Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Back next week. Promise!

Sunday Music Blogging

Comedy and Tragedy

Which one is satire?

This?

Television watching became even more convenient this week with Sony's introduction of a new remote-controlled remote control.

The new device, which can be controlled via remote control through the use of a second remote control unit, will replace older models that needed to be held in the hand to be operable.

"Constantly leaning forward to pick up the remote control from the coffee table is a tiresome, cumbersome chore that will soon be a thing of the past," Sony director of product development Dan Ninomiya said. "These new remotes, should they be left on the coffee table or in some other barely-hard-to-reach place, will not need to be picked up and actually pointed at the screen in order to work."

Or this?

The [Cato Institute] plan is to eliminate employee health benefit insurance and all government health care support, and throw everyone into the private insurance market. Insurance companies would be allowed to risk-rate premiums, so that as people got older and/or sicker their premiums would go up.

However, Cato says, this doesn’t have to be a problem. The solution is … wait for it … insurance insurance. They call it “health status insurance,” but essentially it’s insurance insurance. It’s a separate policy you take that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance.

(Photo by ophelia immortal.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Not dead, I assure you. Just busy with a project that's requiring all my attention and several times more stamina than I actually have. I was supposed to be done before now, but as usual, work expands to fill the available time.

Maybe I'll get some breathing room after the weekend. Or if not, maybe I'll retire to Bedlam and devote my remaining days to consideration of "the Drone, who with the appearance of a Bee is neither a soldier nor an artist, neither a swordsman nor smith."

I hope you're all well, meanwhile, and I'm very, very sorry to have worried a few very kind people by not checking my blog-related e-mail for several weeks. I should know better at my age, honestly.

Onwards and...

Well, onwards, anyway.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

The Egyptian Parliament has added 64 seats that are reserved for women:

32 new constituencies, comprising two seats each, will be created nationwide to accept applications for running for the parliament from women only. The amendment will take effect starting from Egypt’s elections due next year for at least two legislative elections.

Australian has eased visa restrictions on victims of sex trafficking:

[T]he change will allow women to be granted a temporary visa for up to 45 days even if they do not cooperate with police.

They will also be entitled to support services to help them with legal advice, counselling and accommodation.

Obama has granted some benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees:

President Obama signed an executive order granting some benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees Wednesday, calling it "a historic step" but promising more action to come.

In the UK, the House of Lords has ruled against the use of secret evidence in terrorism trials:

The result was a resounding victory for justice: a unanimous verdict from all nine Law Lords against the government. They stated that a trial in which the accused can’t see or challenge the evidence against him is not a fair trial and is an abuse of basic human rights.

In the USA, anti-immigrant demagogy seems to be on the wane:

According to the Progressive States Network (PSN), budget deficits have meant that states are unwilling to pass legislation with a cost attached. Immigration is less of a wedge issue in 2009—that is, politicians seem less willing to push anti-immigrant platforms because candidates who did so in the 2008 elections lost.

PSN also reports that anti-immigrant legislators have been marginalized in 2009. Bills introduced by Texas State Rep. Leo Berman, a notorious anti-immigrant voice, got no traction, even from within his own party. No votes were taken on any of his 9 anti-immigrant bills.

A wolverine was seen in Colorado for the first time since 1919:

The wolverine was once native to found in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and California, but were mostly wiped out by around 1930.

Photo: Mark Packila © WCS.
Russia is creating a large Arctic park:

The 'Russian Arctic' park is located on the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, a long island that arcs out into the Arctic Ocean between the Barents and Kara Seas. It also includes some adjacent marine areas.

WWF has long been lobbying for the park, which is also a key area for walrus, wild reindeer and bird population. The park creation excludes all industrial activities.

"This is exactly the sort of thing we need to see from Arctic governments," says Neil Hamilton Director of WWF International’s Arctic Programme.

