Rhinocrisy

I have not paid my taxes yet for 2006.

If I were to pay my taxes, it is likely that a significant portion of those dollars will go towards funding the Iraq occupation, nuclear weapons, and a host of other military-industrial projects that I somehow can’t bring myself to masturbate about.^*

I am a poor individual, and my contribution in this regard will be meager. Specifically, I estimate that my total contribution to the Iraq War will be about $160,^† a mere billionth of the total cost of the war. I’m not sure what can be purchased for this amount, but I find it an alarmingly large quantity from my own perspective. I’m somewhat dismayed that my material contribution is so substantial. I could certainly do a lot that was less damaging to the world with that $160.

I’m not sure how guilty I should feel about this - refusal to pay means I might end up with severe debt or, in extremely unlikely scenarios, prison. Should I balance this against the fact that I’m purchasing bullets? Maybe those bullets go unused - maybe they’re only fired off in warning and not into someone’s spine. Maybe I pay for a soldier’s insulin supplement or boots. Whatever the case, ultimately I’m pitting a bit of my well-being against that of someone else.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

^* Am I un-American?

^† Roughly, assuming I pay ~2700 in taxes and the Iraq budget is about $161 billion out of a total of $2600 billion in outlays for 2008.

When do we say “enough” to new building construction?

The average occupied American home in 2005 — renter and homeowner, apartment and house — was 1,795 square feet. That’s an 11% increase from 1,610 in 1985 (big PDF).

At the same time, the median number of square feet per person in occupied units rose by 18% to 752 from 633 as the number of people per unit declined.

The current population of the USA is about 302 million. By returning to the cramped, miserable living conditions of 1985, we could house the next 48 million Americans — about 15 years’ worth of growth at one new resident every 11 seconds — without building a single new unit of housing.

By advancing to a more collectively oriented culture in which real estate investment isn’t considered the be-all-and-end-all of middle class existence, by opening up to more coop living or extended family living, who knows how many more could fit while increasing happiness.

edited 5:20 a.m. to correct math errors

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.

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”

A deep and disturbing essay by William Arkin on his Washington Post page. He points out that the President of the USA is motivated by good and sees the bulk of Americans, never mind people elsewhere, as being naive sops who must be ignored in the formulation of policy.

I think this gets to the heart of why demonstrations and letter-writing do no good — we can’t establish our basic credibility to get in the mental door with the people who matter, so the details of what we say becomes irrelevant. This is a president who thinks the Iraq Study Group was a bunch of idealistic flakes, while he is The Protector.

Arkin also recommends against using fear as a motivating principle for anti-Bush politics. He says that when liberals say Bush is making the threat of terrorism greater, they inadvertently play into his message and strengthen his grip. If he’s right, it’s too bad, because he is increasing the risk of terrorism, and he does make me feel physically threatened.

Occupying streets is for losers. Occupying Wal-Mart? Now you’re talking. Or hablando, as the case may be.

If you can’t deal with the lengthy and tough-to-comprehend Spanish chanting, just jump 10 minutes into the video. It gets better and better.

And in case you haven’t been closely tracking Mexican politics, they had an election this summer in which the lefty was narrowly beaten by the rightist in an election marked with many irregularities. Voto x Voto, or Voto por voto, or vote by vote, has become the slogan of the lefty’s demonstrators, who occupied the financial core of the nation’s capital for more than a month in August and September.

According to Chris of Attitude Adjustor, such demonstrations took place at 22 Wal-Marts around Mexico City in one afternoon. I don’t know — I was in Mexico at the time and unsurprisingly heard nothing about it on the national news. Maybe this explains why the security at the Wal-Mart near the Refineria metro station got so nervous when I started shooting photos two days ago. (Yes, there’s a subway station for the refinery. I went there just cause I loved its name. The area was dismal, with WalMart sharing space with a mall called “Suburbia” that reminded me mostly of the movie Suburbia.)

Strange, I have so much to write about Mexico and here I am starting by writing about something I see on the Internet rather than all that I saw and recorded with my eyes, pen, recorder and camera.

I would like to think that the San Francisco Police Department has a new and salutary practice for dealing with terrorists: arrest them and treat them as common criminals. Yesterday, an Afghani man, Omeed Aziz Popal, ran down at least 14 people on the streets of San Francisco, most of them in largely African-American and Jewish neighborhoods. Two of the victims were outside the Jewish Community Center. Neither the cops nor the media brought up his ethnicity or that of the victims’ neighborhoods, though today’s SF Chronicle update does describe the ethnicity of the victims. The only mention of terrorism was apparently on local TV Channel 2, which said the driver claimed to be a terrorist. The police denied his assertion.

This is brilliant. Deny the guy the attention he might have been seeking. And refuse to be terrorized. Hooray SFPD.

The sad part is that this probably isn’t a new modus operandi. If Popal had used a gun or a poison instead of a car, the news worldwide would have covered this carnage and there’s no doubt that the word “terrorism” would have been thrown around. The reason it wasn’t, in this case, was most likely because people are so inured to car violence.

It’s always nice to hear from a security professional who cares about security more than he cares about getting on CNN. Bruce Schneier is such a person. His new column at Wired News is worth a read.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want….

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

I’ve been saying for years, the best response to terrorists is to treat them as particularly meddlesome criminals, not as threats to the basic essence of society. That gives them too much credit and our society too little. The only reason bin Laden and friends were able to destroy much of American democracy is because of their allies in high places.

An old girlfriend of mine is interning at a company that is looking for found materials to make their products out of - in this case, durable cloth-like materials.

This morning I removed some old keys from my keychain - some of them I can’t even remember what they’re for. I didn’t know what to do with the old keys afterwards. They can’t really be recut and they’re more or less useless in other contexts. Hallowe’en costume, maybe - the Keymaker from The Matrix Reloaded.

A few weeks back I was reading an article in the Boston Globe about pollution in Morocco resulting from their prolific olive oil industry. Apparently they have tremendous problems from the remainder, the pulp produced in the olive oil production process, being dumped into waterways, where it produces an oily olive-oil slick and all sorts of other nasty problems.

One of my utopian schemes has been as follows: after the Revolution, garbage collectors ought to actually play the role of “sanitation engineer”. That is, after they’ve picked up the trash, they go back and figure out what to do with it - categorize the kinds of trash received, which ones are problematic, which ones can be easily recycled and have amazingly useful second lives. This seems like it would actually be a fantastically entertaining and profitable line of work. I’m not entirely sure why it doesn’t happen already…

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.

^† 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.