Rhinocrisy

I’ll admit it. Lebanon is hard. So many characters* to try and unravel - Maronites, Druze, Palestinian refugees, Shi’a militants, Syrians, Israelis, French, Americans - each with their own damn military force. And constantly-shifting alliances. So much intrigue it’s almost salacious. Juan Cole is helpful - he dropped some history on me. I’m trying to cope and keep up.

But this just blows my mind:

[U].S. President George W. Bush… told an audience in Washington this week that Syria must withdraw all of its troops from Lebanon before parliamentary elections in May.

“All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair,” he said.

Does this mean that Bush openly acknowledges that the January 30th elections in Iraq, which were held under occupation with American military forces and intelligence personnel sprawled across the country, were NOT free and fair?

Well, I’m going to pretend he did, anyway.

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*No, I haven’t read “Gravity’s Rainbow”, yet, though I easily handled the cast of “The Brothers Karamazov”.

It’s been a day since Maskhadov’s death, now confirmed by Chechens*, and still no official reaction from the White House other than this weak bit:

Q On Russia. The Russians have just announced they have killed the secessionist leader, Aslan Maskhadov. First, do you have any independent confirmation of that?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, the last I heard before I came out here, I’d seen the reports, but I did not have any confirmation on those reports at this point. Our views, in terms of the situation, is that we believe it should be resolved through a political process, and that remains our view.

Q How can it be resolved in a political process if the leader of the secessionists have now been killed — has now been killed? And a number –

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I’ve seen the reports. I don’t have confirmation on that. But we’ve consistently said that when it comes to Chechnya, that it needs to be — in this situation with Russia, that it needs to be resolved through a political process.

Q I don’t — I don’t see the logic there. Why is it different from capturing and killing terrorists in other countries? Why is it different from capturing Saddam Hussein in –

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I mean, you’re talking about a specific report. I’ve not confirmed that report. I would want to find out more about the information on this particular report.

Q I’m asking –

MR. McCLELLAN: Obviously, our views on terrorists are very well known.

Q I’m asking about your –

MR. McCLELLAN: We work very closely with Russia in the global war on terrorism.

Q I’m asking about your general approach to the situation. Suppose the report comes true — suppose the report does not turn out to be true, why do you insist that in this particular instance, the political approach is what should work, whereas in other situations involving Americans themselves, you do not have much regard for political processes, as far as I can see, in Iraq, or maybe some other places?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, first of all, again, I don’t — I’m not going to suppose anything. I do not have official confirmation on the reports that I have seen, and I would want to have that first. But we have a longstanding position when it comes to the situation in Chechnya. And our view has not changed. Our view remains that it ought — there ought to be a political resolution to the situation.

Kudos to the reporter, who is unnamed in the transcript, for sticking it out. I hope to god this isn’t the last we hear of this, and the U.S. will have the guts to step forward and (hypocritically, I’ll admit) condemn Russia for this killing. But I’m betting they’ll stay mum and continue to spout the weasely “Russia is our partner in the war on terrorism” garbage.

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*Ramzan Kadyrov, the warlord prick who has Russian “approval”, claimed that Maskhadov was killed in a botched capture operation when he was shot accidentally by his own bodyguard. The Russians, meanwhile, claim that the entire compound Maskhadov was in blew up - astounding since we’ve already seen Che Guevara-esque published photos of the body.

Aslan Maskhadov is dead.

He is dead at the hands of Russian security forces, who are triumphant, hailing this as a victory in their war against the Chechen terrorists. Maskhadov was the erstwhile “president” of Chechnya (before it blew to shit) and later became one of the more prominent rebel leaders, but was always the one with a grain of sanity. The Russian government has blamed Maskhadov for a whole spate of terrorist incidents: the hostage situations in a school in Beslan and a theater in Moscow, and a string of apartment bombings that were the initial spark for the current Russian invasion of Chechnya.

Maskhadov denied responsiblity for all of these.* Meanwhile, Shamil Basayev, who actually IS a diabolical Islamist terrorist, claimed responsibility for both Beslan AND the Moscow theater hostage-takings.

According to Moscow, Basayev and Maskhadov were both allied to al-Qaeda. Which sort of makes you wonder why they were such bitter, bitter rivals, and why Maskhadov continually made public commitments to eschewing terrorism (preferring a much more conventional military resistance), and why he wasn’t an Islamist, and why he continually made (rejected) peace overtures to Moscow.

So now what are we left with? A bunch of crazy jerks. Putin on one side, and Basayev on the other. The one man who actually wanted some sort of peace in Chechnya is dead.

File this away under “Not just America is run by stupid assholes”.

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* As I’ve mentioned here before, it’s widely rumored that Putin himself (or, his boys in the FSB) blew up all those apartments, so he could coast to power on a vitriolic anti-terrorist campaign. This is such a mainstream viewpoint that even John McCain has publicly mouthed it.

I have this unfortunate problem: the field in which I travail (evolution) dictates that, if my attention is focused on any physical feature, I will ultimately be forced to posit the evolutionary underpinnings of that feature. To wit: this five o’clock shadow I’ve had going for the past several days (now running in the vicinity of sixty-two o’clock shadow).

