Mitigating Militantly Mindless Militarism

If you can wade past all the hysteria out there in the media and internets, Cheryl Rofer talks sense on the whole ridiculous Wesley Clark affair and her brief remarks are basically all you need to read:

When I heard Wesley Clark say, on Sunday, that while John McCain's behavior as a prisoner of war was honorable, it wasn't a job qualification for the presidency, I breathed a sigh of relief that at last someone was calling the McCain campaign, and possibly even more so, the media, on the unthinking conflation of things military with things civilian.

McCain's POW experience speaks to a particular kind of military discipline and honor. Those qualities have some relevance to the character traits we want in a president. But too often, McCain's POW experience seems to stand in for experience in foreign affairs, military command, and numerous other intellectual/managerial qualities we want in a president. I thought that Clark made the distinction nicely, and that it was a distinction that needed saying...

The problem with a lifetime of honorable service in the military, intensified by experience as a POW, is that it can produce a mindset that elevates that military. McCain's membership in today's Republican party and everything he has said so far on the Iraq war suggest that he shares this mindset, part of the militarization of our society.

So I'm joining others in the blogosphere in saying that Wesley Clark said nothing wrong. In fact, what he said could be a beginning of disentangling American security from mindless militarism.

Eulogy to Saffron

One of my newly favorite-est writers on the internet is Elatia Harris, who writes at our friends' place, 3 Quarks Daily. I previously linked to her fine essay on Japanese art. Now, Monday's essay continues a series she's been doing intermittently on her love for saffron. Elatia writes beautiful eulogies without a hint of the pomposity sometimes accompanying the form. These are subtle, lovely essays in praise of the intricacies of fine substances and objects often at the margins of our lives.

A Really Really Bad Presidency

My desultory blogging habits can't keep me away from the link of the day which is making the blog-arounds. It is Andrew Bacevich's piece counting some of the ways in which the Bush presidency has been really really bad. Let's enumerate:

The administration's many failures, especially those related to Iraq, mask a considerable legacy. Among other things, the Bush team has accomplished the following:

Defined the contemporary era as an "age of terror" with an open-ended "global war" as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;

Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;

Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;

Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, "defense is not a budget item";

Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;

Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising "global leadership";

Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.

By almost any measure, this constitutes a record of substantial, if almost entirely malignant, achievement.

No kidding. If I hadn't been making such lists for the past seven years, I'd pitch in. Now, I'm just tired. There's so much work to do over the next few decades to clean up the god-awful mess that it's best to conserve energy for now.

There's more from Brad Reed at Alternet.

Development as Dumb

There's some buzz about the new Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development (or Spence Report) replacing the age-old "Washington Consensus." The report, however, prompts a no-duh kind of response. Dani Rodrik summarizes the report's general view:

...The traditional policy framework, which the new thinking is gradually replacing, is presumptive rather than diagnostic.

It starts with strong preconceptions about the nature of the problem: too much (or too little) government regulation, too poor governance, too little public spending on health and education, and so on. Moreover, its recommendations take the form of the proverbial “laundry list” of reforms, and emphasize their complementary nature – the imperative to undertake them all simultaneously – rather than their sequencing and prioritization. And it is biased toward universal recipes – “model” institutional arrangements, “best practices,” rules of thumb, and so forth.

By contrast, the new policy mindset starts with relative agnosticism about what works. Its hypothesis is that there is a great deal of “slack” in poor countries, so simple changes can make a big difference. As a result, it is explicitly diagnostic and focuses on the most significant economic bottlenecks and constraints. Rather than comprehensive reform, it emphasizes policy experimentation and relatively narrowly targeted initiatives in order to discover local solutions, and it calls for monitoring and evaluation in order to learn which experiments work.

The new approach is suspicious of universal remedies. Instead, it searches for policy innovations that provide a shortcut around local economic or political complications.

But much of the most intelligent thinking in development work came to such conclusions a couple of decades ago by challenging the very notion of "development." The development industry - a monopoly of monstrous international agencies, elites on massive salaries, and smaller firms doing whatever it takes for money-flow - is fundamentally conservative intellectually. The best work has almost always come from the margins once again - at time from within places like the World Bank, but most often from without - making small dents here and there in the industry. But now it appears that the industry itself is shifting its general perspective. William Easterly responds pretty much how I would,

...the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

This conclusion is fleshed out with statements such as: “It is hard to know how the economy will respond to a policy, and the right answer in the present moment may not apply in the future.” Growth should be directed by markets, except when it should be directed by governments.

My students at New York University would have been happy to supply statements like these to the World Bank for a lot less than $4m.

Why should we care about the debacle of a World Bank report? Because this report represents the final collapse of the “development expert” paradigm that has governed the west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy. If there was something for “development experts” to say about attaining high growth, this talented group would have said it.

What went wrong? Experts help as long as there are useful general principles, such as could be established by comparing low-growth and high-growth countries. The Growth Commission correctly pointed out that such an attempt to find secrets to growth has failed. The Growth Commission concluded that “answers” had to be country specific and even period specific. But if each moment in each country is unique, then experts cannot learn from any other experience – so on what basis do they become an “expert”?

That's partially because "growth" is now and always has been the wrong marker for the good life. It's a dumb, meaningless marker.

Peruvian Apple Cactus

First-Class Passengers of the Anthropocene

Another essay you must read is Mike Davis' piece in TomDispatch, "Living on the Ice Shelf." We've mentioned this before too, but the problem of climate change is not simply the hydrometeorological phenomena themselves. It is the coming problem of intensifying inequalities in terms of the distribution of responsibility and of effects. Davis is spot on:

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.

