Rhinocrisy

Listen to the words. The strong, determined words of U.S. President George Walker Bush, speaking on energy.

We must address the root causes that are driving up gas prices.

In the past decade, America’s energy consumption has been growing about 40 times faster than our energy production. That means we’re relying more on energy produced abroad.

To reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, we must take four key steps.

First, we must better use technology to become better conservers of energy.

What he called the House’s “good energy bill” eliminates most of Bush’s proposed energy efficiency funding.

And secondly, we must find innovative and environmentally sensitive ways to make the most of our existing energy resources, including oil, natural gas, coal and safe, clean nuclear power.

The only environmentally sensitive way to make the most of existing enregy sources is to not use them. And if “safe, clean nuclear power” is an existing energy source, I hope Mr. Bush will submit this news to a peer-reviewed journal, because it’s big news.

Third, we must develop promising new sources of energy, such as hydrogen, ethanol or bio-diesel.

Dude - I realize you’re a guy who ends a press conference by saying to the assembled reporters, “thank you for your answers.” But still, I need to say: hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s a storage medium which will most likely be used to store fossil fuel energy. Ethanol is not a new energy source, and while the debate rages (and this link goes to someone with serious oil industry connections), ethanol may well be an energy sink. And bio-diesel is better than the others, but if it’s going to be used for any significant fraction of our energy needs, that’s going to require even more land going into soybean cultivation — and the concominant use of fossil water, which is not a renewable resource. (Or, we could do what we did in early 2004, and start importing soybeans. Wouldn’t that be cool.)

Fourth, we must help growing energy consumers overseas, like China and India, apply new technologies to use energy more efficiently and reduce global demand of fossil fuels.

I love this one. Criminy — we have these brilliant scientists at our Dept of Energy labs who have spent their lives devising ways to save energy. But because the government’s prime directive is to provide the base with its viscous bodily fluids, these scientists mostly get to talk to one another and enjoy the view. Now, good news! Bush is going to send them to help China. Where, one can expect, they will have all the influence of, say, the dozen or so urbanist delegations to China, the human-rights promoters, or best of all, the Taiwanese “pissing in the wind” against the Chinese “anti-secession law.”

Oh I’m sorry, am I being a “filter?” Well that’s ok, because Bush was on in prime time. So don’t listen to the filter. Just listen to the words.

PS: Oh I’m sorry, did I neglect to mention that that same TV program recently wrapped up all the oil news you could possibly need.

Wow! Crooked Timber points the way to this story, on Alabama State Senator Gerald Allen’s bill to prevent schools from using public funds to buy books about homosexuality, or even by homosexual authors!

This must be a really embarassing time to be a Republican. But me, I’m hoping that these paltry sorts of culture wars (Mr. Allen is surely condemned to the rubbish-heap of endless ridicule) will escalate into la vraie chose. If I play things right, I could end up being burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno! If I’m really bad, they may even nail my tongue to my jaw so I can’t speak poisonous lies!

For a while now, I’ve been remarking to anyone who will pretend to listen on how postmodernism is fast becoming an instrument of evil. Observe the following claim in this thread I stumbled across regarding American violations of the Geneva Conventions:

Under the customs of war, not civil law, these are matters for the military command to decide. Thats my opinion, with historical precedent. You could disagree, but there really isn’t anyone with authority who can say which of us is correct.

Or, as a galloping idiot told me during a discussion on Wikipedia:

There is no absolute certainty in the factuality of evolution. It is subject to replacement just as the original theories of atomic structures were. There are many problems with the theory itself which tend to make it slide a little off its high horse.

Or, the parody version, courtesy of the Daily Show

Jon: …that’s just innuendo and that can’t be the only thing in a news story.
Colbert: Can’t it? I ask you: DOES Jon Stewart orally pleasure teamsters for pocket change?
Jon: Uhhh, no.
Colbert: Well, you are certainly entitled to that opinion, but I’m sure I can assemble an impressive panel who thinks you do. The truth lies somewhere in between. Let’s talk about it for eight weeks, and let the public decide.

