Rhinocrisy

Meant to post this a while back, but it seems the West African Black rhino^* is extinct. As a species we’ve managed to eliminate most of the amazing megafauna in the world - only a few left! Let’s keep trying, people.

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^* So called to distinguish it from the White rhino, “White” being taken from the Afrikaans “weit” for “wide”, to describe the latter’s wide mouth.

This project is brilliant. We’re already putting the tape up all around our burrow. An art installation about it is in the window of Artists Television Access in San Francisco and it looks like S.F. Critical Mass might try and follow a future waterline route this month. I can’t think of a better way to commemorate Hurricane Katrina — except, maybe, for listening to Fats Domino and eating a plate of my extra-savory vegan jambalaya.

Apparently, someone decided to list us as a “Blog of Note” on the blogger.com front page. Undoubtedly this brief window of fame^* will result in a meteoric rise, culminating in my being deluged by attractive women and buried alive in a mountain of money and precious jewels. Please send shovels.

In accordance with this elevation in status, we will immediately begin to implement the points of our ten-point program, which are as follows:

• A federal Civilian Caprice Corps will be created to encourage the growth of spontaneity, eccentricity and public exhibitionism; corps members will patrol the streets undercover and reward exemplary spontaneous behavior with a shower of chocolate coins.
• To Adam Peacock: I forgive you and your gang of cronies for teasing me in the third grade. You can keep your thumbs.
• Our first major economics reform will be the imposition of the tyranny of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). This will apply at all levels: hot dog buns and hot dogs must both be packaged in compatible multiples; all laptops, cell phones, electric razors and other portable electronic devices will employ common plug interfaces; cameras, etc., will agree on a single freaking memory card format. To avoid confusion due to the newfound prominence of the ISO, the International Socialist Organisation will be disbanded. Sorry, college Marxists.
• Federal dollars currently spent on nuclear stockpile maintenance will be diverted to a National Boondoggle Fund, which will require the construction of a city-wide jungley-gym, kite the size of a ten-story office building, giant mechanical rhinoceros or other frivolous item in every major metropolis in America. This will be a waste of money, but at least it won’t be wasted on the means to destroy the planet.
• To discourage currency speculation, the dollar will be de-floated and fixed against a standard again. This action will be tied to our conservation program by backing the dollar with infant pandas, ensuring that even in the event of a panda-rush and rapid devaluation, no one will be too upset.
• “Local news” programs that report on the travails of neighborhood pets and how the corner drug store is “fleecing America” will be replaced with international news, so Americans know what countries they are bombing and can identify them on a map.
• All politicians will be shot, or at the very least severely reprimanded.
• Foreign aid will be directed towards actual progressive development goals, as opposed to bolstering our favorite gangsters or promoting trade partnerships with American businesses.
• People will actually be made to learn something about how to build democratic institutions in this so-called democracy, starting with civics classes in elementary schools.
• “Mild” and “Medium” salsas will no longer be sold. If you can’t take the heat, eat some rice cakes instead.

Some of these goals may seem controversial^† However, we are confident that with enough good faith and the judicious application of suitable hallucinogenic compounds, you will come to agree with all of our positions. We’ve already printed up the t-shirts.

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^* I’m told I can expect this to last somewhere around fifteen minutes.

^† We have considered the possible catastrophic effects of panda extinction in a number of detailed scenarios. However, a small intrepid team could be sent back in time to Qin Dynasty-era China to save the species from total annihilation. We’ve already started our calculations for time warp.

Some super-smart and rather funny people wrote recently in dismayed tones about the conquest of irony over satire.^* I worry more about the death of disappointment.

Talking to American baby boomers, I sense a national self-image that now seems naive, quaint, and maybe a bit foolish. They felt their country could offer freedom and democracy and hope for the world — not just as a talking point but for real. I talked to one fellow in June who said that even after he turned against Vietnam, he still applied to the State Department — not realizing that they didn’t much hire Jews.

Who under 30 carries that kind of hope? Without hope, there is no disappointment. Without disappointment, no Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, no All the President’s Men, no “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin-to-Die Rag” or “Ohio.” Not even, and this is art that came out in the 80s but was produced by a boomer…

read the whole delicious post by clicking hereBloom County, a daily comic that openly discussed safe sex, had its characters go on a closed-shop union-led strike, and talked of impeaching Reagan.