This isn't some hysterical prediction. It already exists as the big secret of climate change, while the public, benighted by its own ignorance and by intentional sideshows designed to maintain that ignorance, debates whether climate change actually exists. Now, it's going to be a matter of degrees with little real hope of "development" for poor countries, only a few bread crumbs at the margins. Again, the problem isn't one of the existence of the hydrometeorological phenomena that constitute climate change. The real problem - and it is profound, worthy of its own geohistorical designation - is political and moral. But, for now, only a handful of people even care to view it as such.

A New Black Narrative

Here's Charles Johnson's essay, in the American Prospect, on the dawn of a new black narrative in the US. It's a provocative essay, which, in its general theme, gets to the heart of something that applies to everyone. In publications elsewhere, I've called this the "traveling self."

No matter which angle we use to view black people in America today, we find them to be a complex and multifaceted people who defy easy categorization. We challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails at the beginning of this new century to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity. My point is not that black Americans don’t have social and cultural problems in 2008. We have several nagging problems, among them poor schools and far too many black men in prison and too few in college. But these are problems based more on the inequities of class, and they appear in other groups as well. It simply is no longer the case that the essence of black American life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and a condemnation, a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is thinghood, created even before one is born. This is not something we can assume...

What I am saying is that “official” stories and explanations and endlessly repeated interpretations of black American life over decades can short-circuit direct perception of the specific phenomenon before us. The idea of something—an intellectual construct—is often more appealing and perfect (in a Platonic sense) than the thing itself, which always remains mysterious and ambiguous and messy, by which I mean that its sense is open-ended, never fixed. It is always wise, I believe, to see all our propositions (and stories) as provisional, partial, incomplete, and subject to revision on the basis of new evidence, which we can be sure is just around the corner.

And that is a basic pragmatist view of the sort I often espouse so clunkily. Johnson's answer to the new black narrative is Rortyan in tone:

...if the old black American narrative has outlived its usefulness as a tool of interpretation, then what should we do? The answer, I think, is obvious. In the 21st century, we need new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present, with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading of reality, a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised, if not completely overturned. These will be narratives that do not claim to be absolute truth, but instead more humbly present themselves as a very tentative thesis that must be tested every day in the depths of our own experience and by all the reliable evidence we have available, as limited as that might be. For as Bertrand Russell told us, what we know is always “vanishingly small.” These will be narratives of individuals, not groups. And is this not exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of when he hoped a day would come when men and women were judged not by the color of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions, and the content of their character?

Finally!

Photo of the Day

From this excellent photo blog (discovered via All Intensive Purposes).

Illegal Anti-Gays

Sullivan:

The Federal Marriage Amendment is reintroduced. And with perfect symbolism, its sponsors are Larry Craig, whose own marriage is based on a lie, and prostitute-client and foe of HIV-positive tourists, David Vitter. But it's committed gay couples who threaten marriage! And people wonder why some of us are sick of the Republican party.

War Crimes

More of the guilty.
Interrogation.
The trial.

In a post on the bizarre and, frankly, nonsensical statements of Antonin Scalia regarding detainment, Marty Lederman points out a pattern in Bush administration detainment policies that is connected to what I've been saying about torture. (And Scalia himself unwittingly hints at it). Lederman writes,

In this conflict, by contrast, the U.S. has detained thousands of persons without very reliable assurances that they are, in fact, dangerous. Its detention practices, in other words, have been much more indiscriminate and uncertain -- and motivated principally by a design to interrogate as many persons as possible who might conceivably be able to offer some actionable intelligence, rather than (primarily) for the traditional purposes of incapacitating and weakening the enemy. When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, you tend to collect a lot of hay. That is exactly why the military itself has released such a high percent of the GTMO detainees: because its criteria for detention in the first instance were so permissive.

Recall that torture as information-gathering can work but entails a much broader institutionalization of torture and widespread torturing of innocents than that of the slippery-slope narrative frame the administration and its surrogates present to the public (that is, the one evil terrorist vs. the lives of hundreds or thousands). As I said in congressional testimony last year,

A principal incentive raised by the argument for torture as a means of gathering information... is ultimately to seek patterns of information rather than attempt to verify or falsify individual bits of data, especially under time and resource constraints. Comprehensive sets of data-points yield more complex patterns. The more extensive the practice and institution, the more successful torture will be. If torture is used indiscriminately and broadly, more complex patterns and a better understanding of what is meaningful in the information will be obtained. Patterns of information by themselves are meaningless, but they serve to corroborate and verify partial bits of information and infer other patterns. They also serve to eliminate or falsify outlying bits of information, the information gained from those innocent of any perceived wrongdoing. A descriptive narrative may be interpreted and assembled from the resulting patterns and regularities.

Note the common pattern between detainment and torture.

Blackberry Jam Fruit

Googled Values

This is great.

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm...

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added...

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

It goes to the heart of American puritan "values." The US may be a country founded on principles of individualism, but the authoritarian puritanical streak running through American culture has always entailed an ongoing conflict between what the individual does and what that same individual says others ought to do. The ought is based on a largely unreflexive set of vague, protestant values - a mythology - against which one judges others. It sublimates desires so that the mythology serves to build individual and communal resentments against those who don't believe the mythology and may do quite well outside of its system without suffering the misfortunes of God's wrath. "Communal values" may have some roughly identifiable qualities, but they are always fundamentally vague and diverse in a pluralistic society (after all, who belongs to the community?). In other words, "communal values" are generally what the keepers of the unreflexive mythology say they are. Nothing individualistic about that.