The marbled murrelet will retain ESA protections:

Rebuffing the anti-science stance of the Bush administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released a report finding that continued protection of marbled murrelets in Washington, Oregon, and California is required. This report replaces a 2004 review in which Bush political appointees reversed scientific and legal conclusions to try to eliminate protections for murrelets. The new report finds that the tri-state murrelet population is distinct and separate from other populations in Canada and Alaska.

“Science has won the day,” said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The marbled murrelet is severely imperiled and needs the protections of the Endangered Species Act to survive.”

Thirty-one other endangered birds will receive the protection they need:

The Center for Biological Diversity reached a settlement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service yesterday that will compel the agency to provide protection for scores of the world’s most imperiled bird species and come into compliance with the Endangered Species Act. The Service has committed itself to publishing final listing determinations for six species of foreign birds and proposed listings for an additional 25 species, in accordance with a negotiated timeline that terminates on December 29, 2009.

The United Nations Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre has launched a new online system that will help scientists monitor marine protected areas:

"Obtaining and promoting accurate information on marine protected areas is a top priority. I am therefore delighted on World Oceans Day that we are launching WDPA – Marine as another critical tool alongside Protect Planet Ocean and Google Ocean to show the world how much of our seas are protected," said Dan Laffoley, Chair of IUCN's WCPA – Marine. "These new innovative approaches show everyone the urgent need for governments and all of us to radically scale up MPA networks as well as the ambition and effectiveness by which we manage marine resources."

(h/t: Peacay.)

Bjorn Lomborg is calling for a carbon tax.

According to the paper, Lomborg says a carbon tax "could address what he calls a 'market failure' in the development of solar-power systems and wind turbines effective enough and cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels."

Lomborg is such a dreadful person that his support is arguably less meaningful than his opposition. Still, it's safe to say that he's caused a fair number of heads to explode this week, so let us gather rosebuds while we may.

China's ban on plastic bags allegedly saved 1.6 million tons of oil:

A ban on super thin plastic bags cut the use of 40 billion bags, reduced plastic bag usage by 66 percent and saved China 1.6 million tons of petroleum, according to recent government estimates, Worldwatch reports.

Worldchanging reports on a solar autoclave:

The autoclave piggybacks off of solar cooking boxes already in wide use in rural Nicaragua. The cooking boxes, which are about the size of several extra-large pizza boxes stacked on top of one another, placed on waist-high legs, are used to cook eggs, plantains, cakes -- everything, that is, "except tortillas," Lori Hanna says. Hanna is the engineering student at the University of Dayton in Ohio who launched the project after spending two months in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua, living and working amongst Las Mujeres Solares, a community group that is using the energy of the sun to patch the country's notoriously poor energy grid.

I have mixed emotions about this art installation at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna, but on the whole, I think it's worthwhile:

In one animal enclosure, the German duo have half-submerged a car in a watering hole used by the resident rhinos. In another enclosure, penguins frolic in the shadow of an oil pump, and in yet another, alligators must share their modest bayou with a bathtub and a monster truck tire.

According to the artists, these scenes of ecological nightmares are “experimental set-up[s]” in which “the viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging 'natural' environments while they are increasingly endangered.”

While I share Pruned's loathing of golf courses and golf culture, I was slightly heartened to learn that "golf courses are all but weaned from municipal fresh-water systems, with 86 percent now using some other source, liked recycled effluent water, surface water or water treated by reverse osmosis."

The Telegraph has an interesting article on the planned shrinking of American cities:

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The photo at the top is by Andrzej Kramarz, from his series Things, which details arrangements of goods at Krakow's flea markets. In related news, glass negatives from 1930s Poland. Initial images from the Herschel telescope. A living chair. And 57 photographs by Emmett Gowin:


I've had this Raindrop Melody Maker running all morning (via things). It goes well with the photos at Across the Great Divide, and with the music drifting in from the other room. It'd probably go just as well with two million pages of 19th-century newspapers (via The Bioscope). Or the rather surreal diagrams from A Beast Book.


