opposition to them builds, then asks that they let him have his say and says he'll be glad to talk to them later.

Recommended viewing for university chancellors and police everywhere.

Speaking of whom, Lieutenant John Pike of the University of California, Davis, police has achieved internet immortality.

Update: And now, reviews of pepper spray on Amazon!

The Heat's Heat

2011-11-20T23:13:00.001-05:00

Via here, via MT, via FB

And here's a fuller version of the Scoville scale so that you can compare your favorite pepper to getting blasted in the face with a little Standard U.S. Grade FN 303 by the mighty blue of UC-Davis, NYC, or Oakland. Personally, I like a few dabs of Madam Jeanette under my eyelids with my morning coffee.

Scoville Rating	Type of Pepper
15,000,000 - 16,000,000	Pure capsaicin (Unavailable through a natural grown plant and is only synthetically developed)
8,600,000 - 9,100,000	Various capsaicinoids (e.g. homocapsaicin, homodihydrocapsaicin, norhydrocapsaicin) (Unavailable through a natural grown plant and is only synthetically developed)
2,000,000 - 5,300,000	Standard U.S. Grade pepper stray, FN 303 irritant ammunition (Unavailable through a natural grown plant and is only synthetically developed)
855,000 - 1,050,000	Bhut Jolokia aka Naga Jolokia (Hottest naturally grown pepper)
350,000 - 580,000	Red Savina Habanero
100,000 - 350,000	Habanero chili, Scotch Bonnet Pepper, Datil Pepper, Rocoto, Jamaican Hot pepper, African Birdseye, Madame Jeanette
50,000 - 100,000	Thai Pepper, Malagueta Pepper, Chiltepin Pepper, Pequin Pepper
30,000 - 50,000	Cayenne Pepper, Aji Pepper, Tabasco Pepper, some Chipotle pepper
10,000 - 23,000	Serrano Pepper, some Chipotle peppers
2,500 - 8,000	Jalapeño Pepper, Guajillo pepper, New Mexican varieties of Anaheim pepper, Paprika (Hungarian wax pepper)
500 - 250	Anaheim pepper, Poblano pepper, Rocotillo Pepper
100 - 500	Pimento, Pepperoncini
0	No heat, Bell pepper

One of These is Wrong

2011-11-19T19:50:00.001-05:00

Recent police violence: videos from Garance Franke-Ruta.

It's the 148th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettsburg Address. That's where the phrase "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" comes from.

Nature Jumps Into the Sexism Morass

2011-11-19T09:27:00.007-05:00

I saw this the other day, read the first few sentences and couldn't figure out what was going on. Or didn't want to believe that Nature, the premier British scientific journal, was publishing adolescent male musing on how different the female sex really is. But there it is. I found this today, from the Journal of Are You Fucking Kidding, of which the editor-in-commandant is apparently a sister chemist. So I went back to Nature, and indeed, the gameboy stuff was still there.

The writer wrote it, and he is defending it in the comment thread, apparently learning nothing on the way. An editor, probably more than one, had to approve it, which meant that they found nothing wrong with it and presumably liked it better than other things they might have published in its place. And it's fiction. I didn't know that Nature published fiction, so it seems that some special exception must have been made for the brilliance of this piece. (That's sarcasm; I'm feeling like the naivete is so thick that I have to explain every little thing.)

That sequence attests to a thoroughgoing sexism, apparently invisible to all involved.

And oh yes, it was written tongue-in-cheek, ha ha, the author tells us, so it's your fault, you sourpuss feminists, if you don't get it. No humor, ha ha.

All this stuff, as the editor-in-commandant is saying, is so old, it's hard to believe that the boys at Nature aren't aware of it. I think that's a big part of my disbelief. They've been hidden away in their labs and missed the last fifty years, I guess.

Update: Oh my, I see I'm quite late to this discussion. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that Nature actually published something so juvenile.

Mas: Scientific American is published by the Nature Publishing Group. But they've posted two of the best responses to Nature's idiocy, by Christie Wilcox and Janet Stemwedel. There is also a Twitter hashtag, #womenspace, for those who follow such things.

I simply could not imagine doing any better than this.

Womandate 11/20/11: ~~Nature seems to have~~ This masterpiece has been regendered. I have to admit that I thought about doing that myself, but I had several more important things to do, like removing the soaker hoses from the flowerbeds and setting up the heated birdbath. The regendering, which seems to consist only of replacing male names and pronouns with their female equivalents, shows even more vividly how poorly written this piece is and fails to do much more. Even the comments have been regendered. ~~Given what I've read about Nature's editor, the man responsible for publishing the original idiocy, I suspect that this was his brilliant idea too.~~ I was thinking of a more elaborate regendering, in which reversed sex roles might even generate a bit of satire. But I think I'll go wash out the summer birdbath instead.

I am told, via Twitter, that this is an automated function at regender.com. I'll stick with my comments above as modified.

Bits and Pieces - November 18, 2011

2011-11-18T11:41:00.000-05:00

I think we need to continue to hear about that Norwegian massacre last spring, but I'd also like to hear about how the Norwegian people are recovering. The American MSM aren's much covering either.

This isn't good. OTOH, doesn't seem like there's much of a move toward intervention in Syria anyway.

The legions and the auxiliaries in Rome and America.

Are psychologists sexing up their research?

Seymour Hersh makes his case on Iran. I don't entirely agree with it, but it's a clear and honest exposition.

Mehdi Hasan makes a case for diplomacy with Iran that's been made many times before, but worth repeating.

And there's much more on Iran at Nuclear Diner, both links and my commentary.

What Kind of Innovation Do We Need?

2011-11-15T15:23:00.001-05:00

The Atlantic's website is featuring a section on innovation. I would like to subscribe only to certain parts of that website, but that doesn't seem to be possible, so I'm getting this innovation stuff too.

I grew up during the fifties and sixties, so I was as wide-eyed about innovation and space and transistors and computers and cars and neat stuff as any math-crazy young girl of that period. It was a good time, and new stuff was coming thick and fast.

That period put the shine on the word innovation. Innovation really did make our lives better. People made money on innovation, and they have continued to do so since then. Innovation has even reached out into our financial markets, helping to crater them, and still the word shines.

It means making something new, of course, but it has become our modern version of what the Victorians were pleased to call progress and what is now called the Whig version of progress. Ever onward and upward.

The Atlantic series is focused on new gadgets, the iPhone squared or cubed, and all the ways they will make things better, just like the flying cars that the 1950s expected for us today.* It's delightful, of course, to think about new gadgets, but most of us don't know how to use all of what we've got now, nor do we need to. Watching television on a hand-held device is not a giant step for humankind.

Part of this Whig version of innovation is the myth of the single (male) inventor. It was good to see Vaclav Smil debunk this today. The Atlantic series has been unrelentingly male. They are, of course, our innovators, if by innovator you mean guys who fit this stereotype of the heroic guy working alone to perfect the lightbulb or iPhone. Which, Smil points out, is hardly ever in fact the case.