But then we do love when the keepers are exposed as what we call "hypocrites." We do love to cast stones. The angry, anti-gay pastor who is discovered in an alley on his knees in front of a male prostitute. The critic of money in politics who takes reelection funds from the most flagrant lobbyists. But also smaller instances most of us see in our own families - the family members who consider themselves upstanding Christians, who harm or hurt others, but claim it was not their intent to harm (thus, there's no problem! Or the hurt person is overly sensitive). They are hypocrites because they earnestly preach one thing and cynically do the other. But there's nothing unusual about this for the puritanical society because the values of the community are always used to hold others in check, not one's own individualistic self. Besides, in Protestantism you can then save yourself through rebirth. That's a pretty neat method for getting away with whatever you want. Nevertheless, the charge of "hypocrite!" also allows the rest of us to make our own personal reference to the "communal values" mythology and lay claim to being one of the keepers.

The google method of discerning the values of the community isn't any worse than any other method we have, which are generally, subtly authoritarian. The google method might not work, and there are probably serious methodological problems with it, but workability isn't the issue here. What the case exposes is the deficit between genuine-because-practiced values and genuine-because-preached values. That's much more interesting territory for thinking about the nature of communal values than the lazy reliance on that mythology which leads to such unreflective - and seemingly individualistic! - statements as "I know it when I see it."

Environmental Reading Assignment

Photo: Rio Cachoeira, coastal Atlantic forest, Paraná, Brazil by John Maier

India's Growth Outstrips Crops. A similar dynamic to elsewhere in the world: basic ecpnomic rapaciousness.

In the UK, lots of doubters about the cause of climate change.

Freeman Dyson, in the New York Review of Books, discusses William Nordhaus' recent book on climate change policy.

A new report at Policy Exchange on carbon capture.

Ocean heat content revisions. The NY Times also reports.

More on the trashing of the oceans.

Fighting for wild apple forests in Kazakhstan.

Kudzu as biofuel?

My own thinking and teaching on environmental issues links poverty, development, and economic "growth," and questions of justice to environmental harms. At Dissent, the philosopher Thomas Pogge discusses the avoidable nature of global poverty and the legerdemain of much of economic thinking, arguing that,

The analysis shows that the problem of world poverty is both amazingly small and amazingly large. It is amazingly small in economic terms: The aggregate shortfall from the World Bank’s $2/day poverty line of all those 40 percent of human beings who now live below this line is barely $300 billion annually, much less than what the United States spends on its military. This amounts to only 0.7 percent of the global product or less than 1 percent of the combined GNIs of the high-income countries. On the other hand, the problem of world poverty is amazingly large in human terms, accounting for a third of all human deaths and the majority of human deprivation, morbidity, and suffering worldwide.

Most of the massive severe poverty persisting in the world today is avoidable through more equitable institutions that would entail minuscule opportunity costs for the affluent. It is for the sake of trivial economic gains that national and global elites are keeping billions of human beings in life-threatening poverty with all its attendant evils such as hunger and communicable diseases, child labor and prostitution, trafficking, and premature death. Considering this situation from a moral standpoint, we must now assess growth—both globally and within most countries—in terms of its effect on the economic position of the poor.

And, finally, from Pruned, "a new Kiribati."

"I Am Fuck... Fuck of the Mountain!"

That he was. George Carlin, 1937-2008.

All About Oil

No other reason for the Iraq War has ever stood up to a little dash of reasoned reflection. It's all the orthodox geopolitics of military bases and oil, apparently worth hundreds of thousands of human lives and trillions of dollars. We've already seen one horn of the end game. Now the other...

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

By the way, Tom Engelhardt has been on the ball on the permanent bases since early on in the war. See, for example, here, here, and here.

(Photo above from here. September 1932. "Iraq oil fields. Man with fires in desert." American Colony Photo Department, Matson Photo Collection).

Telecom Capitulation

Cowards. Laura Rozen:

Reports of the newest FISA compromise indicate that, on telecom immunity, a federal court would be compelled to grant the telecoms immunity if there was substantial evidence that the Bush administration assured them that the warrantless surveillance program was legal. Doesn't that actually endorse and extend to private actors the Nixonian view that if the president says it's legal, it's legal, regardless of what the law says and the Constitution says? Wouldn't that set an awful precedent that an administration could get private actors to do whatever they wanted including breaking the law?

Pandanus

Torture, Torture, Torture

If you haven't already, you must read McClatchy's series this week on American torture and suspension of morality and legality in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, all orchestrated by the Bush administration itself. The McClatchy series is a crucial document. It shows what I've said over the past few years: that all torture institutions involve innocents.

As I've suggested repeatedly (see, for example, this Helsinki Commission testimony), a system of information-gathering operates necessarily in a state of ignorance and uncertainty. The actual degree of ignorance within the US system from top to bottom, as we learn more about the US gulag archipelago, is simply stunning. But any such system will operate with limited information. More information comes through more interrogation, the US having chosen the way of torture. But limited information means limited certainty about the guilt of prisoners and torture victims. The Bush administration has waved off such concerns, repeating the mantra "9-11." In a morbid way, they are right since any torture system will torture innocents. Always.

We can run through the arguments once again for why torture is never justified, if you like. Torture is not morally justifiable. Nor is it useful for its stated purpose of information-gathering. At this point, with the number of posts I've done on torture over the past couple of years, you'll have to buy the book.

When reading pieces like the McClatchy articles, however, remember that if torture is never justified, the "guilt" of the torture victim is a moot point. That's the core of the smokescreen that the Bush administration and other defenders of torture would have you face. They want you to think of their torture victims as "bad" or "evil," a judgment only they the administration may make (in advance of evidence). The innocence of some of the prisoners is, on the other hand, important because it gives the lie to those who have no time for habeas corpus because, they say, these are bad people.