Animal hands and luminous spacescapes. Paintings by Walt Kuhn. Lithographs by Cyprien Gaillard. And via Dark Roasted Blend, much-needed considerations of strangely shaped communities and factory decorations.


And, needless to say, a cartoon.

A Call for Political Clarification

Since I don't have time, this week, to problematize the role of left-humanist ideology in the social reproduction of oppression, I figured I'd simply link to this excellent survey of emerging best practices in neo-Socialist polemics.

Every word is a sermon in itself, but points 7, 9, and 10 are dearest to my heart:

7. Your opponents are dogmatic and sectarian, unless they are not, in which case they are opportunists....

9. What people say is less important than what they imply. What they imply is what the correct political analysis leads you to decide that they imply. Don’t take their account as to what they are saying: tell them what they are saying. Be abusive if necessary. You have been provoked.

10. Welcome the new audience for socialism and always remember what they find of interest. What they find of interest is minutiae, because they are interested in political clarification and to that end the smallest details are important. Do not neglect the political ferment inside Skegness SWP, a council byelection in Oxford or what was on the front of Socialist Worker in 1969. This should fascinate a younger audience who missed the discussion the first time around (or the first two hundred).

These points can't be overemphasized, particularly if we wish to avoid falling prey to the sort of Zinovievian factionalist opportunism that marred the Fifth Comintern Congress.

Consider yourselves warned.

(Link via Moonbootica via rootless. Illustration by yours truly, stolen lazily from an earlier post.)

Our Innocent Children

The irrepressible Bjorn Lomborg has come up with a new argument against AGW: It frightens children. And not in a good way, like clowns, or sirens, or fundamentalist sermons on Hell, or "duck and cover" drills for nuclear war, or balsawood drones laden with anthrax spores.

An article in the Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinctions from global warming. In her words: "I don't like global warming because it kills animals, and I like animals."

What this child needs to understand is that a) mass animal extinctions are impossible, or at least unlikely, or at least not that big a deal; b) there are plenty more animals where those came from, and anyway this is why we have zoos; and c) it's far more tragic that millions of African children are dying of malaria, so turn off the waterworks or we'll give you something serious to cry about.

Usually, Lomborg is angry because people believe that something can be done about climate change. Today, though, he's angry because they don't. Consistency is for small-minded people, y'see, and Lomborg's wits are as wide as all outdoors.

Exaggeration also wears out the public's willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything?

Of course, most of the prominent people who claim that mitigation is impossible or pointless or a Marxist plot -- or all three -- are inactivists like Lomborg.

But so what? This argument allows Lomborg to lean down from Parnassus and sigh theatrically over what fools we mortals be, so it's as true as it needs to be. A boxer's feint isn't strictly honest, either; what matters is whether it throws his opponent off balance. And if you're not thrown off balance by Lomborg's argument that inaction is bad when it's based on despair, but good when it's based on complacency, your mind is a good deal sturdier than mine.

Essentially, Lomborg has translated his standard economic argument into emotional terms: just as the cost of taking action here and now must be weighed against the prospective riches of Third World tycoons from the year 2100, the present-day tears of a few deluded children must be weighed against the abiding joys of a future in which everything turns out just fine, thanks to clever people like Lomborg who understand that there's no sense in fighting fate.

Since catastrophic -- or even seriously disruptive -- climate change is pretty much impossible, normal reactions like anxiety or grief must be pathologized, and the fact that our children are worried becomes an argument against addressing the issues that worry them. To paraphrase Ivan Karamazov, Lomborg is unwilling to found the edifice of climate action on the unavenged tears of a child: the truth is not worth such a price.

The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. I believe that it is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue.

Absolutely. Because otherwise, as Lord Monckton explains, we'll destroy Western prosperity, commit genocide against the Third World, and wind up daubing ourselves with woad and subsisting on fronds and bracken.

The sooner our kids get this through their thick little skulls, and recognize the deadly conspiracy that threatens their future, the better off we'll all be.

(Illustration: "Magic Lantern Alphabet of Animals. London, Paris, New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, not before 1886.')