Rhinocrisy

In the “Stuff you can’t make up” department, the head of the WHO’s HIV/AIDS program, which today announced that men should be circumcised in order to reduce their chance of getting HIV by 60%, is named Kevin De Cock.

I’m not sure how I feel about the recommendation myself. Actually, I can tell you that my immediate reaction was anger, before I read the study, which makes it clear that the effect is almost certainly real (that is, attributable directly to the circumcision and not attendant factors). It seems risky in the extreme to pin a lot of emphasis on something with a relatively modest effect if it’s only going to result in more risk-taking behavior. It’s also not cheap at all to circumcise everyone in sub-Saharan Africa (it costs $50-100 a slice), which means it’s arguably a big waste of money as well. But maybe they know what they’re talking about - I’m not a public health specialist.

I’ve been thinking about that U.S. Attorney purge. I’ve been having a great time following it from the safe distance of the Internet, watching it like a soap opera on Talking Points Memo. It’s great drama. While no one knows why these particular prosecutors got canned, I have a theory — all of them but the Californians come from jurisdictions likely to be “battleground states” in the 2008 presidential race. And the Californians had problems of their own.
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While looking up a story about how harmful various drugs are in The Lancet (more on that later), I found the editors of the journal, as well as a considerable number of their colleagues, expressing their disapproval of their publisher, Reed Elsevier, engaging in and even organizing arms exhibitions. They say:

When the connection between Reed Elsevier and the arms trade was drawn to our attention in 2005, we joined our International Advisory Board to ask the company to divest itself of this part of its business. We argued that the arms trade was incompatible with the professional values of a health-science publisher—promoting health and wellbeing, reducing death and disability, respecting human rights, and showing concern for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society. Reed Elsevier supported our freedom to say what we did, but has so far declined to pursue our request.

They go on to point out that a number of professional associations have called for a boycott of all Reed Elsevier publications, including The Lancet, to encourage the publisher to divest. Despite this it seems the editors have chosen to go down with the ship rather than abandon principle. Good on them.

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Liberation, the U.S. has spent about $410 billion on the war. The head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office has said it will cost at least $1 trillion. Iraq had 26 million people in it at the beginning. So far, the U.S. has spent about $15,800 per Iraqi. In a country where the per-capita income in 2003 was about $255. The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years. Meanwhile Iraq would still have functioning industries, farms and infrastructure, which would give people there a much higher quality of life.

If the killing rates found in last year’s Johns Hopkins study have continued, about 730,000 Iraqis have now been killed, along with the UN’s new estimate of 2 million refugees. So to calculate it another way, the U.S. has spent about $562,000 per Iraqi killed. Which is pretty efficient compared to, say, California’s death penalty, which costs the state about $250 million per corpse, according to the LA Times (cited at Death Penalty Focus).

The next-generation U.S. bomber should be outfitted with bomb bays that release $20 bills. I am not joking.

I know how low my expectations of U.S. government have fallen when, upon reading this report, I am not only furious but also relieved, like the time I hurled up a burger that had been out too long.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board decided to slam oil company BP for screwing the pooch on safety at its Texas City, Texas refinery and contributing to an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 180 in 2005. Their press release is terrifying. It says a tanker-truck worth of flammable hydrocarbons spewed out of a vat in less than two minutes. It vaporized and spread over the property before being ignited and bang. “High overpressures from the resulting vapor cloud explosion totally destroyed 13 trailers and damaged 27 others. People inside trailers were injured as far as 479 feet away from the blowdown drum, and trailers nearly 1000 feet away sustained damage.”

It wasn’t surprising that fuels can burn and even explode. Or that refineries might suffer from design flaws. The two surprises were how open the investigators were about negligence by the oil company and in recommending federal regulation as a cure.

For BP’s part, here was a particularly damning section:

the refinery only investigated three of the eight known previous ISOM blowdown release incidents, where flammable and potentially explosive vapor was released from the same blowdown drum involved in the March 23 accident. In 2004, an internal BP audit graded the refinery’s analysis of incident information as “poor.”

And there was that subhead, “Dysfunctional Safety Culture Existed at All Levels of BP,” followed by lines like “BP executives made spending cuts without assessing the safety impact of those decisions.”

I know I’m not including BP’s side of the story here, because my point isn’t to provide a news story. I’m just pleased that any U.S. federal agency would speak such clear truth to power. And even more surprised that they would call on the government, rather than voluntary industry action, as the remedy. They did so in a section called “OSHA Should Increase Petrochemical Inspections, Enforcement.”

Proposed OSHA fines during the twenty years preceding the March 2005 disaster - a period when ten fatalities occurred at the refinery - totaled $270,255; net fines collected after negotiations totaled $77,860….

Federal OSHA conducted only nine [in depth, multi-week] inspections [between 1995 and 2005], and none in the refining sector. State agencies in the 26 states that operate their own workplace safety programs conducted a total of 48 [such] inspections, including six at refineries. However, a number of states - including Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, where much of the U.S. oil and chemical industry is concentrated - rely upon federal OSHA to enforce workplace safety rules….

California’s Contra Costa County, which has its own industrial safety ordinance, inspects each covered facility every three years. A county staff of five engineers performs an average of 16 inspections per year.

I can think of a few other places where the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s straightforward analysis could come in handy.

Some of you may have seen the news that a large amount of water ice has been discovered hidden under Mars’ south pole. Supposedly this is enough to cover the entire surface of Mars to a depth of 10m. Pretty cool!

Of course this doesn’t make much sense, since water falls to the lowest point it can, so it’s reasonable to ask what Mars would look like if all this water flowed down to fill basins. I did a pretty naive approximation of this, the results of which are below.