Meanwhile, Americans are apparently largely okay with torture, according to this new Pew Research poll. 43% say torture is justifiable at least sometimes. But note also that an additional 25% say torture is rarely justified. Since the entire discourse on torture in the US is one of extraordinary circumstances (which is an excuse always used by torturing states), this may amount to 68% of Americans being pro-torture.

Torture isn't some grave policy choice made by moral realists; it's a moral sickness. The Bush administration's torture policies are war crimes. And you folks who hold the pro-torture views in the Pew survey are complicit.

Linkadaisical

* The Boston Review does a forum on development in Africa, "Is It Africa's Turn?" It's worth your while to explore the essays. Note the absence of mention of external predation as an obstacle to development. UNEP geographers, however, have sounded a further note of alarm about increased ecological degradation (also here). See their recently published atlas on Africa's environment (with downloadable docs and images here and here).

* The US Congress, apparently, is making a bit of an effort to preserve wilderness areas. Huh...

A confluence of factors is driving this wilderness renaissance: the shift in Congress from Republican to Democratic control; environmentalists' decision to take a more pragmatic approach in which they enlist local support for their proposals by making concessions to opposing interests; and some communities' recognition that intact ecosystems can often offer a greater economic payoff than extractive industries.

* Argentine farmers clashing with police over a new tariff scheme on exports.

* David Luban on Hannah Arendt and 1968.

* BLDGBLOG on a mega-mall in China that never really happened.

Photo: South China Mall by Philip Gostelow for The National

And BLDGBLOG also finds some stunning long exposure photographs by Alexey Titarenko of crowds in Russia.

Photo: from "City of Shadows" by Alexey Titarenko

* Tom Engelhardt on the "Greatest Story Never Told": the story of the US "mega-bases in Iraq.

...these giant bases, rising from the smashed birthplace of Western civilization, were not only built on (and sometimes out of bits of) the ancient ruins of that land, but are functionally modern ziggurats. They are the cherished monuments of the Bush administration. Even though its spokespeople have regularly refused to use the word "permanent" in relation to them -- in fact, in relation to any U.S. base on the planet -- they have been built to long outlast the Bush administration itself. They were, in fact, clearly meant to be key garrisons of a Pax Americana in the Middle East for generations to come. And, not surprisingly, they reek of permanency. They are the unavoidable essence -- unless, like most Americans, you don't know they're there -- of Bush administration planning in Iraq.

* Plus, more on abuses of detainees at Guantanamo - this time known innocents.

* Al Giordano's invaluable blog, The Field, has been censored and apparently wiped clean from its previous place at Rural Votes. Narcosphere is now hosting Al here. My blogroll is changing accordingly.

*And, finally, the "9 most devastating insults from around the world."

"A Little, Blippy Scene"

Photo: Julia Gorton

Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) and Byron Coley have published a book of photos and text on the late-1970s no wave scene, No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980. The NY Times reviews it here.

Apart from the music, no wave was basically the beginning of the end of the Lower East Side where "the end" means gentrification.

Little Powers

Lawrence of Cyberia has found a nice little line by the brilliant and relatively unsung G.K. Chesterton. I'm borrowing the whole thing, but please give LC a visit.

"It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself."

- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, chapter 18 ("The Fallacy of the Young Nation"), 1906

Tangerines

Abandoned Embassies

This little oddity of an article in the Washington Post harps on mainly a couple of run-down African embassies in DC. Conspicuous in its absence is the old Iraq Embassy on R Street near Sheridan Circle. When this little Iraq invasion started, the Iraqi Embassy was abandoned and is now overgrown with weeds. Why not mention that one? Apparently because Iraq is doing a multi-million dollar makeover and move to a different location... right across the street from Dick Cheney's VP mansion.

Crimes Are Committed by Other People

Wolcott:

Crestwood, N.Y.: So the Senate report--supported by two Republicans-- supports the conclusion that we all reached several years ago, that Bush and Cheney used propaganda and ginned up intelligence to trick the country into war. If this is not an impeachable offense, what do you define as one? And if an impeachable offense is committed, isn't it the height of irresponsibility for the Democrats to put possible harm to their electoral chances (negligible, in my opinion) ahead of their oaths to the Constitution? How will history look back at this disgraceful chapter in both the executive and legislative branches?

That sort of hothead talk isn't welcome in Broder's barbershop. His Olympian response:

You'll have to forgive me, but I am reluctant to see every big policy dispute turned into a criminal or impeachable affair. There needs to be accountability but there also needs to be proportionality. This country is engaged in two wars and has serious, serious domestic problems. To stop everything and attempt to impeach and remove a president who has less than a year to serve would not strike me as the best use of our energy. And for what? So Dick Cheney can be president?

No, no, David, you don't understand. Let me wipe the windshield for you. Dick Cheney wouldn't assume the presidency because under this dream scenario we'd impeach his flubberducking ass too.

It's not as if he wasn't in on it, after all.

Then with those two unindicted war racketeers removed from office, we'd turn our keen sense of justice on The Washington Post and demand that they shitcan your sorry, energy-dependent ass too, along the equally flagrant tails belonging to Fred Hiatt, Richard Cohen, and Charles Krauthammer.

Readings

Not a bad idea: Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer as Obama VP pick.

Obama gives Lieberman a talking-to.

Obama and McCain working together on a "good governance" bill.

The Senate Intel committee's report Phase II essentially calls the Bush administration liars on pre-war Iraq. Meanwhile, Iranian agents led the administration into war.