In other words, the inchoate nature of knowledge has become a shield for the ignorant. Though I haven’t got many specific examples on hand, I’m sure that you can dredge up anecdotal memories of application of such arguments to modern political topics. I’ve long felt that postmodernism was something of a nihilistic tradition, and even if it can serve as a basis for attacking regressive dogmatic moral positions (e.g. Christian patriarchy), it doesn’t leave anything of worth in its place, and can be applied equally blindly in attacking progressive stances. And as it becomes an ever more deeply embedded mode of thought, its use in that manner will only become more frequent. ‘Ware being hoisted by your own petard.

Everyone can relax, it turns out that that whole “feminism” thing was wrong, and there is in fact, NO discrimination against women. Yes, that’s right! Women have got it worse than men only because of their own choices.

I learned this after I saw a “Mallard Fillmore” comic today, that claimed “if you compare apples to apples, women earn MORE than men”. My first thought was, “Hah! Mallard Fillmore. What a stupid name!”

But then I noodled around, and eventually came across what I think is the source of this claim: a book that came out recently (Jan. 2005) by one Warren Farrell. He seems to be a pretty despicable human being. Here’s a quote!

If a man ignoring a woman’s verbal ‘no’ is committing date rape, then a woman who says ‘no’ with her verbal language but ‘yes’ with her body language is committing date fraud. And a woman who continues to be sexual even after she says ‘no’ is committing date lying…

We have forgotten that before we began calling this date rape and date fraud, we called it exciting. — Warren Farrell, in Myth of Male Power

Farrell also has expressed some disturbing views on rehabilitating incest that he’s not so proud of any more. Nevertheless, he has in the intervening years become a hero of the “Men’s Rights” movement, has published several books, and now has, according to dozens of sites (including the anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum) definitively put the nail in the coffin of the gender wage gap claim with his book, “Why Men Earn More”.

Dr.* Farrell provides us with 25 (count ‘em!) reasons why women earn less than men. Cribbing from the IWF article:

The real reason than men tend to out-earn women is the choices they make. Men are far more likely to take unpleasant and dangerous jobs, what Farrell calls the “death and exposure professions.” For example, firefighting, truck driving, mining and logging — to name just a few high-risk jobs — are all more than 95 percent male. Conversely, low risk jobs like secretarial work and childcare are more than 95 percent female.

Farrell points out that in California, prison guards can earn $70,000 per year plus full medical benefits and retire after thirty years with a hefty retirement package. But it takes little imagination to figure out why California still has a difficult time staffing its prisons, and it goes without saying that most prison guards are male. Says Farrell, “As with most jobs, there’s an inverse relationship between fulfillment and pay.”

He summarizes with this Seussian jingle:

Jobs that expose you to the sleet and the heat pay more than those that are indoors and neat.

Farrell is right, of course. Oh - except for the part where he claims equal pay for equal work. Try this, or the article “So How Far Have We Come? Pestilent and Persistent Gender Gap in Pay”, by Margaret Gibelman in the journal Social Work (2003, Vol. 48, Issue 1). This is one of a handful of, well, actual sociological studies of this question I found through a few careless minutes of searching that approach the questions Dr. Farrell claims to answer with more nuance and depth. I quote from the above:

A history of occupational segregation by gender and the associated salary inequities has been well documented. Research by economists and sociologists has revealed that the wage differential between men and women is only partially explained by the characteristics of the worker (such as education level) or the job (see, for example, Acker, 1989; England, 1992; Gibelman & Schervish, 1995; National Committee on Pay Equity, 1995)… A recent study by the American Bar Association revealed that, “despite surging numbers of female lawyers, bias against women remains entrenched in the legal profession and results in steep inequities of pay, promotion, and opportunity’ (Bernstein, 1996, p. A9). Among college and university admissions officers in doctoral and comprehensive institutions, men’s median salaries were higher than women’s median salaries at every position, even when the years of experience were the same. These differences could not be explained (National Association for College Admission Counseling, 1997). The American Association of University Professors reported that for the 1996 to 1997 academic year, female faculty members, depending on their rank, earned 85 cents to 96 cents for each dollar earned by their male colleagues (Moses, 1997). A University of Michigan study that tracked the careers of 1,226 physicians trained at that university’s medical school over a 10-year period found that women occupied lower status positions and experienced unequal pay (Colburn, 1993).