When the series started, it occurred to me that we need innovation very badly indeed, and the good words sprayed around by a national magazine in the way that national magazines do when telling us what a great series they're going to run, when I skimmed them, looked like the series might address the innovation I thought we need.

The innovation I was thinking about was the innovation needed to deal with the too-high unemployment rate, the dead-end politics being pursued by too many in Congress, the undue influence of money in politics, and the renewal of the country's infrastructure. The crisis in the European Union, the slide of Russia back toward centuries-old attitudes that have kept Russia from reaching its potential, the religious extremism of Israel and Iran. Those lists are not exhaustive.

How do we think up new things, particularly in human relations, in the systems we use for governance, the repetitive behaviors and intransigences, the ignoring of the obvious? The same way we think up iPhones or new designs of milk-bottle caps? It may be, but there has been no attempt to consider this in the Atlantic. Almost certainly these problems will need the cooperative, incremental approach that Smil describes, not a hero swooping in with One Good Idea.

In fact, isn't that the model that the Republican candidates used far too many times in their debate on Saturday to look at foreign policy? Bomb Iran before it gets a nuclear weapon. Zero-base foreign aid. Back to torture. Oversimplified, independent of realities, each candidate a hero.

The easy road is the one the Atlantic has taken. Innovation good, get many clicks. A more thoughtful approach to the innovation we need probably wouldn't have had as many cool photos, as many search-engine-friendly words. Too bad.
_________________________________
* I make broad generalizations about the Atlantic series which may or may not be true. They are my impressions from skipping past most of the articles in my Google Reader. I don't have the stomach to go to the series and count up articles of various types.

Vyacheslav Danilenko, Nuclear Weapons Scientist?

2011-11-14T10:32:00.002-05:00

Juan Cole questions the accuracy of the IAEA report on Iran. “A key allegation in the IAEA report on Iranian nuclear activities has fallen apart,” he says. He bases this claim on an article by Gareth Porter, which supposedly shows that “Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Russian scientist referred to without being identified in the report, is not a nuclear weapons expert.” Instead, Cole says, “His field is nanotechnology (making tiny machines), and Iran has been looking into making diamonds with nanotechnology, bypassing the middle man.”

Cole’s concern is understandable, given the way the Iraq war was sold. A number of circumstances are different this time: the Obama administration is not explicitly looking for war as was the case with the Bush administration, and this report comes from an international body, the IAEA, rather than the American government. But let’s take the most suspicious viewpoint and insist that a serious error would open questions of competence and veracity.

Here’s what the IAEA report says about this scientist.

44. The Agency has strong indications that the development by Iran of the high explosives initiation system, and its development of the high speed diagnostic configuration used to monitor related experiments, were assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable in these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career with this technology in the nuclear weapon programme of the country of his origin. The Agency has reviewed publications by this foreign expert and has met with him. The Agency has been able to verify through three separate routes, including the expert himself, that this person was in Iran from about 1996 to about 2002, ostensibly to assist Iran in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra-dispersed diamonds (“UDDs” or “nanodiamonds”), where he also lectured on explosion physics and its applications.

The claim that “this foreign expert” is Vyacheslav Danilenko comes from Joby Warrick at the Washington Post:

According to the intelligence provided to the IAEA, key assistance in both areas was provided by Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet nuclear scientist who was contracted in the mid-1990s by Iran’s Physics Research Center, a facility linked to the country’s nuclear program. Documents provided to the U.N. officials showed that Danilenko offered assistance to the Iranians over at least five years, giving lectures and sharing research papers on developing and testing an explosives package that the Iranians apparently incorporated into their warhead design, according to two officials with access to the IAEA’s confidential files.

Danilenko’s role was judged to be so critical that IAEA investigators devoted considerable effort to obtaining his cooperation, the two officials said. The scientist acknowledged his role but said he thought his work was limited to assisting civilian engineering projects, the sources said.

There is no evidence that Russian government officials knew of Danilenko’s activities in Iran. ¬E-mails requesting comment from Russian officials in Washington and Moscow were not returned. Efforts to reach Danilenko through his former company were not successful.

Warrick cites the source for this information as David Albright, with confirmation by “two European diplomats privy to the IAEA’s internal reports.”

Porter finds a publication by Danilenko on the history of his involvement with nanodiamonds in a symposium volume, Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties and Applications, edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter M. Gruen, published in 2006, apparently this book. I have found another book, Synthesis, Properties And Applications of Ultrananocrystalline Diamond, by Dieter M. Gruen, Olga A. Shenderova, Alexander Ya Vul', to which Danilenko has contributed a chapter.

The operating assumption by all involved seems to be that Danilenko is the person referred to in paragraph 44 of the Annex to the IAEA report. There seems to be a certain amount of playing with words in the various articles on this subject, or perhaps misunderstanding in regard to the phrase “nuclear weapons scientist.” The IAEA gives a longer description of the person that does not include that phrase. In any case, the important question is whether Danilenko had nuclear information on (from the IAEA report) “the high explosives initiation system, and … the high speed diagnostic configuration used to monitor related experiments.”

From Danilenko’s article in the symposium volume, he was working at Snezhinsk in the 1960s. Snezhinsk, also known as Chelyabinsk-70, was one of the Soviet Union’s secret cities in its nuclear weapons complex. Anyone living and working there would have held high security clearances. Indeed, Danilenko points out in that article that his work on diamonds during that time was classified, as everything at Chelyabinsk-70 was. The weapons work probably still is, so an inability to find anything in that area by him is not an indication that he didn’t do such work.

The Soviet Union did not bring in researchers to the secret cities to conduct unclassified research. However, research that would have been unclassified elsewhere might have been carried out if it grew out of and contributed to the weapons research. That was likely the case for Danilenko’s diamond research.

Even if, by some odd chance, Soviet authorities thought it was a good idea to bring a group doing solely unclassified research into a secret city, Danilenko would have had all appropriate clearances and would have been aware of research on nuclear weapons detonation systems similar to his because he would have been working at the same experimental facilities.

The claim that because he was working on explosively-formed diamonds, he could not have been working on weapons is simply foolish. Scientists frequently work on more than one project simultaneously, particularly if those projects are closely related.

Danilenko is reported to have issued a denial, “I am not a nuclear scientist and I am not the founder of the Iranian nuclear program.” The quote is entirely in the present tense and says little about his past or the work he has done on detonation systems. Nobody has suggested that he is the founder of the Iranian nuclear program. So there’s not much to this denial.

Danilenko’s son-in-law has been quoted as saying that Danilenko helped the Iranians with another project mentioned in the IAEA report, a large detonation chamber. This would be consistent with work on diamonds or detonation systems. The detonation chamber reported by the IAEA at Parchin, an Iranian military base, seems to be much larger than would be needed for the manufacture of diamonds. Knowledge of detonation chambers would be consistent with nuclear weapons work as well. In any case, there is no way to tell from the information in the IAEA report what the chamber was to be used for.