Crucial read: Patrick Cockburn on the secret plan to keep Iraq under US control. James Wolcott comments on the Cockburn article:

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to this reporter, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which U.S. troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law [my emphasis], will destabilize Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the U.S. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

It's all about him, him and that imaginary friend known as his "legacy." In his mind, he liberated Iraq, but true liberation requires submission to the guarantors of that liberation, who don't plan on leaving anytime soon; like, ever. And a little gratitude wouldn't be amiss either from those fortunate enough not to have been killed during the last five years. For all the talk of democracy, such a deal would reduce Iraq to a client state subject to the long reach of the Unitary Executive and its gun barrel. Cockburn: "Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet and the right to pursue its 'war on terror' in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation."

Let's call it something else: the Iraq War as murder. And "Shock and Awe" as state-sponsored and citizen-accepted terrorism. Jonathan Schwarz calls out the criminality of US leverage over the Iraqis.

Billions wasted in carbon offset fund. And CDM corruption.

Elsewhere, Croatia riles Czech tourists with food ban.

BLDGBLOG on the architecture of disaster.

[Image: Shuhei Endo's "tennis dome/emergency center" (left), photographed by Kenichi Amano,
next to the New Orleans Superdome, post-Katrina].

"It's like I'm just the excuse"

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

It's slowly sinking in, what this means, who this man is, even though our support here has been unwavering. I'd like to write something more, feel the need to understand it better through trying to write something. Soon (still recovering from surgery)....

Can Change Congress Change Congress?

From The Nation: Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, has moved to Washington to found what the nation identifies as a 'procedural reform' organization, Change Congress. The Nation doesn't seem to have decided whether Lessig is Quijote or Mr. Smith (despite the title they use). He'll get something done, one way or another, but it's hard to guess, now, what that might be.

What gives Lessig a unique credibility as he embarks on his new career as process reformer is his former life pursuing substantive reform. Before there was Lawrence Lessig, corruption crusader, there was Lawrence Lessig, copyright crusader. In the 1990s, when he started writing about the dangers of a sclerotic, overly restrictive intellectual property regime, few besides industry groups like the RIAA and MPAA and a tiny circle of academics paid much attention. So it was easy, in 1998, for Congress to pass overwhelmingly the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which President Clinton signed into law, extending copyright protections for twenty additional years, bringing the total guaranteed copyright term to seventy years after a creator's death (Since Disney had lobbied strongly for the bill, critics dubbed it the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.)

In the absence of high-profile voices countering the industry groups that dominated the issue, Lessig became an evangelist for the cause of what he calls "free culture." He and his allies argue that cultural vibrance, scientific progress and business innovation all rely on the diffusion of knowledge, a diffusion threatened by an intellectual property regime that attempts to keep that knowledge trapped in a proprietary vault. What they see happening is a modern-day rerun of the eighteenth-century enclosure movement, in which the British commons were brought under private control. But here, instead of using fences to capture land, the private interests are manipulating the law to keep cultural production and the knowledge needed for technological innovation out of the public domain.

[ . . . ]

Lessig's years rolling the copyright boulder up the hill served as the narrative inspiration for his talk at the Press Club. For Lessig, copyright is just one example of the ways money corrupts the Congressional process by preventing Congress from getting what he calls the "easy cases" right. Nearly every expert who's studied copyright term has concluded that it shouldn't be extended retroactively: Milton Friedman once referred to this position as a "no-brainer." But that hasn't stopped big corporations like Disney, which stands to lose a considerable amount of money when Mickey Mouse becomes public property, from pushing through legislation that extends copyright protections for old works.

It's the same dynamic with a host of issues, from the farm bill to the role of contractors in Iraq to an issue Lessig calls "the most profound" we face: global warming. There, the scientific consensus is absolute, the stakes dire and yet action has been routinely thwarted by a coterie of corporations that have a monumental monetary interest in the status quo. "Really, who cares about Mickey Mouse," Lessig told me over dinner the night before his talk. "But if we can't get global warming right? An easy question as fundamental as global warming? Then we're really fucked."

Albizzia

Photo: Yolanda

KremlinWhiteHouseology

From our dear, irascible friend TMiss:

I found this rather irritating:

Kremlin Rules? Gosh, I wonder if this means that all the TV news and political talk shows in Russia are wall to wall with retired generals spouting the Kremlin line? And if so, does this mean only the NYTimes will tell us about this, or will the other American-based news organizations actually have the chutzpah to report on this when they still haven’t told us about our retired generals getting paid to shovel the Pentagon’s propaganda?

Yes, there’s still a slight difference between the USA and Russia, but style-wise it’s too close to call. I think we’ve moved towards them more than they’ve moved towards us. And no, none of this will stop our media from flogging Hugo Chávez for being half the tinpot dictator Bush is.

Please, Make It Stop

Apparently, okay, maybe, tonight.

Apparently, not, tonight.

Hey, Bo Diddley

If I get to heaven,
Before you do,
I'll try to make a hole,
And pull you thru.

Thanks. A tune.

Gates on Moral Obligation

Helmut said it here a bit more clearly (and more than two weeks ago): "The junta's intransigence has risen to the level of genocidal intransigence. The junta's paranoia amounts to deliberate starvation of Burma's people."

But Helmut is not yet a ranking official, so it's nice to see that Robert Gates has given the issue some thought:

BANGKOK — In the strongest remarks yet by a high-ranking American official, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Sunday that Myanmar was guilty of “criminal neglect” for blocking large-scale international aid to cyclone victims and that more Burmese civilians would perish unless the military regime reverses its policy.