Some of you may have noticed that women, for the most part, don’t have hair on their faces. When they do, it is generally considered somewhat odd. I’m sure that, in time, we will learn to overcome this form of chauvinism, but for the present it seems to be with us. Men get the beards. And since my face is itching like crazy right now, I have to wonder: “Why, God? Why did you do this to us? Are you still sore about that Tower of Babel thing? Was it because we stopped burning the fatted kine in your name, O Lord?”*

I’d like to point out that our nearest surviving relatives, chimps and gorillas, don’t actually have facial hair. Or, rather, whatever facial hair they have is exactly the opposite the pattern seen in humans: they have hair everywhere but around the chin and mouth.

This implies two things: first, human males specifically evolved the growth of facial hair around the chin and mouth. And second, since human females did not evolve this feature, it is likely the result of sexual selection. At some point in our history, human females expressed a sexual preference for bearded males, strong enough that it conferred a selective advantage on them.

Which leads me to ask: what the hell is wrong with you, human females?

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* I am aware that I’m not Christian or Jewish, but for the purposes of making fun of God, YHWH cannot be beat.

I’m also aware that I said I would be getting bored of these footnotes soon, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.

My dad tells me that the most important lesson he learned in this country (through, apparently, the painful process of getting it wrong for a long time) was that you’ll never get anywhere in America if you don’t toot your own horn. “Americans are very good at talking about what they do,” he more or less said.

So, here’s this ultra-short piece of fiction I wrote last night. I haven’t written much of anything recently, fiction-wise, which sucks, because I love it. But somehow I can’t, right now. I’m trying to ease myself back into it with ultra-short pieces (thus avoiding problems of narrative craft, character development, and the like).

Okay, I know that everyone has ranted adequately about how hydrogen isn’t really an energy source, it’s a vector, and you still need an energy source to produce it, blah blah blah. But, there’s an obvious value in developing this technology, which is this:

Energy sources are pretty well partitioned based on usage. Natural gas gets used for home heating, oil gets used for transportation, and coal gets used for electricity generation. There’s some cross-over in all of these areas, of course, but this is a good enough approximation for my hand-waving argument.

Oil is obviously the best suited for being a transportation fuel: all you need to do is boil it for a while, and you’ve got gasoline. Meanwhile, no one has, to date, created a coal-burning car, and don’t hold your breath (unless someone actually DOES create a coal-burning car, in which case you absolutely SHOULD hold your breath). And so once we run out of oil, we’re not going to be able to drive to Wal-Mart to buy that super-cheap salad-spinner (and even if we DID drive there, the store would be fucking empty, because the goddamn boat never brought the salad-spinners over from China, and have you ever had a Chinese salad? No, because they don’t eat salad in China, and they don’t need salad spinners, and we’ve got the makings of a real tragedy here), because there’s no liquid fuel besides gasoline. Unless, that is, we develop hydrogen as an energy vector and burn it in our cars. Q.E.D.

Of course, since oil and gas are on the outs, hydrogen is only ever going to be as “clean” as the energy source behind it. (I’m finally getting to the point, here! Exciting, isn’t it?) And what have we got more of than we know what to do with?* Coal. We’ve got upwards of 200 years of Coal, which should be more than enough time for the Vogons to get their shit together and vaporize our planet.

But coal is NOT clean, and it never has been. In fact, it’s way, way more polluting than oil and gas per unit of energy, and hydrogen fuel will probably not end up being as efficient a fuel source as gasoline (improbable as that sounds). Which is why the U.S. government is POURING money, tons and tons of money, into developing “clean coal technologies”.

You’ve heard George Bush talk about it on more than one occassion. That other guy (the one with a jaw like a Tiki god) also stressed how important it was to develop “clean coal technologies”. But both of these men are fuckwits.

“Clean coal” seems like a bad idea on all levels. Coal mining is, by itself, one of the worst polluting processes we’ve come up with. And coal burning has always been a rather nasty business, responsible for modern blessings like sulfuric acid rain. Not to mention all that CO₂ it produces. So how can we make it “good”? Well, we can pour billions upon billions of dollars into researching “CCS” - carbon capture and sequestration. What’s that? Why, it’s removing CO₂ from a stack, compressing it into a liquid or solid, and fucking burying it in the ground. That’s right, kids. Your government is spending BILLIONS of dollars researching technology that will probably be viable in, oh, 20 or 30 years to make coal slightly less polluting by BURYING CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE GROUND!

This is a good time to do a happy dance.

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* Besides lawyers, obviously, which won’t make a good fuel source because they are a net energy sink - it takes far more energy to create a lawyer than we would produce by burning one.

For those of you who use Mozilla Firefox, I highly recommend the Mouse Gestures extension, especially with mouse trails enabled. It’s so friggin’ cool.

Those of you who are still using Internut Exploder: wake up, man. Disco is dead. Move on.

And those of you who are using Safari: hi Agi!

Everyone else… err, carry on.

If, like me, you’re annoyed by all the effusions of praise over Hosni Mubarak’s magnanimous and important steps towards democracy, you should read Abu Aardvark, who is doing a pretty good job throwing some cold water on that particular fire. Juan Cole also gives it brief mention, pointing out that Mubarak gets to decide which parties can run, and will not be allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to field candidates. I’m extremely suspicious of Mubarak’s purported reforms (described here in reasonable detail), especially since not a month ago he jailed Ayman Nour, leader of a prominent opposition party (al-Ghad) and a strong advocate for democratic reforms in Egypt. Funny that Bush is putting the thumbscrews on Syria while patting Mubarak on the back, and meanwhile the latter is putting the thumbscrews on Ayman Nour.