What the IAEA report says about this “foreign expert” appears to be consistent with Danilenko’s history, and that history includes the opportunity to have learned about nuclear weapons detonation systems.

I should probably say something about the basis for my understanding of the Soviet secret cities. I’ve worked with an ISTC program and reviewed a number of proposals for them. The ISTC’s purpose was to provide alternative work for Soviet nuclear weapons scientists after the fall of the Soviet Union, to prevent their selling their expertise to other countries and aiding proliferation. I’ve also been discussing these issues with four other people who have experience with the Soviet system. We all have the same understanding of how that system worked. That’s been a friendly back-and-forth, so I don’t feel I can use their names.

I made the points in this post to Porter and his source “blogger Moon of Alabama” on a private listserv before Porter’s article was published.

Update: David Albright at ISIS has done more research into Danilenko's publications than Porter or I have and finds additional publications that could be weapons-related. What he has to say generally supports what I've said here, and he adds more detail.

More from Joby Warrick at the Washington Post.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Cattley Guava

2011-11-14T00:42:00.001-05:00

Photo by mmmavocado, Flickr

Bits and Pieces - November 13, 2011

2011-11-13T21:11:00.000-05:00

CBS did a poll on the topics covered in Saturday night's Republican debate before the debate. The country doesn't agree with the candidates.

Photos of a new volcanic island growing off El Hierro in the Canary Islands.

A really good review by Henry Kissinger of a new biography of George Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis.

Resources on Fukushima from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

How scientists react to popularizations of science - in this case, archaeologists.

Dennis Ross Stepping Down

2011-11-11T17:28:00.001-05:00

Dennis Ross has advised a number of presidential administrations on Middle East affairs. He is definitely of the neocon persuasion, and how to deal with Iran seems to have been mostly his baliwick.

Something I've been thinking of posting on has been my puzzlement over what seems to be an unnecessarily rigid aproach to a number of issues in the Middle East. This won't be that post, and I'll stick to Iran, since that's been so much in the news lately.

There has been little creativity from a president who, when he was campaigning, said he was willing to talk to Iran's president without preconditions. That hasn't happened, of course, and the precondition of Iran's ceasing to enrich its nuclear material remains.

It can be argued that that precondition is something that the United Nations insists on as well, although the way those United Nations resolutions were passed came from a United States, under the Bush administration, that wanted justification very badly for that precondition. Unfortunately, removing that precondition would now send a message of weakness to a stubborn and volatile Iranian government.

But I used the word creativity because the essence of diplomacy is finding ways around difficult situations like this.

It's highly likely that that sort of diplomacy went unpracticed because preconditions were just fine with Dennis Ross. As the articles I'll link at the end of this post note, his ideas are held more broadly in the administration, so it seems doubtful that much will change.

While Israel has been indulging in histrionics the past few weeks in preparation for the quarterly International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran, the US administration has been quiet and continues to be, now that the report has been issued.

Come to think of it, perhaps Ross's resignation in this quiet time signifies a disagreement with that quiet policy. It is a welcome change from some of the judgementalism that has been displayed in the past. And, now that the report is out, Israel seems to be quietening down too.

Iran is a difficult nation to deal with. It has its own internal splits and a complicated governing structure that makes those splits difficult to interpret. Its policy toward the United States has been hostile since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Apparent breakthroughs in the nuclear negotiations have fallen apart for unobvious reasons. So that leaves sanctions. China and Russia are unlikely to agree to UN-sponsored increases in sanctions, so the United States is considering unilateral sanctions and which other countries might be induced to join.

Sanctions are a frustrating means of dealing with another country. Their effect is long-term and the connection between sanctions and results is not obvious. But Paul Pillar argues persuasively that it was sanctions that caused South Africa and Libya to give up their nuclear programs.

So perhaps the sanctions, combined with negotiation when it is possible, will eventually result in a favorable outcome with Iran. That would be reducing the danger that now exists that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon; it would not necessarily mean the end of their enrichment program. That program might be internationalized as a production center for fuel for civilian reactors of many nations. A favorable outcome would also include Iran's making their information on their work on nuclear weapons related subjects available to the IAEA and allowing their inspectors greater freedom at its nuclear facilities.

On Dennis Ross: Michael Hirsh and Noam Sheizaf.

Bits and Pieces - November 9, 2011

2011-11-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

The Russian Mars spacecraft is stuck in earth orbit. They've got three days to get it unstuck.

Do you want to hear more about Herman Cain? Yet another baseless accusation. And Ta-Nehisi Coates has the last word.

The Sad Story of Central Asia's German Community May Be Ending.

And I've been writing about the IAEA report on Iran over at Nuclear Diner. A short summary of what it says about Iran's weapons activities, and some later thoughts, with links and a place to comment, if you wish.

Bits and Pieces - November 8, 2011

2011-11-08T11:31:00.001-05:00

Do the Republicans want America to be like Greece? Compare this with the denigration of government (alternative to government: anarchy) and recommendation of "individual action" via guns and such:

A few thousand years after Greeks invented Western civilization, the basic premise behind it has broken down: the Greek individual and the Greek state no longer work in concert. Over the past generation, Greece has been slowly devolving into a state of quiet anarchy.

OTOH, here's too much government in action.

Americans want more government in health care.

Mapping Twitter.

Honey you buy in stores may not be honey.

The promiscuous past of the human race.

Mas: A nice article on improving cities, but this observation

I find that successful advocacy and implementation is more about facilitating real and personal commitment in others than in proselytizing about the abstract, and for that, we need more accessible experiences.

has implications far beyond that topic.

At first, during my visit this summer, I thought that the Estonians preferred debit cards to credit cards, since they were punching numbers into machines rather than signing slips of paper. Then I realized that it was my credit card that was behind the times. Kevin Drum explains why.

Will the Penn State debacle end college football? Should it?

Great that the defense contractors are doing such a good job of keeping costs down.

Herman Cain Is Definitely a Business Executive

2011-11-06T00:21:00.001-04:00

He proved that nicely in his tantrum with the press tonight. When I saw it, all the memories of nasty bosses came back:

- No, don't even go there.

- Just listen for thirty seconds. (He did have presence of mind enough to realize he shouldn't say "Shut up.")

- We are getting back on message, end of story.

The video is really worth watching. The reporters' refusal to respond to the boss-is-mad messages really irritates him. So he lets go with one ineffective parting shot.

- Where’s my chief of staff? Please send him the journalistic code of ethics.

Getting a lackey to send the document that tells a reporter how he should act toward the boss, even when Cain isn't his boss, combines so many tropes of the corporate guy-in-charge that I think they're all bursting my brain.

I would not want to have worked for this man.

Baidaba

2011-11-04T12:05:00.002-04:00

Photo: Impicard, Flickr

Fission at Fukushima Reactor 2?