He's certainly on the right track. (I mean "on the right track" here in the way that teachers have always used that cliche -- we really mean, "thanks for saying something, but what you said is kind of stupid.")

When asked whether the Myanmar government’s actions were tantamount to genocide, Mr. Gates stopped short of that accusation. “This is more akin, in my view, to criminal neglect,” he said.

Considering the situation, Gates concluded that “We have really exercised our moral obligation above and beyond the call." Do we have a greater moral obligation to changing regimes where it most benefits us? More likely, we have a greater rhetorical obligation to talk about being driven to action by moral obligations (in, say, Iraq) when we might be perceived as being motivated above all by material interests. When we're not at all motivated by material interests, we have a rhetorical obligation to avoid language (like "genocidal intransigence") that we use to express our moral obligations to action.

Can we get Gates to read Singer?

The Twenty-First Century Alchemical Imagination

Last night, I fell asleep thinking of ethanol (I had been drinking bourbon and had a brief, sleep-threatening panic: what if ethanol demand affects bourbon supply? Cold sweats ensued.)

I woke thinking of a book I’ve been reading – Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood (thanks to Ethicurean for the recommendation). Among Grescoe’s principal arguments is the suggestion that eating lower on the oceanic food chain is both safer (it’s in the big, old, meaty fish like tuna that toxins accumulate over time) and smarter. Little, delicious critters – the gently-fished (by international standards) Portuguese sardine, grilled and healthy-oily; the oyster (now 95% farmed, a good thing for oysters and the bodies of water they’re farmed in) – replenish more quickly than the disappearing fish at the top of the food chain and they eat stuff we can’t eat – algae, plankton, and all the other even tinier things at the very bottom of the food chain.

More importantly, however, farming of the bigger fish is threatening to deplete these more plentiful smaller, younger fish faster than would our simply eating them directly, given the desire to raise marketable fish quickly. That short-circuiting of the oceanic feeding cycle – accomplished in order that we can continue to eat fish that are disappearing and take too long to grow big on their own – may mean we wind up with nothing to eat, in the end. But farming species like salmon (DO NOT EAT), steelhead trout, and bluefin tuna requires huge inputs of the smaller fish.

Industrial fishing off the coast of Senegal, Grescoe writes, has reshaped that country’s national dish, thieboudienne, traditionally made with grouper. A ship like “Ireland’s Atlantic Dawn, the largest fishing boat in the world . . . which works off the coast of Senegal and Mauritania, has been known to haul in 400 tonnes of such small fish as horse mackerel and sardines a day” (140). The result? Though the grouper has largely disappeared because of overfishing of both it and the species it eats, and though the Senegalese have “taken to making thieboudienne with sardines” which they have to import in cans back from Europe, sardines themselves are becoming more dear, given that “much of the sardine catch off the coast of West Africa is now being sent to bluefin-tuna-fattening farms in Australia. Concentrated up the food chain, the protein that should be going to feed the world’s poorest countries is ending up in the sushi bars of Los Angeles and Tokyo, in the form of bluefin tuna sashimi” (141).

In other words: we’re not thinking carefully enough about the inputs it takes for the outputs we desire. In fact, we’re quite deliberately not thinking about it at all: it strikes me as a peculiarly 21^st century kind of alchemical fantasy: we can drive our cars on ethanol, we can eat farmed bluefin tuna and corn-fed cow, we make plans to bury our carbon dioxide in the ground (tellingly, we're a lot more concerned with how to burn coal cleanly than how to mine it ethically -- who gives a shit where it comes from or what mountain disappeared today?), we can air-condition Phoenix and water its lawns with the Colorado river. We can have what we want – isn't the refrain that Americans shouldn’t have to sacrifice any of their comforts and conveniences? – and not have to pay for it. Ourselves.

How to Profit from Immigration

We've explained this before, but it's worth saying again: if you want to make a lot of really easy money, just imprison you some immigrants. It really works! All's you have to do is pull these people out of the labor force and put them in jail, and then hire different people to look menacing all day.

Who knows how we pay for it? The feds just print more money, I guess, but, also, who cares? It's like, free money, and these people must deserve to be in jail, otherwise they wouldn't be in jail, right? This is moneymaking you can feel good about.

From The Paris News, here's an example of a town run by really smart, forward-thinking people:

CLARKSVILLE — Clarksville could be the site of a secure correctional facility that would provide 600-700 jobs for the Red River County area.

If selected, the City of Clarksville could receive a much needed economic boost from the facility to be built by Emerald Correctional Management, L.L.C.

Emerald! Oooh, good choice! They run a real shitbarn at the edge of my community! When you're trying to profit from the misery of the untenable detention bubble, could you do worse than a privately-held prison company from Louisiana? I mean, these people are deeply committed to cutting every corner they can, so that you can share with them more of every taxpayer dollar! They'll make your town rich. Laissez les bon temps roulez! (Note: Les bon temps have not exactly begun to roule in my little town, several years after the opening of the $25+ million facility, and people have been laid off . . . but any day now, any day, I'm certain we'll see the promised hotels and restaurants and shops).

The genius mayor of Clarksville, Ann Rushing, has this to say:

“Community acceptance and cooperation are vital... If we are selected, the good will definitely outweigh any negative aspects,” Rushing said.

Emerald Correctional Management is an industry leader in private prison management services, correctional health care and programming services for offender populations.

Yes, "the good will definitely outweigh any negative aspects." I envy Rushing her ability to see so, well, definitively into the future of her town. But I know she's right! It's so obvious!