Et cetera. But, as I said, Farrell IS correct: a significant portion of the difference in wages for men and women can be explained by occupational segregation. What Dr. Farrell forgets to discuss is that women continue to bear the majority of the burden for raising children. That men are able to abdicate their responsibility in order to pursue their careers, while women are not (and are slighted because of this expectation), is a matter of unquestionable salience. The implication that women’s choice is at fault in this regard implies that women can achieve equality simply by copying the behavior of men: that is, give up on raising their children. I hope I don’t need to point out what a terrible model of egalitarianism this is.

---

* His Ph.D. is in political science, so there’s no doubt that he’s eminently qualified to answer this sociological question. And since he IS so highly qualified, let it not be said that I am attempting to slight his accomplishment and erudition. I will give him his due without the least trace of irony.

I am often amazed at how the Fatherland Security apparatus in the USA treats everyone like a suspect — this in a country where practically everyone, even people who consider themselves anarchists, have a pretty good sense of collective defense and preservation.

I’m not a huge fan of the NRA, but they are on the generally right track when they say that if everyone were armed, we’d be safer — there are far more good people than bad, and if you give everyone the ability to handle dangerous or violent situations, good will win. (I part from them in that they dwell far too much on firearms while ignoring the far more important types of self-defense weaponry: good communications skills in multiple languages, physical fitness, empathy, even machine tools: when I have a 15-mm crescent wrench I can help someone I see on a dark street late at night with, say, a tacoed bike wheel.)

But instead of relying on this type of collective, non-hierarchical defense, Fatherland Security treats everyone like a suspect and wastes everyone’s time and money, inuring us to the totalitarian police state, and arguably making us more vulnerable to terrorism and crime. For example, I had to give up my 15-mm crescent wrench because it was in my backpack as I tried to board an Alaska Airlines plane last summer. Can’t have that — someone carrying a tool on a plane!

At this point the only airport security we need is bomb-sniffing dogs and maybe machines. All this worry about knives and guns is ridiculous. There are plenty of people on a plane to disarm anyone carrying such a thing, and since 0.8181, people have been mentally prepared to respond with whatever it takes to any physical threat on a plane.

So I am happy to see that clam-diggers in Boston are now being called on to watch the port. This initiative makes sense — trust the people who know the area. Even if a few “bad guys” start digging clams, they won’t be able to stop their spade-wielding colleagues from calling Fatherland Security on their government-issued mobile phones should an explosives-laden speedboat start pulling up to the latest LNG shipment.

What I hope is that this relatively smart initiative can spread beyond the largely Irish-American Boston clamdigger culture into the far more diverse, but equally important “eyes and ears” cultures of, say, cab drivers, or the largely minority communities living near our 297 chemical plants that could “affect” over 50,000 people apiece.

(Yes, I know. This post ignores the legitimate questions about the likelihood of terrorism as compared to, say, a gale that wrecks the LNG tanker or poor OSHA inspections that contribute to a chemical leak. And it ignores whether terrorism should really be stopped at the last possible second, after the terrorists have already been indoctrinated, assembled, trained, funded, armed, transported, and launched — or whether, maybe, better global policies could “dry the swamps” well ahead of that. My point is to argue that even on the terms of the current blindered system, this is one of the first time I’ve seen the Fatherland Protectors act with anything resembling brains.)

WTF?:

On one wall is a “Star Trek” poster with investigators’ faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the [Internet pedophiles] they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie…37 arrests last year.

Now remind me why, at age 11, I felt uncomfortable at the few comic book conventions I went to?

Photo released
April 28, 2004

Saurabh was just pondering how knowledge gets lost. We recently saw a government agency try to lose some knowledge. But today, it snuck out.

Now we can see why Homeland Security doesn’t want to know how many terrorist attacks took place last year, just as the Global War on Terror matured. Short answer: a more than 200 percent rise. It’s a lot like how the religious right claims to be fighting against abortion, but their tactics (including abstinence-only education and opposing contraception) seem to correlate with increased abortion rates.

With success like that, I hope Washington will declare war on orgasms. And chocolate ice-cream. And piles of kittens asleep on the sidewalk. I promise, if you censor your success rate, I promise not to tell.

Update: As usual, the clip-art people get it righter than me, faster, and funnier.

Update2: It looks like the numbers are coming out, not just through leaks, but through a new agency. So - um - never mind this posting. Except for the part about a war on orgasm, which is a very good idea.