2011-11-02T15:36:00.001-04:00

The xenon isotopes that result from fission have short half-lives: 9.2 hours for Xe-135 and 5.2 days for Xe-133. So if they show up, as they have at Fukushima reactor 2, that means that fission has been taking place.

The Japan Times has a report that includes all the important information and puts it into perspective. The amount of both isotopes of xenon detected is one hundred thousandth of a becquerel per cubic centimeter in gas samples. That means that there is one becquerel - one count per second - in a hundred thousand cubic centimeters of gas, or in a hundred liters of gas, a small closetful.

When you add in that "there have been no drastic changes in the reactor's temperature and pressure" reported by Japan's nuclear safety agency, what this adds up to is that there probably is a pile of broken and melted fuel pieces at the bottom of the reactor vessel. Somehow, a very limited part of that pile got to criticality. Tepco has added boric acid to the water to absorb neutrons and prevent further chain reactions. But the criticality was very limited if it didn't make a difference in temperature or pressure.

I've seen a few fevered tweets and Facebook posts on this. There's an element of "I told you so" in some of them. I argued against the earlier reports of "re-criticality" and see no reason to change those opinions. Obviously there has been a small criticality at Reactor #2. But I thought that the reason people were worried about "re-criticality" had to do with the "China Syndrome" idea that the core would sustain its criticality to melt through the bottom of the reactor vessel and on to, um, Nebraska. That's not what's happening.

Update (November 3, 2011): More information has become available, and it appears that the xenon is coming from spontaneous fission of curium isotopes produced by normal reactor processes.

Cross-posted from Nuclear Diner.

Not To Defend Herman Cain, But...

2011-11-02T13:03:00.001-04:00

Kevin Drum excerpts the News Hour money quote that is making the blogospheric rounds

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you view China as a potential military threat to the United States?

HERMAN CAIN: I do view China as a potential military threat to the United States....They've indicated that they're trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

and I think makes the correct point: why didn't Woodruff follow this up?

I'm not sure whether this indicates that Cain doesn't know that China does indeed have nuclear weapons. "[T]rying to develop nuclear capability" could mean a lot of things: that they want to add to their stockpile or maybe that they are trying to develop nuclear-powered ships. Or it could mean that he doesn't know that China has been a nuclear weapons power since 1964, one of the five institutionalized in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and a nation with which America is holding talks on reducing nuclear weapons.

So I think there's a bit too much being made of this quote. It's been clear that Cain's strong suit is not foreign relations for some time. But it would have helped if Woodruff would have clarified.

The Over-the Hill Chemical Warfare Gang

2011-11-02T11:33:00.002-04:00

Four old guys in Georgia decided to strike a blow for the Constitution by blowing ricin (which they didn't have in a pure form) out their car to, I guess, sicken other drivers and residents in the area. There was something about explosives, too.

This is dumb on so many levels: the idea that an attack like this would lessen the role of the government (standard right-wing talking point) or the use of ricin, one of the less-promising chemical agents.

And it looks like these are white guys, so there's no hysteria in the major news outlets about it. Just our own home-grown right-wing terrorists. Nothing to see here.

Both Adam Serwer and Conor Friedersdorf are wondering how much the FBI egged these guys on at the Waffle House. And I'll wonder how many "domestic terror plots" have involved FBI encouragement and how many would have stayed over the coffee cups without.

Could we end the War on Terror now, please?

Update: Mmnh, yeah. It was a fed selling the gang explosives and such. How many guys are out there mumbling about the Constitution and keeping the race pure and bringing on sharia who go home and kiss their wives, play with the kids, and maybe kick the dog, nothing more than that? What difference does it make if a fed happens to be in the neighborhood?

Bits and Pieces - November 1, 2011

2011-11-01T14:30:00.001-04:00

A bunch of stuff relevant to OWS, not all explicitly so.

Richard Cohen joins the 99%.

Jim Sleeper is all over the map with this one, but he makes some good points if you have the patience to find them.

One year at Princeton University: $37,000. One year at a New Jersey state prison: $44,000. There are a lot of reasons for this, including that so many states have privatized their prison system. Was it really smart to develop a constituency that makes money from having people incarcerated?

You've probably seen those charts where you scroll and scroll and scroll to see how the Republican flat tax plans will benefit the 1%. More about that and links here. Did the candidates not think that someone would figure this out? What about the people who will vote for them?

The prime minister has suggested that the Greek people vote on whether they want more austerity shoved down their throats. The rest of the world is not pleased.

On to other things.

A good summary of what is known about the situation at Fukushima.

Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best

Added Later: George Washington on Constitutional originalism. (Hint: He probably wouldn't agree with Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas.)

Anatol Lieven: Maybe we should look at Pakistan as an enemy. In Afghanistan, anyway.

Quotes of the Day

2011-11-01T11:42:00.000-04:00

This

Congress will provide no relief from the immediate term threat of unemployment, income loss, or foreclosure.

reminded me of this

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I see Yeats's "Second Coming" quoted every other day, but there's a lot to be said for Arnold's "Dover Beach" as a commentary on today's situation as well.

Medicaid is What's Squeezing College Tuition

2011-10-31T14:54:00.001-04:00

So says Sarah Kliff.

Of course, as state tax revenues go down, choices will have to be made on what to fund. It appears that federal requirements on Medicaid make it necessary for states to choose to fund Medicaid if they want to keep the program going, and education budgets have less of this sort of incentive, so they get cut first.

But why is it a choice between supporting medical care for the poorest people and supporting affordable higher education? Because tax revenues are not sufficient to maintain states with liberty for all. And that's because of the obsession with no taxes on the part of all too many who can well afford to pay their share of keeping things going.

The Science Establishment Strikes Back

2011-10-31T10:01:00.000-04:00

I still read the dead-tree version of some magazines. I like to have to page through a variety of things and consciously make the decision not to read stuff that I frequently wind up reading anyway.

Scientific American is one of those dead-tree favorites. This month, they have a couple of quotes in a series they call "Suspect Science." One is Michelle Bachmann's concern trolling about the papillomavirus vaccine and the other is Rick Perry's quote about evolution being "a scientific theory that's not settled yet."

Both are identified as Republican candidates for the presidential nomination.

Chemical and Engineering News, the newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, has an article titled "Alleged Science Manipulation" in its October 24 issue. Right in the first paragraph:

Some Republicans in the House of Representatives are now saying that EPA may be manipulating scientific assessments of the hazards of chemicals to sway pollution regulations.

The article is pretty much straight reporting, but it makes clear that the hearing being reported on is based on Republican concerns.

I don't recall seeing such explicit identification of party in these publications with reference to scientific issues before. Both have editorial columns that strongly support science-based issues like evolution and anthropogenic global warming; Scientific American's letters column is small and tends toward scientific issues. The letters column in C&E News allows longer and more letters which frequently take issue with AGW in particular.

It will be interesting to see the reactions. Probably some at their websites; I'll report if I check them out.

Bits and Pieces - October 29, 2011

2011-10-30T00:06:00.001-04:00

Evidently some New York City Police see themselves as part of a 1%. (via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Crooked Timber)

The Daily Show and a Minnesota Republican on the Republican war on science.