Of course, the mayor didn't say that last part, about what a great company Emerald is -- evidently, the newspaper reporter just "went the extra mile" and did some independent digging into company PR materials. Such ethically responsible journalism is so rare these days.

Friday Evening Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

Angela Carter, in a 1984 London Review of Books review of, among others, Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook:

The cook-proprietor of 'Chez Panisse', Alice Waters, says in her Introduction: 'I bought Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking and I cooked everything in it, from beginning to end. I admired her aesthetics of food and wanted a restaurant that had the same feeling as the pictures on the covers of her books.' It seems an unusual desire, to create a restaurant that looks like a book-jacket, and most of the cooks from whom Mrs David originally acquired her recipes would think it even more unusual to learn to cook from a book instead of from Mum. But all this must spring naturally from the kind of second-order experience that lies behind the cult of food. Alice Waters is a girl from New Jersey who earned her culinary stripes by resolutely cooking her way through a compendium of French recipes assembled by an Englishwoman, using ingredients from Northern California and serving them up to the me-generation in a restaurant named after an old movie. The result is a Franco-Californian cuisine of almost ludicrous refinement, in which the simplest item is turned into an object of mystification. A ripe melon, for example, is sought for as if it were a piece of the True Cross. Ms Waters applauds herself on serving one. 'Anyone could have chosen a perfect melon, but unfortunately most people don't take the time or make an effort to choose carefully and understand what that potentially sublime fruit should be.' She talks as if selecting a melon were an existential choice of a kind to leave Jean-Paul Sartre stumped.

Grease Rustler Blues

In my defense, I have always asked for the stuff. And brought my own barrels.

Much to the surprise of Mr. Damianidis and many other people, processed fryer oil, which is called yellow grease, is actually not trash. The grease is traded on the booming commodities market. Its value has increased in recent months to historic highs, driven by the even higher prices of gas and ethanol, making it an ever more popular form of biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks.

In 2000, yellow grease was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. On Thursday, its price was about 33 cents a pound, or almost $2.50 a gallon.

More on Biotech from HTTW

Andrew Leonard, in How the World Works, responding to the Bush administration's call for "science-based regulation" of bioengineered foods:

How the World Works has always thought it unseemly for the U.S. government to act as the bag man for the biotech industry -- it may be excusable for Schafer to slap himself on the back and tout how much food the U.S. is already giving away, but it's a lot less justifiable to propose solutions to the world's food security needs that are really just thinly disguised marketing pitches for American corporations. But that's a story for another day. Right now, I'm still having trouble believing a representative of the Bush administration thinks it is kosher to lecture other nations on the necessity for science-based regulation.

I know what he means: the U.S. position -- again, at the behest of the biotech industry -- is that other nations should not be able to ban genetically modified food products unless they can prove, scientifically, that they post a real danger to human health or the environment. But has there been any other American administration, this century, that has been more dismissive of science, or more brazenly political in its policymaking? The disemboweling of the EPA, the rank politicization of agencies like the Fish & Wildlife Administration, the attempts to crack down on outspoken climate researchers, the repeated efforts to water down climate research ... the list goes on and on and on.

What, Me Shift My Thinking?

From a Dallas Morning News story, "Texas Governor Rick Perry asks College Leaders to Shift Their Thinking,"

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry exhorted state university and college leaders Wednesday to fundamentally alter higher education by shifting how public money is spent, how professors are rewarded and how success is graded.

Mr. Perry spoke to about 60 regents, all of whom he appointed, and touted an accountability system that would basically shift power from tenured faculties and university institutions and put more emphasis on performance, such as demonstrated teaching skills, how much research money is brought in and how many students are taught and graduated.

[ . . . ]

The summit of regents and chancellors was hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank, which invited other speakers and handed out reading materials that suggested great American universities have been blunted by intellectuals and left-leaning doctrine.

That's right. In my spare time, I create my own set of leftist reading materials. You wouldn't believe the damage I can do in a single summer session of English 4309, Advanced Grammar. My lefty colleagues and I have a good laugh at our secret name for the class, Advanced Gramsci! Ha ha! Suckers! They think they're learning about the non-finite verb phrases functioning nominally, but they're actually being indoctrinated!

The NYT is pandering to Phronesisaical, again

It's pretty clear they're looking for Phron readers with titles like "A Tiny Fruit that Tricks the Tongue." Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't think my esophagus is ready for an hour's worth of eating lemons and thinking they're sweet:

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

"shore up the library"

Robert Darnton, in the NYRB, on "The Library in the New Age"

I realize, however, that considerations of "feel" and "smell" may seem to undercut my argument. Most readers care about the text, not the physical medium in which it is embedded; and by indulging my fascination with print and paper, I may expose myself to accusations of romanticizing or of reacting like an old-fashioned, ultra-bookish scholar who wants nothing more than to retreat into a rare book room. I plead guilty. I love rare book rooms, even the kind that make you put on gloves before handling their treasures. Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books, quiet places in comfortable settings, where the codex can be appreciated in all its individuality.

In fact, the strongest argument for the old-fashioned book is its effectiveness for ordinary readers. Thanks to Google, scholars are able to search, navigate, harvest, mine, deep link, and crawl (the terms vary along with the technology) through millions of Web sites and electronic texts. At the same time, anyone in search of a good read can pick up a printed volume and thumb through it at ease, enjoying the magic of words as ink on paper. No computer screen gives satisfaction like the printed page. But the Internet delivers data that can be transformed into a classical codex. It already has made print-on-demand a thriving industry, and it promises to make books available from computers that will operate like ATM machines: log in, order electronically, and out comes a printed and bound volume. Perhaps someday a text on a hand-held screen will please the eye as thoroughly as a page of a codex produced two thousand years ago.

