A Little Hint From Your Mother

clipped from unitedcats.wordpress.com

The abandoned town of Pripyat, the Chernobyl reactor in the background.

There has been an exciting new biological discovery inside the tomb of the Chernobyl reactor. Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.

This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source.

Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level.

The fungi appear to use melanin, a chemical found in human skin as well, in the same fashion as plants use chlorophyll.

Good news: It seems it may be more difficult to destroy all life on earth than we had previously imagined.

Bad News: It seems as likely as ever that we may destroy us - and Mom already has contingency plans for our replacements.

Failing to see the forest fire for the trees.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign complained Wednesday that money they've obtained for use in the Tahoe Basin is being held up by bureaucratic red tape. If more of it had been spent on brush clearing and fuel reduction, some of the devastation of last month's Tahoe fire could have been prevented, they said.

"We worked hard to get this money. ... we expected the money to be spent," Reid, D-Nev., told reporters after the senators met with U.S. Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell in Majority Leader Reid's office.

It turns out that rules and regulations for lake preservation and habitat management got in the way of habitat management and lake preservation.

The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency that administers some of the restrictions has come in for angry criticism after a blaze destroyed 254 homes and other buildings across about 5 square miles and displaced about 3,500 people late last month. Some residents say the agency overstepped its mission of protecting the lake by imposing unwieldy rules on homeowners including even limiting where residents can rake pine needles.

Now, of course that seems absurd, but there probably are reasons that seem good to those who are trying to micromanage an ecology and human behavior within it. But then, that's the problem - the attempt to micromanage an ecology (or indeed, any somewhat chaotic system) leads to absurdity at best.

Certainly fire is a large part of the natural ecology around here. That doesn't mean we have any good reason to let fire burn down our habitats! No ethos that requires the sacrifice of the ethical will survive long enough to benefit much of anything, which is why all persistent ethical systems act to the benefit of those practicing it first.

And let's not forget that a forest fire ain't exactly great for riparian habitat. All that erosion leads to choked and polluted streams, something the micromanagement was intended to prevent!

So this is not a post about "bureaucratic mismanagement," per se. In fact, it's difficult to imagine how one could manage the habitat and preserve Lake Tahoe without some sort of bureau, and that's clearly a matter of common concern and interest to everyone living there.

Nope, my criticism focuses on the plain silly idea that you can create rules (or even computer programs) that can substitute for expert human judgment. What's needed here is an expert system that works to tell people the right thing to do in various situations rather than forbidding "bad" behavior on a microscopic level, without regard to secondary and tertiary effects.

What I would suggest would be to take a minuscule amount of those federal dollars to set up a powerful Wiki and pool the knowledge of experts and residents of the Tahoe basin and use it as a tool to hammer out a new management scheme. It's a far more powerful approach than public meetings and seminars, and a far more efficient way to preserve and present the information.

In other words, we need to start exploring Management 2.0.

The opposite of Republican politics is... not the Democrats.

I found this today, via op-ed news.com
It speaks of something I've been breathing in the air, feeling between my toes, the source and cause of an apparently unreasonable and unjustifiable sense of optimism.

To Remake the World | Orion magazine

This is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an “ism.” What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. This unnamed movement’s big contribution is the absence of one big idea; in its stead it offers thousands of practical and useful ideas. In place of isms are processes, concerns, and compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side of humanity.

And it is impossible to pin down. Generalities are largely inaccurate. It is nonviolent, and grassroots; it has no bombs, armies, or helicopters. A charismatic male vertebrate is not in charge. The movement does not agree on everything nor will it ever, because that would be an ideology. But it shares a basic set of fundamental understandings about the Earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people partaking of the planet’s
life-giving systems.

The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world.

I found this followed a depressing IM conversation with a 20-something who found politics so "irritating" that she resents it even being brought up in conversation.

Well, hell, so do I. But I take a longer view, and I'm older and more set in my ways; I tend to see the political process as the way forward. But day by day, the news shows the amazing lack of interest the Democrats have in achieving any real change, of addressing real issues, of confronting real evil. Is she correct in seeing them as an irrelevant waste of time?

Would my time be better spent ignoring the political process as much as possible, save when working to achieve some real, practical, useful goal?

I've always been very impatient with ideology - and far more impatient with the ideologues who see the ideology as valid only to the extent that paying it lip-service places them in power.

Therefore my heart is gladdened that in a very practical sense, people have begun to pro-actively network around the political choke-points that seem increasingly to exist only for the sake of maintaining authoritarians in power. Over the years I've become very respectful of actual, practical authority and increasingly disrespectful of authoritarians, who seem to have become entirely divorced from the idea that merit, expertise and relevance are inherent to holding sway over others.

Or in other words, if I am to respect an authority - strike that, if I'm to notice an authority, it must be an authority that's interested in achieving something I wish to achieve in a way I find acceptable. These days, there are simply so many alternates that nobody has any particular reason to unquestioningly listen to and obey any authority, other than emotional attachment.