I think that the detachment and indifference one finds in youth culture and even in protest culture about the fate of the USA — and maybe of the developed world as a whole — is based on despair. We’ve given up hope that Enlightenment-era Constitutional democracy is anything but a cover for the rapaciousness that’s cataloged in the million-selling A People’s History of the United States and, on weekdays, in the Wall Street Journal. It’s like we feel it would be just as well to throw this draft out, ball it up and start over. And that would be great if any real revolutionary sentiment was flowing around, but it’s not — we’re not throwing out, we’re not starting over, and as we withdraw into negativity and hopelessness, real people are being killed in our wars and factories.

The most terrifying loss isn’t comedy or cine verite. It’s the loss of a wide-open youth culture in which people get together and commiserate and fix things — a culture motivated, maybe, by hope and disappointment. I know the Web is nice but no, it’s not the same. When veterans returned from Vietnam (forget the “spitting” myths, they are bullshit), the angriest and most alienated were welcomed by hippie and biker culture, each premised on love for different ideals of what America and humanity could be. Even while in Vietnam, they had open organized rebellions against the politicians who sent them to kill and die. (You are required to watch the extended 12-minute trailer.)

So, to draw the parallel, where do people go who return from Iraq? Almost half a million have served there. Many have been broken down. Being under fire for a year and taught to torture and having friends killed amid limited booze and unlimited ammo is not good for the mind.

The people I find on this blergh are, I think, still hopeful and put off by America’s turn away from ideals. Many of us are immigrants or children of immigrants, but other than that, I see little unifying theme. Maybe African-Americans have kept this kind of hope more than “whites”; at least their vote turnout is higher and let’s just say no European-American celebrities had the huevos to say the obvious about whether George Bush likes black people.

Why do some people continue to struggle for the deeper, more inspiring American dream, the one embodied in the best rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, while so many others seem willing to detach and watch, not even helping create an alternative but rather enjoying clever jokes about the chaos of the fall from Jon Stewart & Co.? Do they really feel so safe? Is it the deathwish of the privileged? What?

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^*OK, so I am reposting a barely rewritten comment I wrote for another blergh. That is because I have become functionally illiterate as a result of working for the Man. Enjoy this while you can, as I am regurgitating old prose, starting with the most recent, and before long I will have to start posting stories from my high-school literary magazine. At that time, the Internet can be expected to shrivel up in recoiling horror, unwilling to transmit such bad.

note: i moved this post down to make keep saurabh’s manifesto up top longer.
-hh

I know we’re not supposed to take Internet polls seriously, but the one on this Boston Herald article was too good to pass up:

Are you surprised by the N.H. poll that found such high negatives for Hillary Clinton?

9%Yes, she is a viable candidate

83%No, she is a self-serving politician

8%It’s as irrelevent as N.H. is in the big picture
Total Votes: 3,034

My sis points me to this post about GM bentgrass designed for golf courses making its way into the wild. In the past I’ve been pretty heavily involved with anti-GM activism, including participation in some Greenpeace and Rainforst Action Network campaigns. Their focus has always annoyed me, especially as a biologist.

The fact of the matter is, the danger posed by GM crops is not really that substantial. It’s possible that GM bentgrass will run wild and overrun the world, but in truth it’s far LESS likely to do so than ordinary bentgrass. GM traits are maintained by selection - artificial selection. If they confer any fitness advantage, it is usually only in a narrow context. In the case of the above bentgrass, it’s that it was engineered for increased glyphosate resistance (which is done by expressing an alternative version of the protein whose action glyphosate normally blocks). In fact it’s likely that this would prove disadvantageous compared to normal bentgrass in the absence of maintenance and the application of RoundUp, since it’s more or less wasting resources expressing a redundant protein, and probably under much more poorly-controlled gene regulation than normal bentgrass.

So if this bentgrass gets out into the wild, chances are it’ll die out quickly, or at least that the offending GM segment of the genome will be bred out. All this talk of GM super-weeds taking over the world is therefore quite overblown and probably not something we need worry about. Sure, volunteer GM corn might occasionally turn up in a field downwind, and there’ll be some degree of contamination in the wild, but no cataclysm will result.

Food safety issues are a bit more problematic, but still I think exaggerated. RoundUp-ready tomatoes probably aren’t some sort of pestilence, and although some genetic modifications may produce unanticipated responses, especially allergenic responses (as has actually been observed), the stuff isn’t poison. Not compared to, say, Twinkies, which is not a major environmental issue.

These are the issues that get pressed because this is what draws (or drew, rather, since these days the movement is somewhat muted) popular attention. The real issues, as I see them, however, are corporate control of agriculture and biodiversity.