Why the Republicans like Herman Cain.

The United States spends on health care alone what the 65 million people in France spend on everything.

Advice to OWS from Iran's Green Movement.

Bits and Pieces - October 27, 2011

2011-10-27T15:32:00.000-04:00

More on the Occupy Movement.

Glenn Greenwald

Some thoughts on social justice.

The police attack on Occupy Oakland. And some police departments have been asking YouTube to take down those nasty videos that show police brutality, but Google has politely declined. The times, they are a'changing.

Dahlia Lithwick on why the pundit class doesn't get it.

Changing the subject slightly, is this the kind of person that we want advising our president on foreign policy?

Good news: Jack the cat, who was lost for two months in the American Airlines baggage spaces at Kennedy Airport in New York, has been found.

And a good idea: build community health clinics.

Always Russia

2011-10-26T18:52:00.000-04:00

I've been reading a lot of Russian history lately, and there were two articles today that fell right in line with some of the recurring themes of that history.

Russia might not be pleased for the United States to leave Afghanistan. It's hard for us Americans to understand just how difficult it is to maintain a large country that has boundaries with not-necessarily-friendly countries around it. So if America is willing to distract the troublemakers in one of them, so much the better for the Russians.

That continental geography has been an enormous influence in Russian history and thinking. The Russians set out in the nineteenth century to bring the natives to the east under control, as did the Americans to the west. But the Russian spaces are much more immense and climatically unforgiving. It's the kind of thing that seems logical to secure the borders but turns out to have its own kind of revenge. On the south, Russia has a bunch of people, many of them Muslim, who don't want to be part of the empire. To the east, they have cold lands that are mostly good for pumping oil and harvesting lumber when you can avoid being mired in the mud.

But that immense stretch of geography, with its natural resources, is the basis for a strong country if those pluses can overcome the drain of building infrastructure, dealing with the locals, and defending against invasions. Russia, as the Soviet Union, became a great power in the last half of the twentieth century via a heavy military buildup, including nuclear weapons. Russia has always wanted recognition of its resources and, all too often, potential capabilities, and never quite received that recognition the way it wanted.

So one might think that John Boehner is an astute student of history in wanting to use that recognition as a lever with Russia. But I suspect that his inclination is more a reflexively Cold War thing, or just that feeling that so many conservatives seem to have that bestowal of recognition is a boon that America grants only to the deserving, and we decide who's deserving. Just as stereotyped and counterproductive as that Russian longing for proper recognition.

One Reason College Tuition Is So High

2011-10-26T16:13:00.000-04:00

Today's good news on the unilateral presidential action front is that paying back college loans will be less onerous. It's all over the blogosphere, but here are (rather similar) selections from Kevin Drum and Brad Plumer.

In those two links, they're talking about the decrease in wages of college-educated people making paying off those loans more difficult. That's true, and there's plenty that can be said about why those wages are decreasing, although still better than those of the non-college-degreed.

But I would like to point out one factor that I haven't seen said nearly enough, or hardly at all. Because of "tax revolts," starting with California's Proposition 13 in 1978, the taxes that support state endeavors have been going down. One of those endeavors used to be higher education, in the form of state university systems. Back before Prop 13, people had the quaint idea that making education easily available to all was a general good that helped society by lowering the crime rate and upping the innovation and business-hiring rate and stuff like that. But that idea has been superseded by the much more logical notion that my money is mine, and it's not going to support someone else's kids. So let those universities filled with slackers run as profit-making institutions!

So, as tax support is taken away, tuition at state institutions of higher learning has been approaching that of private institutions. And the students need loans to get themselves through. It might also be noted that the banksters were making a bunch of gummint-supported money off that fact until recently. I guess that was more of a societal good than broadly available education.

Bits and Pieces - October 26, 2011

2011-10-26T13:39:00.003-04:00

Ian Fraser: The dukes and earls in America’s Great Tower of Bulls**t are starting to blink a little.

Matt Taibbi: OWS's Beef: Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating.

The phone that Murdoch's News of the World used for hacking has been found, with call records.

A critique of the Libyan intervention and Responsibility to Protect, from Eric Posner. I've been concerned about some of the arguments going around in favor of Responsibility to Protect, but haven't had enough time to work them up into respectable blog posts. Posner lays out some of my concerns, although I don't agree with everything he says. I'll also note that it looks to me like different advocates of R2P are saying different things, and opponents respond to some points from some advocates, so the arguments tend to run all over the map. While I may not agree with all of Posner's views, I think that the ground he's arguing on is the one that will ultimately yield the most usable insights.

Steve Clemons would like to know how to spell, in English, the name of that Libyan dictator. So would I.

Added Later: Stephen Walt, as usual, has some very sensible things to say about America's place in the world. It's not all as pessimistic as the title. Read to the end.

Where are all the big players in the financial meltdown? Not in jail.

Bits and Pieces - October 25, 2011

2011-10-25T15:22:00.000-04:00

I didn't know they still make Necco Wafers. The article is right - the flavors were bizarre, but their shape and consistency were fun.

Here's an explanation of complexity in social systems. A lot of what it says describes "complex systems" more generally. Unfortunately, it's at a fairly high comprehension level, so most of the people who blather on about complex systems and emergent properties will continue to do so without having any idea what they're talking about.

I've completed a longish series of five posts (first one here, with links to the rest) over at Nuclear Diner on Representative Ed Markey's (D-MA) suggestion that the Super Committee remove $200 billion from the nuclear weapons budget over the next ten years. First I try to figure out some of the numbers and more or less conclude that everyone has their own set, and then I work through some of the politics. Bottom line: it probably won't happen, and it could wind up removing funds from programs Markey and his supporters like.

OTOH, Stan Collender thinks there's a good chance the Super Committee won't agree on anything and that it won't matter. And Sarah Kliff has a chart.

2011-10-24T16:33:00.000-04:00

Frederick Kagan thinks Obama's withdrawal from Iraq constitutes "abandoning" Iraq. Matt Duss calls him out:
Interestingly, Kagan doesn’t mention that this "retreat" is being done in accordance with an agreement that the previous administration signed with the Iraqi government. Even more interestingly, when that agreement was signed, Fred Kagan himself hailed it as a great U.S. success.

Again, why does anyone continue to listen to these people? It really just boggles my mind. (via)

VIPR: Coming Soon To a Highway Near You

2011-10-24T11:46:00.001-04:00

The TSA decided they didn't have enough to do at airports, so now they are going to make our highways safe from the terrists!

Conor Friedersdorf
James Fallows

It's hard to believe how much autonomy this agency was given in its enabling legislation. Or is it just grabbing for power?

And who thought that VIPR was a good name to sell the public on random searches of their cars at highway stops?

Should I ask about how the Fourth Amendment, the one on the United States Constitution, fits into this? Probably not.