Everyone’s favorite megacorp is worried about taking positions that its workers disagree with. This gentleman joins the debate, tossing out a surprising tidbit: Do programmers in Redmond really march through the hallways chanting against seafood and deodorant? I thought I was the only one. My favorite:

Hey hey, ho ho
Shrimp scampi
In my panty
Make me stinky
Is what democracy sounds like

(repeat until hoarse)

I’m down to six fingers, after I stabbed myself in my right middle finger last night with a kitchen knife. Since I’ve thus got a large blood clot “at hand”, I’ll take this opportunity to make an awkward segue.

Michael Behe argues in his book, “Darwin’s Black Box”, that certain protein pathways are what he terms “irreducibly complex”, that is, could not have formed through an evolutionary process. Behe’s contention is that some complex, multi-component systems would obviously fail if any one component were missing, and since evolution by natural selection demands they form via a stepwise process, such systems could not have been the product of evolution. The cascade of reactions that results in the formation of blood clots in humans is one of his more spectacular examples.

A simple thought experiment illustrates both the sense and nonsense of this proposition. Take three chopsticks and try to form a tripod with them through a series of stable intermediates. It seems impossible, since any two by themselves will collapse without the support of a third. But in fact, we can very easily form such a structure: we stabilize the one- and two-stick intermediates with one hand, add the third, and take our hand away. A system that is apparently irreducibly complex is not so if we consider the possibility of scaffolding structures, which stabilized intermediates in a way which is not obvious from the current state of the system.

In fact, this is not a far-fetched idea. Life is far more adept at borrowing, stealing, subverting and recycling bits of machinery than we can imagine. Irreducible complexity isn’t a disproof of evolution, unless you can definitively establish that no such scaffolding process of intermediates could have occurred - a much more difficult, and perhaps even impossible proposition. In fact, Behe’s original blood clot example has been taken apart by simple example - a supposedly vital component of the “irreducibly complex” system does not exist in some other species.

Nevertheless, despite the weakness of the critique, and despite the fact that it remains a fundamentally negative statement and has not been augmented by any coherent theory of origins, the idea of “irreducible complexity” is the linchpin of the modern Intelligent Design movement, which in turn represents the basis for the modern Christian creationist attack on the theory of evolution. Since that paritcular movement has been gaining in leaps and bounds, and since attacking the theory of evolution has always been a favorite hobby-horse of the Christian conservative movement, it’s fairly inevitable that the attempts to discredit the theory would be escalating. And not without some success, in the lay public. The “modern synthesis” is a very well-established theory, corroborated by evidence from many fields: genetics, ecology, geology, paleontology, et alia. But most people only have a cursory understanding of these fields, and (coupled with ideological credence) are susceptible to flawed but technical and informed arguments in a broad range of these fields. So, I’m not surprised to see proponents of intelligent design “theory” gaining ground and becoming more militant and self-assured.

But, to be honest, I can’t picture a realistic scenario in which these forces achieve a victory. It’s frankly impossible, given the fact that the science is crap, and evolution is a well-established liberal sacred cow. If it were seriously threatened, battle lines would be drawn and some sustained battles would occur, and intelligent design would come out bloodied and probably dead.

So the only issue is whether it’s worthwhile to have a sensibly educated public. Note that the American majority has been hostile to the theory of evolution pretty much since its inception (along with other scientific theories), and the result has not been a notable decay in the strength of these theories or of scientific institutions. They’ve remained quite robust, in fact. The only reason, therefore, to advance a correct understanding of the theory of evolution (and other theories that contradict Christian dogma) is because they imply a rejection of Christian dogma. Their acceptance necessarily entails giving up the belief in Biblical inerrancy. This is why they’re so vigorously opposed.

Now, I’m quite clearly an empiricist, and I think Biblical inerrancy is the height of foolishness. On the other hand, there’s another liberal sacred cow at stake here, viz. the Establishment Clause. Since evolution is a direct contravention of a religious viewpoint, doesn’t teaching it in schools imply an endorsement of a particular religious perspective?

We can always hope that Christians will grow the fuck up and wake up to reality, but it’s a historical truth that people cling fiercely to their religious ideals, no matter how irrational. I think this is a battle we’re stuck with. Forever, even.