First we start with a topography map of Mars, courtesy NASA:

This is an equirectangular projection, which makes math easy on us. Given the surface area of Mars, we know how much water is sitting around (in cubic meters) based on the above figure. If we assume that this could all sit on top of the dry Martian surface without it being sucked up like a sponge (doubtful), we can work out what height this would fill merely by subtracting away the terrain. This works out to a height of 90m, surprisingly enough. Mars seems to be pretty flat. So we can flood everything below that:

Then some false coloring and completely fictitious clouds for jazz:

Looks neat! I’d live there.

Check out this little poll the Chicago Tribune has running on whether homosexuality is immoral, with their columnist Eric Zorn bravely holding the fort in defense of the obvious answer. A fairly unvarnished question. I don’t think I know a single person who would answer yes. But the poll stands at an almost even tie. O tempora, o mores.

Previously we lamented the ease with which scientific theories on the subject of evolution can be smudged in the public eye, and how simple it is for a disingenuous party to skew the proportions of a “debate”, especially given an ideologically-predisposed audience. Fortunately, other domains of science are vulnerable to the same tactics, so we biologists are not alone.

A case in point: the recently-released documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, aired on the UK’s Channel 4, is earning wild praise all over the [expletive deleted] for finally debunking that pesky global warming myth once and for all. Thanks to the miracle of science, you can actually view this documentary in full. Which I did!^*

The piece is full of errors (and also full of infuriatingly snide and self-satisfied men). I was forced to flip my LCD monitor the bird a couple of times. The most egregious, in my estimation, was a little segment talking about how carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (including the good old bit about how water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, so why should we pay CO₂ so much attention?), and anyway anthropogenic carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the total CO₂ released into the atmosphere every year, swamped by the amount released by volcanoes and decaying plant matter. This is hopelessly insulting if you even know how to spell “science”. Real Climate has a decent thrashing, plus more in comments.

Then it gets weird: the documentary concludes by positing that this is all an effort on the part of the first world to keep the Third World down. Say what? The environmental movement is fighting against big business and First World governments to keep the Third World down?

The producer of the piece is a guy named Martin Durkin, whose inglorious production history is apparently firmly wedded to controversy. Curiously enough, it turns out that he’s closely associated with a band currently called “Spiked” (their hagiographic piece on the documentary is here), previously known as “LM”. A.k.a. “Living Marxism”. George Monbiot reveals that this is apparently the product of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist unit you might be familiar with. Apparently the RCP feels that the environmental movement is the spearhead of the Western effort to crush Third World development, and is doing what it can to stymie this evil green tide (though evidently the news has not reached all quarters).

Loopy Maoists aside, it’s astonishing how easy it is to make and distribute a documentary like this these days. (You may have noted the similarly-styled documentary “Loose Change“.) The Internet is much better at transmitting than at producing novel ideas (cf. this post), meaning that the veneer of intelligence is often enough to allow something to go skating for miles and miles further than it otherwise might have. Note that the obverse is not necessarily better; the majority of global warming believers likely take it on faith, having received the gospel from Al Gore or some other cherished apostle.

This doesn’t speak well for contemporary discourse. But we shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Modern questions are often highly technical, and it’s really unremarkable that most people are unequipped with the means to parse them correctly. All of us defer to others in their areas of expertise, and in areas of contention it’s appealing to attend to the words of those experts that scratch our confirmation bias. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to be able to reach the right conclusions under those circumstances.

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^* More or less. I skipped heavily once it got past the science.

Daylight savings time starts tonight in the United States, 5 weeks earlier than it has in prior years. The theory behind the change was that it would save energy. The theory, from what I can tell, was based on studies that dated to the Nixon Administration. Like so much in the Bush Administration, it was a “no-brainer” fix, a painless step that seemed like a win-win. I bet you $1 that it turns out to be lose-lose.

The win-win idea was that it would cost little to implement the change, consumers would save money, and the U.S. would become more energy-independent. All of these are likely to turn out false.
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I’ve spent the morning getting mad about Al Gore.

It seems that soon after Al received his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research released a report about his profligate consumption:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

Now, this is an absurd amount of power. Reportedly Al Gore’s house is 10,000 square feet (data not shown), which is maybe twice or three times the size of my house, depending on how you reckon things. I live in a northern clime, so presumably our consumption in this eight-person household should be much greater than in Tennessee. So I’m not clear what, exactly, Gore might be doing to burn so much power, and that makes me suspect there’s a little more to this story. But, be that as it may…

This story was widely reported with great glee across the blogospore, with many pointing out that since Mr. Gore was such an unmitigated tool, he was in no position to tell them what to do.

[Pause for dramatic sigh.]

This blog is called “Rhinocrisy”, for reasons of fancy more than anything else. But it behooves us to reflect for a moment on our sister-word, hypocrisy. The moment will be brief, and we will use it to say only this: hypocrisy is not important.

We’ve had precious little reflection on hypocrisy, here. I have always firmly believed that one bears responsibility for one’s own behavior. I attribute this to my Hindu upbringing, which inculcated in me the idea of “dharma”, which Spike Lee translated quite well: do the right thing. That’s all. So it doesn’t matter whether someone else says one thing and does another, or whether you yourself can’t reconcile your speech and actions. The balance of your sins is determined simply by whether you did the right thing, plain and simple. Whether or not Al Gore is a sinner has no bearing on your own sin, or on your right to sin. The Dude said it clearly two thousand years ago:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

So, when we speak of “rhinocrisy”, we mean to say: failure to do the right thing.