Update: You may have suspected that the TSA screeners get off on searching through your smelly underwear. Here's confirmation.

Ol' Tommy Waits and a Musical Bucket o' Nothin'

2011-10-22T20:39:00.000-04:00

Given the insistently improvised and homemade texture of his music, it is tempting to think Waits spends a good deal of his time out here in the sticks tinkering with farm machinery in his yard or fixing his truck. One inspiration for his music is Harry Partch, an American pioneer of the 40s and 50s, who not only invented his own instruments but created his own notation too. Waits's music still allows the possibility of "hitting a cabinet hard with a two by four" just for the hell of it. He distrusts digitalisation.
"Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting," he says. "The idea that it will just be a sort of vapour that you listen to out of speakers the size of a dime alarms me. It's like injecting yourself. Or eating alone."He is, he says, equally wary of the ease of search and shuffle.
"They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone." [The Guardian]

Sumatran Etlingera

2011-10-22T02:35:00.003-04:00

Photo: CurupKami, Flickr

Young Robin

2011-10-21T10:52:00.000-04:00

Bits and Pieces - We Know Better Edition

2011-10-21T10:16:00.000-04:00

Blogging, and punditry in general, is usually conducted in pleasant surroundings, hence the plethora of jokes about finding something funny and ruining one's keyboard by spitting out coffee as one laughs.

So we have today a plethora (nice pundit word, no?) of commentary on what looks like the summary execution of Muammar al-Qaddafi (plethora of commentary about spelling of name deleted). Hey, I have to obey the traffic light at the bottom of the hill, don't I? Rule of law! Blake Hounshell provides another view. No it's not a good thing that it happened this way, but how much does that really matter? As James Lindsay points out, it's still tough going for Libya until it has a stable government.

Physicists are the concern trolls (yes, another word for pundit!) of the scientific world. Nobody can do anything quite as well as they can. All other science derives from physics, it is true in a rather limited way. But, because many approximations lie between the mathematics of physics and dealing with real chemicals in a test tube, never mind animal physiology or the global circulation system, a physicist cannot simply, overnight, master one of those other sciences. Far too many physicists don't notice this detail.

One of them, Richard Mueller, was convinced that he knew better than those silly climate scientists with their complicated computer models based on too many assumptions. So he decided to rederive climate science. He recently announced his results: the silly climate scientists had it right. This is a great disappointment to the claque of know-nothings who hitched their wagons to his physics star. But I'm sure they'll be able to find someone else to support their denial. I guess we can give Mueller credit for being enough of a scientist to admit he was wrong.

In a somewhat related development, woman finds math relatively easy.

Also, hats are being tipped across the blogosphere to the New York Times and Washington Post who finally figured out that something called politics is being manipulated in the United States Senate by a group called the Republicans.

Another of my own personal punditical I-told-you-so's on community organizing. Of course it's lead from behind!

Crabby Friday, I know. I'll see if I can find a nice photo for later, or perhaps Helmut has some fruit.

Bits and Pieces - October 19, 2011

2011-10-19T18:24:00.001-04:00

Today is the 230th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown, the battle that assured American victory in the Revolution.

Iran is claiming that one of the principals in the convoluted plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States via a Mexican drug ring is a member of the MEK, an Iranian organization that opposes the government but has some aspects of a cult as well. The MEK has been a favorite of neoconservatives. Juan Cole on what this might mean. More, and a warning that this may not be any more accurate than any other explanation of this plot.

Most Americans support Occupy Wall Street.

For those who want to pick nits, why OWS is not generally anti-corporate, just anti the financial industry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is considering the intertwining and conflict between the anti-slavery and women's rights movements. I really like the way he is thinking this out for all of us to see. This is the second post in that series.

XKCD solves a mystery.

Bits and Pieces - October 18, 2011

2011-10-18T18:11:00.000-04:00

Conor Friedorsdorf calls out Rush Limbaugh and his enablers.

Global malaria deaths go down as R&D funding goes up.

Walter Pincus: United States needs to reevaluate its assistance to Israel

Sanctions 'successfully hindering' Iran's nuclear progress

India may be increasing its uranium enrichment capacity.

Something positive: I really like Dan Pink videos. Here's one on Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose as being more important motivators than money.

Quote of the Day

2011-10-17T18:45:00.000-04:00

And so at this moment, when our politics appear so sharply polarized, and faith in our institutions so greatly diminished, we need more than ever to take heed of Dr. King’s teachings. He calls on us to stand in the other person’s shoes; to see through their eyes; to understand their pain. He tells us that we have a duty to fight against poverty, even if we are well off; to care about the child in the decrepit school even if our own children are doing fine; to show compassion toward the immigrant family, with the knowledge that most of us are only a few generations removed from similar hardships.

From President Barack Obama's remarks at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial. Read the whole thing; it's a really good speech, reminding us of how change takes place.

I was wondering why we didn't hear more of it from the media, and then I read this.

Bits and Pieces - More Occupy Edition

2011-10-17T14:56:00.002-04:00

Canadian central banker endorses Occupy Wall Street.

The view from Estonia.

Occupy Wall Street's Top Priority Should Be to Kill the Bush Tax Cuts.

Occupy Philosophy.

Corporations have no core dedication to fundamental human values.

Political disobedience.

h/t to Crooked Timber, from where some of the above links have come.

More lies from Andrew Breitbart.

Mas:
Goldman Sachs supports the 99%.

Krugman on the kvetchocracy.

We are the 1%. We Stand with the 99%.

El Silbato de Perro

2011-10-16T19:40:00.000-04:00

At two campaign rallies in Tennessee on Saturday night, the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said that part of his immigration policy would be to build an electrified fence on the country’s border with Mexico that could kill people trying to enter the country illegally.

But by Sunday morning, in a dramatic change of tone, Mr. Cain, a former restaurant executive, said he was only kidding.“That’s a joke,” Mr. Cain told the journalist David Gregory during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he was asked about the electrified fence.

"That’s not a serious plan. I’ve also said America needs to get a sense of humor.” (NYT)

I wonder.... When Republicans hang out together during down time, do they crack lots of "jokes" about various ways to kill people, particularly the poor and downtrodden? It sure seems to be a popular way for Republicans to publicly express their sense of humor.

Note that, with Cain, the usual dog whistles are now mostly translated into Spanish.

Finland to host 2012 conference on WMD free zone in Middle East

2011-10-16T10:41:00.000-04:00

This is a really important development. A few weeks back, concern was being expressed about the difficulty of selecting a venue and facilitator for a promised 2012 conference on a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. Now Finland has been chosen as the host, and their Under-Secretary of State Jaakko Laajava will be facilitator.

For many years, the idea of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East has been raised in the United Nations by the Arab states in such a way as to use it as a stick to beat Israel with. But in 2010, the United States and Britain backed an initiative for a WMD-free zone. One of the differences from the earlier version is that some of the Middle East states, like Syria, are believed to have chemical weapons programs. A conference was scheduled for 2012.