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

Open-Source Eating

Shouldn't food be open source?

A few weeks ago, Andrew Leonard, in his Salon-based blog How the World Works, sensed that "Malthus is in the air," writing that rising food prices are, among other things, encouraging folks to rethink their opposition of genetically-modified foods:

Biotech proponents see genetically modified crops as one more weapon in the arsenal of technological productivity enhancers that will enable humanity to continue slipping out of the tightening noose formed by a burgeoning population rapaciously exhausting finite resources. Biotech opponents variously see genetically modified organisms as a crime against nature, a Pandora's Box of ecological catastrophe waiting to happen, and fundamentally dependent on a petroleum-based infrastructure that itself is not sustainable. The tension at play here -- will science save us, or destroy us? -- is an ever-popular theme at How the World Works. The surge in food (and oil) prices is suggesting that a showdown between the opposing camps is far more imminent than might have been suspected, even just a year ago.

The post, in general, is a good one (as much of Leonard's stuff is), but something about the above paragraph struck a sour note. It's that summary of the issues concerning "biotech opponents." They're not represented as particularly enlightened objections; in fact, they're religious. And this seems to be the standard representation -- if not the standard understanding -- of opponents of genetic modifications of foods.

So if it's not for some fear that fish-gene tomatoes are going to result in catastrophic, planetary retribution, what's the problem with the fact that the Bush administration will only give food aid if the recipients are willing to take GMOs along with it? (Even the article linked here, from the Washington Post, reduces the claims of biotech opponents to fears of allergies and environmental issues) The problem is that GMOs are intellectual private property. Though Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland want you to believe that, after decades of poisoning poor Americans (demonstrably the case for the former), they suddenly give a shit about feeding poor people elsewhere? Does anyone believe them?

Have a look at this month's Vanity Fair story on Monsanto, "Harvest of Fear." It's a good piece, a look at Monsanto's approach to "protecting" its intellectual property -- its phalanx of investigators and lawyers threatening farmers (and some non-farmers) who they suspect of planting their GMO seeds without paying for them. This is food-as-intellectual-property, and it scares the hell out of me. We don't need more of this, in more parts of the world.

Seeds should be open-source. I don't care so much about creating weird slimy monsters who will eat our children's brains. I care about shrinking common knowledge of agriculture, about the aggressive concentration of that knowledge into fewer and fewer hands. I don't think I'm alone in that, so why is it that folks opposed to biotech are always cast in the same mob-with-pitchforks light?

The mordita . . .

Guess which state has the highest number of customs and immigration officials being investigated for corruption of various kinds?

The Villarreal investigation is among scores of corruption cases in recent years that have alarmed officials in the Homeland Security Department just as it is hiring thousands of border agents to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

The pattern has become familiar: Customs officers wave in vehicles filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband. A Border Patrol agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall prey to temptation and begin taking bribes.

Rose Hips

These Days

Dear Friends,

I'm having surgery tomorrow morning and will be out of commission for at least a few days. The surgery is moderately serious and will require a fair amount of time for rehabilitation. The cause isn't anything life-threatening, but that hasn't prevented me from mulling my mortality the past several days. Pure self-indulgence. It's not easy to face up to the failures of the body (I think I reconciled with my failures of the mind long ago). Nevertheless, in this case, all signs point to a quick and full rehabilitation.

Barba will try to keep some posts coming. If you haven't read his stuff in the past, you're in for a treat. I'll be back in a few days.

Helmut

Bacterial Computers

Ubiwar leads us to this fascinating and somewhat disturbing article on bacteria engineered to do basic computing problems.

Scientists have built the first living computer and tasked it with solving an important problem: flipping pancakes.

Researchers genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing a classic mathematical puzzle known as the burned pancake problem. Molecules of DNA have the natural ability to store and process information, and scientists have been performing computations with bare DNA molecules in lab dishes since the mid-1990s. But the new research, reported online in the Journal of Biological Engineering, is the first to do DNA computation in living cells.

“Imagine having the parallel processing power of a million computers all in the space of a drop of water,” says Karmella Haynes, a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina. “It’s possible to do that because cells are so tiny and DNA is so tiny.”

While the potential computational power of programmed bacteria is immense, the DNA-computation system that Haynes and her colleagues designed can only solve problems by flipping and sorting data. It doesn’t have the open-ended computing flexibility of a laptop computer or even a solar-powered calculator, so the bacteria can only handle a limited set of mathematical problems. “We’re not going to have bacteria running iPods just yet,” Haynes says.

Now, re-listen to Computer World.

Waning Days

Ezra Klein has this just right:

Clinton can, and should, finish the campaign. She has come too far at this point to drop out. The issue is the content of her continuing campaign. Were she running on her issues and blasting McCain, most would probably think that a boon -- more free media for Democrats, more focused criticism of McCain. But what Clinton is actually doing is giving wildly misleading speeches trying to poison the well in Michigan and Florida, opportunistically telling the voters of two major states that a decision she supported until it become inconvenient is a reason to believe that Obama and the Party dismiss or seek to repress their votes, and only Clinton cares for their democratic rights. As a message, it's a mixture of toxic lies and scorched earth campaigning. It doesn't help her win the nomination, but it makes the nomination worth a little bit less for the likely nominee.

Put simply, it's her message, not her presence, that's attracting criticism.

For some reason, Clinton supporters don't seem to understand this. The zealotry by which they misunderstand - always mutually supporting - is what is damaging ultimately to both their own longer-term interests and those of Obama supporters.

Prototopological Watershed Map

Via Strange Maps.

Wine Raspberries