Rhinocrisy

This essay on the subject of the miserable TSA regulations seems almost redundant. Does anyone approve of the meaningless protocols set in place at airport security?

I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations, or the average American’s acceptance of them and willingness to be humiliated. These wasteful and tedious protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of protest rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbled resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.

Holiday travel => airport security => taking off my shoes again. I gather this is the result of infamous would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid, whose failed attempt has since resulted in more bunion and hangnail exposure than the founding of the Birkenstock sandal company. It’s only a matter of time before a Catholic church pedophilia-like scandal sweeps the TSA and it is forced to admit it covered up the legions of foot fetishists who have since joined its ranks, lecherously ogling unclad arches and sweat-stained socks.

But why should foot-fetishists have all the fun? Airports have a disproportionate number of young, attractive travelers, and I, too, want to be able to ogle my pound of flesh. The time is ripe: we need a pants bomber pronto.

So, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. But by whom?

To an American the answer is obvious: al-Qaeda did it. This is the assumption of Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM:

Zinni rattled off reasons for al-Qaeda’s wanting Bhutto dead, including her commitment to democracy, her secular views, the blowback it will create for Musharraf, and her gender. Beyond that, Zinni says al-Qaeda — making marginal progress in Afghanistan, backsliding in Iraq, and rebuffed in Somalia — is looking for a new battlefield.

They’ve also allegedly claimed responsibility.

To an Indian this is just as obviously the ISI (i.e., Musharraf). That name describes a bogeyman commensurate with the Mossad or the KGB in that part of the world, with a long list of terrible deeds tallied up beneath it. And certainly Musharraf is a very credible suspect; we’ve seen in recent days that he is quite determined to hold onto power, and Bhutto was certainly a threat to that.

And – are these really alternatives? The ISI was instrumental in bringing al-Qaeda to the point where it is. It nursed on one teat the mujahideen movement in Afghanistan, serving as the main conduit for US money into the region.^* On the other teat clung the mewling babe that grew into the Taliban movement, brought up in madrassas all throughout Pakistan. They didn’t acquire the weapons and funding necessary to wrest misrule of Afghanistan from its savage and well-armed warlords by magic; tanks don’t grow on trees. (Much of this, ironically, went on during the reign of Benazir Bhutto.) And only after September 11 were there moves to divest the ISI of any trace of sympathy for either of these parties.

Was this effort sincere? Is Musharraf genuinely interested in reigning in these militants, or merely in playing a shell game that convinces the US he is doing what they want? I’ve always suspected the latter. His moves are too half-hearted, his purges temporary, his discipline mere gestures. And I’m not alone in being incredulous of the idea that the ISI was well and truly cleansed. And in this instance their interests are well-aligned.

Bhutto herself complained of specific individuals within the ISI who she thought were closely involved in her previous assassination attempts. At the very least the government is guilty of being lax, of looking the other way while interested parties tried to kill her. That much is fact.

Does it amount to conspiracy? Did Musharraf want Benazir Bhutto dead? Certainly we’re not going to get any useful information out of official investigations. We’ve known for decades that those do nothing to settle the question of who assassinated whom. I propose the following metric: If Musharraf postpones elections, then he is not guilty.

Commence twiddling thumbs.

A missive from the hedgehog woke me from my torpor, and I realize that I should give this blog its due diligence.

I wish I had a good story to explain the long silence. I was visiting a community of Arab exiles in Paraguay, whom I became acquainted with through a friend who trades in refurbished stereos with Arab expatriates all over the world. I found an old boot containing half a kilo of cocaine and an ancient illuminated copy of “The Lives of the Saints”, and had a devil of a time getting rid of both. I contracted a multiply-resistant strain of Staphylococcus and spent the month groaning in a hospital bed, my skin covered in sores that made it look like dried dates, while my doctors attempted to defeat the bug with various combinations of antibiotics. I unfortunately laughed at a man who stepped in a puddle of murky ice-water, who it turned out was a not-so-forgiving Jewish gangster, and spent the month hiding out with my old roommate in Ithaca until the whole thing blew over. I attended a conference in China and lost my passport, and so had to sneak back into the country with the assistance of a parade of smuggler groups, one of which made me work as a driver along the southern border of Panama for two weeks before allowing me to travel north again. I was trapped in a glass bottle by a djinn, and was only discovered a few days ago when my roommate mistook my prison for a bottle of Trader Joe’s olive oil. I went scuba diving and got my foot trapped in the maw of a giant clam, and had to take my air through a long tube until the clam (apparently popular as a local tourist attraction and therefore more valuable than my foot) released me. Meanwhile the skin on my hands partially rotted and they nearly had to be amputated. A fit of mania seized me and I took it upon myself to dig a well in the backyard; the frozen ground made it impossible to identify the water table, and I dug thirty feet down before I realized this. My yoga instructor spent a weekend in samadhi and conceived some brilliant insights about the nature of being, and enlisted my help to translate his fevered and fragmentary memory of his brief wisdom into a vernacular text. We argued almost constantly and in the end wrote almost nothing down. I experimented with a low-sodium diet that resulted in me dropping into a coma. In my comatose state I dreamt I was a salmon, desperately struggling upriver against the current, with the vague desire to spawn glimmering in my mind like a flickering beacon to guide me. Along with some friends I built a stone tower thirty feet high in a local park, working under cover of darkness and sleeping during the day. It collapsed after the first snowstorm and now resembles a ruined battlement. While drunk at a party I received a brief instruction in Tibetan throat singing. But poor coaching led to me developing two completely separate voices, which warred constantly whenever I attempted to speak and often expressed contradictory viewpoints. Recovery required learning to swallow my own tongue without choking. I received an envelope in the mail addressed to a former resident of my house, which I opened; the contents included a letter from the real Santa Claus and one of Baba Jaga’s iron teeth. My subsequent attempts to interest a society of cryptozoologists (some of the most frustrating, and, ironically, close-minded individuals I have ever encountered) in either of these items proved fruitless. A botanist I know isolated a phytoestrogen from a Colombian vine that he claimed suppressed homosexual urges and promoted heterosexual ones. A society of gay ninjas determined to destroy his research solicited my help as a mole. A new brand of long underwear I recently began wearing resulted in an unusual level of static accumulation, which caused me to destroy any keyboard as soon as I touched it; I proved unable to isolate the source of this problem for several weeks. My roommates discovered flatworms in a bunch of tripe they had purchased with the intent of making rennet for use in a homemade Havarti cheese, and got the rest of us tied up in their bullshit legal dramatics with the provider of the infected meat. Fuckers. I stumbled across some bones while jogging, which turned out to be those of a dromedary camel, a mystery which eventually led me to discover a defunct bestiality society which used to run around these parts in the 1920s.