Cross-posted from Nuclear Diner.

Simply getting the parties to agree on a venue and facilitator is one more step forward. The events referred to as "Arab Spring" have complicated the planning. Egypt, which is far from having a stable government that responds to the concerns of the protesters, has traditionally been an advocate for such a conference.

Laajava says the timeframe is "broadly 2012," which may have to do with the unrest and changes of governments in the Arab world.

This conference won't come up with a definitive proposal for a Middle East WMD-Free Zone. The best it is likely to do is to agree on some procedural issues and perhaps a statement of goals or general principles and that there will be another conference. But that is more than has been achieved before.

Bits and Pieces - October 14, 2011

2011-10-14T13:11:00.000-04:00

Mostly Occupy stuff, but scroll to the bottom for stuff about spies and the sins of the Murdoch empire.

One of the 1% says Occupy has it right.

Superheroes and other comic characters as the 1%.

From the world media.

Looks like Mayor Bloomberg backed off from a confrontation.

Juan Cole provides some numbers.

There's a lot in this piece that reminds me of the sixties. I've been feeling really happy to see young people getting out and doing this.

Long interview with the son of William Colby, master spy.

And it appears that Paul Krugman is the only person commenting on the latest Murdoch wrongdoing, which I noted the other day.

Bits and Pieces - Occupy Edition

2011-10-13T14:49:00.001-04:00

From the Atlantic: #OWS: What the Media Can't See About America's First Web-Era Movement

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters

After a TNR editorial panning the movement, John Judis and Jonathan Cohn come out in support.

Ezra Klein and co-workers have been positive all along, and Suzy Khimm now reports that the movement is spreading to London.

I've stolen the Oliphant cartoon from Balloon Juice, who probably stole it from Oliphant himself. Never mind, there's no doubt who penned it. BJ is also covering the movement.

A big pile of charts on why the protesters are angry, from Henry Blodget.

And I know that the issues are mostly economic, but I can't help but think that the aura of not-so-competent law enforcement that nevertheless (or because of?) insists on maximum power contributes to the uneasiness. Think TSA, and, yeah, this starts to overlap with that alleged Iranian plot, or at least the way the Department of Justice rolled it out, or strip searches for traffic tickets. It was humiliation that caused Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi to set himself on fire.

Update (already): OWS is now twice as popular as the Tea Party. There's been a spate of articles this week looking at the similarities between the two. It occurred to me this morning that the big difference is the hate promulgated by the Tea Party and the much more positive affect of OWS. Most people aren't haters.

More (Sort Of) on that Iranian Plot (Sort Of)

2011-10-13T09:41:00.002-04:00

I'm not following this story closely, meaning that I am spending no time at all trying to figure out who said what to whom when or the various degrees of plausibility of the various claims. But I am following some people who are doing that, and I have drawn the conclusion that there is a boatload of stupid in this case, possibly shared by all sides.

That is not to say that I don't believe that the Iranian government would do something so stupid as to engage a struggling used-car dealer to contact the Mexican Zeta gang or that I don't believe that the FBI would get taken by a probably-not-reformed-at-all drug runner. That's where the boatload of stupid comes in. Or boatloads. Recall the plot to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars.

In any case, someone tweeted last night to the effect that presumably the government is smart enough to see how improbable the plot is and therefore checked things out fully. The tweet was actually pithier than that.

So here are a couple more commentaries from Juan Cole and Jeffrey Toobin, without any more comment from me than the above.

Update: Lots of linkies here.

And we have to award at least two points for stupid to the government:

Steven Walt says something I've been thinking in connection with that tweet I reported above:

So my advice to Holder & Co. is this: you better show us what you've got, and it had better be good.

If they recognized how absurd this plot sounds and they have really solid evidence, they should have made more of it public in their first announcement.

And, um, FBI, no kidding?

When residents looked for available Wi-Fi networks, names like “FBI Van 1” would pop up.

Bits and Pieces - October 12, 2011

2011-10-12T14:25:00.002-04:00

Today is National Fossil Day!

So let's celebrate trilobozoans!

Making Money the Old Fashioned Way, By Cooking the Books

Gregory Djerejian: This Ain't No Tea Party: A Conservative Defense of Occupy Wall Street

Update: Another scam from the Murdoch empire, this time the Wall Street Journal. They were buying their own papers through an intermediary to boost circulation.

That Iranian Plot (Or Something)

2011-10-12T12:17:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the arrest of two men for intending to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the United States was announced. The plot, going through Mexican druglords, sounds improbable. But countries and people do dumb things, so that's not a reason to reject it.

Not much information has been released so far. It's not at all clear, for example, how involved the Iranian government might have been, the possibilities ranging all the way from a rogue drug operation to direction by the Supreme Leader or President Ahmadinejad.

It could also be entrapment by US drug or other agents, a plot cooked up by another group (national or not) to embarrass somebody, or totally made up by the guy who got caught. We won't know until we have answers to these questions, at least.

So it's extremely premature to claim that this has anything at all to do with Iran's nuclear weapons, since we don't know how involved the Iranian government was involved in any of this. But that hasn't stopped at least three commentators (here, here, here) from going there. (I know, the reference to Iran's developing an EMP capability should disqualify it too.)

A question that I haven't seen anywhere is why this came up now. There have been some slightly placatory noises coming out of Iran about its nuclear program, and before other negotiations there have been accusations of Iran on various grounds. Iran also has an election coming up.

It could be that it was just a matter of how things happened. But the FBI and other agencies have made arrests before at times that seemed like they could have been intended to influence negotiations, as with Gennadi Zakharov before Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in 1986.

Again, is it a coincidence of timing or an attempt to look strong before a negotiation? And, if the latter, how far up does that intention go?

Update: A caution from Reza Marashi and Trita Parsi.

Bits and Pieces - October 11, 2011

2011-10-11T14:29:00.000-04:00

America: Don't Be Cruel

How Debt Deleveraging Killed the Economy. Long and something of a primer on how easy it can be for the economy to fall into a downward spiral.

Report from Zucotti Park by Jeff Madrick.

Why does Newt Gingrich hate the Constitution?

Russia's Worsening Demographic Crisis

The unsayable beginning to be said: Disarmament talks in the Middle East must include Israel's arsenal.

Nuclear Diner Now Open

2011-10-11T10:52:00.000-04:00

A couple of friends and I wanted to make an internet place where people could discuss nuclear issues.

The problem we see with current discussions of nuclear issues is that they are often among the convinced of one thing or another, and that they are often within expert communities. Both have made for a restricted vision of what is possible and how the many problems associated with both nuclear power and nuclear weapons might be solved.

So we hope to open up the discussion at Nuclear Diner. The site contains a number of ways to express your opinion or participate in a discussion. We want both non-experts and experts to contribute. You can read everything at the site except personal profiles without registering, but you need to register to comment.

I will continue to post my political and philosophical ideas here, but most of my nuclear maunderings will be found at Nuclear Diner. I'll occasionally cross-post if I think I've written something particularly good. Right now, I'm liveblogging the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik. It's exciting. Check it out.