Remember that this is cutting-edge technology, and farmers are beholden to the seed companies that produce this stuff; they must buy RoundUp-ready seed from them every year, not to mention RoundUp itself. GM technology is a powerful way for corporations to insinuate themselves deeper into the agricultural process; the infamous “terminator” technology developed to prevent farmers from saving seed at all is a prime example.^*

And by far the greatest danger is the loss of diversity. GM crops are a very close monoculture; being engineered, they are completely lacking in genetic variation. Not only does this make for a remarkably boring and uniform food supply, it means that there is no standing genetic variation to serve as grist for breeding future strains. This is how agriculture is possible, after all: the selection of desired attributes from amongst a vast pool of available variation. The loss of this variation is a loss of accumulated wealth; we as a species worked hard to develop great varieties in our food crops. It decreases the security of our food supply to reduce it.

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^* Also a good example of ignorance of biology being used to foist arguments; many opponents of terminators complained of it wreaking havoc by spreading and creating a plant holocaust. But this is nuts; obviously, it would breed itself out of any population within a generation and cease to be a bother.

aside from everyone?

Prize quote: “Although countries have talked about encrypting data that’s stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted.” Good thing the countries of the world don’t want their borders to have any complicated infrastructure. That would have made it much harder for me to sell my passport next time I needed money while traveling. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

13 kilos!

Plenty of people fear that the leaders of the U.S. are fired by apocalyptic fantasies.

And according to a 2002 Time/CNN poll, 59% of Americans think the events portrayed in Revelation will happen; 17% think the events will take place within their lifetimes.

I pity the fools.

They don’t realize that the Rapture took place on September 4, 2005. I was burrowing across the country with my pal in a car. We saw first one vehicle, pulled over on the side of the road, with belongings but no person inside. Then another. A few miles later, yet another.

There it was — these folks were Raptured up. I mean, all told, it’s not like there were going to be very many taken into the Kingdom. 144,000 — 12,000 from each of the tribes. Goodbye to them. I wonder if they’ve found what they’re looking for.

Now as for the rest of y’all, quit your hopeless, unrequited carping at the toenails of your almighty and get down with your bad selves. We have Sodoming and Gomorrahing to do.

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about constructing for myself an electric Mini Cooper. It’s actually quite plausible; a number of hobbyist organisations facilitate the process, and financially it’s not out of reach. A brand-new 2-door Mini convertible retails for a scant $24,000, and the conversion process, depending on the batteries you employ, comes to somewhere around $6,000. The sort of performance you get is highly variable, depending on weight of the car, aerodynamics, etc., and batteries.

These last are the critical component in electric vehicles and for alternative energy in general - fossil fuels can be burned to produce power on demand, but the same is not true of many renewable energy sources. Appropriate vectors are thus a critical technology (so you can store power for when you need it), and right now the focus seems to be on batteries, as the most easily achievable in the near-term.^*

For cars, these range from simple lead-acid batteries, which might give you something like 50 mi of driving range, adequate for most people, to cutting-edge lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries, which have incredibly long lifetimes, almost no “memory” (that is, the battery does not degrade much over time, in contrast to say, NiCad batteries), and a much higher capacity than other types of batteries. Electric vehicles equipped with such batteries get ~300 mi of travel time before they must be recharged.

This is fine and wonderfully geeky, but it’s not necessarily clear that an electric car is a good idea yet for the ideological purist. For one thing, this is not a zero-emission vehicle. It has the potential to be, certainly; if it’s charged entirely by non-polluting, renewable energy sources, then it indeed can be considered as such. But most of the power in the grid comes from fossil fuels, and dirty ones at that (such as coal), especially on the Eastern seaboard, where I live. And the greater efficiency of electric motors relative to internal combustion engines means, if the power is oil-fueled, you’re only reducing your pollution output by about half. This is good, but not great.

What it DOES do is push the problem back to a single point: non-polluting power generation is the only thing we need develop if we have an electric car fleet. This is appealing because it makes the task of regulation much easier, if only a single industry, especially a large-scale, extremely centralized one, is responsible. On the other hand, it pushes the problem out of sight, where it might actually be free to grow worse. There seems to be little action in the area of moving away from coal-burning power plants - except possibly retrograde action.

Thorny. Anyway, new poll on the right.^†

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^* Fuel cells, like the hydrogen-based ones much touted by George Bush, probably won’t be feasible for another ten or twenty years, which some suspect is why Bush latched onto them - pie in the sky.

^† As an unfortunate coda to our last poll, you might read this story about polar bears resorting to cannibalism because of thin food supplies.^‡ Depressing. For further depression, read this review by Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, probably the best-known climate change researcher in the world (link courtesy of my Bong doppleganger).

^‡ I have to wonder if they know they’re not supposed to eat polar bear liver.