But the truth is it’s winter, and I’m depressed, and tied up with work, and my own guts are strangling me. Which seems an ill excuse not to write. I’ll try to pick it up.

Governments throughout history have been tools of oppression; they need not be.

A large part of the reason for my new-found Mike Gravel fanhood is his National Initiative, a piece of legislation/Constitutional amendment he has been promoting for several years. In his own words, the problem with representative democracy:

We’re accustomed to thinking that, when we go to the polls on election day, that we’re exercising our power. Really, what we’re doing is we’re giving our power away, and giving it to politicians who have manipulated the electoral process; and then, once they get in office, they obviously – dictates of human nature require that they will put their interests before the public interest. That’s the way representative government works.

This gives me paroxysms of joy to hear. Yes! finally, someone who actually believes in democracy!

Gravel proposes changes allowing a national initiative process, whereby people can vote directly on federal laws. The details can be read here, if you’re curious. I’m sure there’s room for improvement (for example I’m dubious of the use of public opinion polling as part of the qualification process), but at first pass it seems well-organized and attempts to address some of the major pitfalls of state-level ballot initiatives. Read the section titled “A Strong Deliberative Process” and you will hopefully get a warm, happy feeling in the pit of your stomach.

An interesting twist, as Gravel acknowledges, is that Congress is unlikely to enact legislation which directly undermines its power. To answer that, Gravel proposes that the people vote directly on the issue of creating the initiative (as organized by his non-profit company Philadelphia II, where you can, in fact, start the first part of approving the initiative right now). Would it fly? Who knows? But it’s certainly worth trying, and I think if it did NOT fly, despite approval by a majority of the electorate, it would be quite revealing enough to shake the foundations of this country.

Finally, here’s Gravel himself on the subject. If you don’t already know, you can get your fill of Gravel on YouTube – he posts Q&As with random questions from folks on a regular basis. Golden.

This song is from the ending credits of Valve’s stellar first-person-puzzler game Portal, as sung by the mad AI GLaDOS. I find the lyrics very poignant, especially:

I’m doing science and I’m still alive.

Lately I’ve been interested in the Fusor, a device which achieves fusion by accelerating individual ions to high energies using electric fields (rather than creating a high-temperature plasma, the strategy employed by expensive and to date unsuccessful “tokomak”-based methods). It seems some guys at UC Irvine have done something similar. Check it out.

Note that this is NOT “cold fusion”, it is “hot fusion”, and the physics is relatively uncontroversial. Fusion power in a matter of years?

UPDATE: Apparently not.

One of our most popular posts, google-wise, is hedgehog’s missive about the health effects of bisphenol-A, a common ingredient in many plastics. I happened across a nice letter in PLoS Biology, written by Rebecca Roberts, describing her fears as a new mother on her child’s exposure to BPA. Included is a nice summary and references for some of the research supporting the need for tighter regulation (some say banning) of BPA in plastic products, especially with regards to kids, and a chronicle of the failed legislative efforts at removing it.

America’s predominant response to racism, of course, has long been denial. In Jena, the town fathers effected a vivid evasion. Their problem, they concluded, was not themselves but their tree: they cut down the offending oak and hauled it away.

Cha.

Here’s some video of old white guys doing the right thing.

The first you’ve probably seen, of Republican mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego coming out in support of gay marriage. If you haven’t, you MUST watch it. You might even cry.

The next is a composite of Old Man Winter Mike Gravel’s tidbits from the last debate. Gravel is a crazy old man, to be sure, but goddamn, he is so right. Even about how angry he is.

While we’re setting fire to myths, I might as well weigh in on this whole autism/vaccination thing, which I’ve been intending to write about for months. Recently Jenny McCarthy (no pictures, sorry) appeared on the Oprah Winfrey (no pictures, sorry) show, along with Holly Robinson Peete (Earthquake, 2004) to discuss autism. Both are mothers of autistic children. Jenny told the following horror story about how she believes her son Evan became autistic:

“Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, “I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother’s desperate attempt to blame something,’ and he swore at me, and then the nurse gave [Evan] the shot,” she says. “And I remember going, ‘Oh, God, I hope he’s right.’ And soon thereafter-boom-the soul’s gone from his eyes.”

Chilling, indeed. But – do we believe it? Read the rest of this entry »