The Reykjavik Summit

2011-10-11T10:49:00.000-04:00

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the meeting between US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union's General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two came close to agreeing to eliminate all their nuclear weapons by the year 2000.

Here are Gorbachev's thoughts on that anniversary.

His letter to Reagan suggesting the meeting.

Commentary from Richard Rhodes and Michael Krepon.

Malay Apple

2011-10-10T00:52:00.001-04:00

Photo: pudin2008, Flickr

Bits and Pieces - October 9, 2011

2011-10-09T11:51:00.001-04:00

The Obama administration tells us, indirectly, what its legal basis was for killing American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. And what happens when everyone has drones?

The other article everyone's linking to today: Ezra Klein on what President Obama might have done about the finanacial crisis. Bottom line: not much more than what he did. Politics and a frightened electorate are real. His colleague at the WaPo, Steven Perlstein, provides a complementary piece that extends the argument to the Occupy movement. Read 'em both!

The New York Times editorial board, after a bunch of really negative reportorial content, comes around on the Occupy movement.

An attempt is being made to lessen the marketing of unhealthy foods to children.

This week will mark twenty-five years since President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev almost agreed on eliminating nuclear weapons by the year 2000 in Reykjavik, Iceland. You will be hearing a lot more about it, from organizations and from me. Stay tuned.

Update: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and Professor Derrick Bell also died this week.

Bits and Pieces - October 6, 2011

2011-10-06T15:26:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman comes around on the Occupy movement, and Charles Pierce gives some impressions.

Hard cases make bad law, and, unfortunately, the extremists are driving toward hard cases.

Thirteen ways the Republicans are wrong, from a Republican. There probably are more. Ezra Klein gives you the opportunity to suggest questions for the Republican presidential candidates.

I'm a great Matrix fan, but I don't have time to check this out just now.

It's sad that Steve Jobs has died. He greatly influenced this machine I'm typing on now and many other things. But I tend to agree with Kevin Drum that much of what he did was self-limiting by design. I'm not an Apple person, and it seems to me that where I went off the rails and why I stayed off is consistent with what Kevin says. I walked into an Apple store a few months ago, found everything quite opaque to my intuition and walked out. Plus I never could make my iPod work right. That might be me, but it also suggests some limitations in the Apple approach.

Keeping the Homeland Secure

2011-10-05T12:31:00.000-04:00

An interesting mix of directions in homeland security.

There's a blog called Homeland Security Watch. It's been about what you might expect, but I track it to see if there are any interesting (or frightening) trends. Over the last week, the bloggers there seem to be developing some sympathy for Occupy Wall Street.

More than a few commentators have begun to suggest in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the Arab Spring could be followed by an American Fall. As homeland security professionals, we might rightly ask ourselves what this means for us. Which side are we on? Do we stand with the state or the citizens?

I don’t know about any of you, but I’m not eager to play the part of the Egyptian Army if Zuccotti Park becomes the new Tahrir Square.

After the out-of-control cop sprayed kettled protesters with pepper spray, I saw something about 100 NYPD officers refusing to act against the protesters. Haven't seen any followup.

More from Homeland Security Watch, not clear if this is sympathetic:

Let’s see, Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Israel, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Western Sahara.

Unemployed people with cell phones, twitter accounts, facebook pages, youtube feeds.

Now there’s a 21st century risk.

I wonder if it is included in the Strategic National Risk Assessment.

The folks over there also seem to have found a paper bag to breathe into on nuclear terrorism. Or perhaps it's Thomas Schelling's credentials that convinced them.

Unfortunately, as that one group of voices seems to be settling back from terrorist-induced panic after only ten years, the Department of Homeland Security seems to be working toward bigger and better things: a full-up security zone all along the Canadian border; making sure that private pilots aren't hiding anything in their flight plans; and the usual TSA assaulting of people who want to fly while prosthetized.

Bits and Pieces - October 4, 2011

2011-10-04T16:56:00.000-04:00

A long article from Michael Hirsh on why Europe's crisis is about much more than finance.

The Department of Homeland Security wants an enhanced security zone along the Canadian border. That includes those naked x-ray machines for everyone crossing the border.

Ezra Klein explains why he's covering Occupy Wall Street.

Suzy Khimm and Andrew Ross Sorkin on what the protesters want.

And a couple more reasons for demonstrating:
Corporations make big bucks by cutting hygiene corners. Maybe we need more effective regulation, which would cost money that just might come from taxing the hyper-wealthy.

The political influence of the hyper-wealthy that is allowing global warming to continue, in a chart.

Bits and Pieces - October 3, 2011

2011-10-03T14:38:00.003-04:00

Ezra Klein and his fellow bloggers are taking note of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Here are some links, an interview with one of initial organizers, and news that other organizations are joining in. Mas. Y mas. You get the idea - follow Ezra's blog on this. Photos from the arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Koch Industries heart Iran. More about the Koch brothers and their empire.

Herman Cain Is No Booker T. Washington. I'm glad to see something good about Booker T. Washington. My aunt gave me a book about him when I was maybe seven, and I was very impressed with his accomplishments. There was something in the book about his religion, too, which I think was more the point that my aunt was trying to make.

Clean Energy Cons: Dozens of Republicans Asked for Clean Energy Grants and Subsidized Loans Before Attacking Them.

Ain't Gonna Study War No More

2011-10-03T12:04:00.002-04:00

I have long been of the opinion that the world is becoming less violent. Now some others are joining me.

Steven Pinker has a book coming out on the subject, that I intend to read. Doug Saunders adds some of his thoughts.

Joshua Goldstein has a piece in Foreign Policy pulling together some of the arguments.

I've been reading a lot of history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century lately, the period just before and during the first World War. The system of European monarchy at that time was brutal to the subjects and nonchalant about war. A little squabble with the cousins that just happened to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Daily life was much more brutal: evident poverty, the exploitation of workers, including children, maltreatment of horses in the street. We now find such things unacceptable. Or most of us, those not in the Tea Party or pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars a year, find such things unacceptable.

That's been one of my sources of feeling that the world is becoming less violent. Another is that the potentially world-destroying rivalry between the United States and Russia has ended. There are some on both sides who would like to stoke it up again, but they've been unsuccessful for twenty years now.

There are still wars in progress. Although we're going to have to sort out the legality of drone strikes, they kill a lot fewer people than previous methods of war. There is a horrendous war in the Congo that Americans and Europeans hardly hear about.

We need to become more conscious of this movement away from war, so that we can look at the wars we've still got, the wars that might happen, and why some people still are content with daily brutality and national violence, to see how we can change all that.

Quote of the Day

2011-10-02T23:52:00.000-04:00

J.L. Austin asked, “Where and what exactly is the surface of a cat?”

Papayas - Guatemala

2011-09-28T22:58:00.003-04:00

Photo: Les Yeux Heureux, Flickr