This is all gaining great momentum due to the Internet - and modern communications in general. Or in other words, it's unstoppable; it's not merely a new movement, it's a sea change in how humans connect with each other and organize themselves. Those vital roles that existed in the industrial age, boss, manager, executive, ruler - all these offices are now to some degree becoming vestigial, save where they adapt themselves to the new reality.

We will always need authorities - on things like law, and earthquakes and building codes, on materials science, on the behavior of animal species and genetics. We will need people who know and understand a great deal more than is common today among those with the large, impressive hats and who are yet willing to be humble enough to understand that they are not in charge; that in fact, nobody is "in charge," that there is no need for anyone to compete to "lead" humanity.

For each human can and should do that for themselves to the degree that they can - and to the degree that they cannot, they may freely choose a little less freedom.

And there will be no lack of useful and meaningful work for those who are led to have power over others. Indeed, given human nature, there will be a high demand for those skills. But they must start giving value for value, respecting the worth of the power and talents put at their disposal, for in our brave new world there will be no way to keep followers against their will.

Do I advocate anarchy? No, not in any usual sense. It's more that I'm predicting a condition where such laws as are needed are largely followed because they make sense and help make life easier. I envision a government that is at the service of the people rather than on their backs. I see it as being composed entirely OF the people. Of course, that's the case now, but those in government have become blinded to it and the proper relationships to other citizens this implies.
But sooner or later, our self-styled Lords and Masters will find that it's all to easy to simply ignore them, disregard their laws, ignore their diktats and avoid their taxes, so long as the people are willing to accept the cost of not having access to whatever services such government provides.

And as our government sees itself to be more and more the servant of Big - Big money, Big Special Interest groups, Big Corporations, it does less and less that is of benefit to poor and middle class persons - or indeed, of actual individuals of any level of wealth and power. We are seen by Washington as classes of person, of piles of various sizes of cog and screw. It's a very machine-age view, and it's a viewpoint as dead and as irrelevant as Karl Marx.

That means that what happens in Washington is of little interest to more people; it's regulations and rules more and more opaque or obviously biased towards large dollar interests, and therefore there is increasingly less motivation to respect the rule of law. Why should anyone, seeing as the law is obviously for sale?

And yet people need those things that government should provide, and therefore they will go about creating new and more flexible ways to provide those things without bothering to consult or consider the interests of Government.

What I do see is the rise of small governments and voluntary administrations that are made possible by Internet communication. For instance, it would make a great deal of sense to have two or three co-operative competitors in the field of approving and regulating prescription drugs, rather than having many separate entities. National association and sponsorship is nice, but it's hardly vital to the task; indeed, it obviously gets in the way. The same could be said for the Centers for Disease Control. Here, it would be much better to have a trans-national agency with a shared knowledge base and common procedures. It's also common sense that those areas least able to afford it's services are most likely to produce the threats that should be stomped on immediately, before they spread to areas that CAN afford it.

In other words, I see a pragmatic re-alignment, wherein services exist locally, regionally or globally depending upon need and the support of the people there, but with the caviat that whenever practically possible, they are available to any individual willing to pay to be an exception.

In the final analysis, government is not dissimilar in it's role and nature from an insurance policy - it amounts to a group of people coming together to pool their risks. And when an insurance company fails to pay out on claims, what happens? Well, ultimately, after a great deal of noise and hand-wringing - it goes out of business, to be replaced by a company that is better able, or at least more willing to manage assets conservatively so that it may satisfy it's customers liberally.

tag: Orion Magazine, Paradigm Shift, Paul Hawkin

Speaking of Potty-Mouths.

Here's a rhetorical question for you: Which is worse, using the "seven words you can't use on Television" - as defined by George Carlin, or committing the "seven deadly social sins", as defined by Gandhi?"

Coulter: I Would Talk About Edwards But “You Have To Go Into Rehab If You Use The Word ‘Faggot’”

Speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered. (Video on site)

Seeing this blonde turd in the soup of our great political discourse, I find it increasingly difficult to take the posturing of certain pearl-clutching hypocrites at all seriously. However, I'm willing to observe a potential compromise - they don't have to take as credible anything that contains one of the seven deadly words, and we don't have to take anyone who links to Coulter, laughs at Colter or buys Coulter's books serously. You are what you eat, folks - and in this case, politically speaking, I believe this boils down to "eat shit and die."

Not as a curse - as a matter-of-fact observation of fact; if you persist in eating shit, you will die. In this case, it's a viscerally disgusting metaphor for an even less appetizing reality.

tag: ann coulter, homophobia, seven deadly words, hate speech, potty mouths

Iraq: Forget winning. Forget losing. Let's beat the spread.

The Blog | Sen. Harry Reid: The Clock is Ticking, Mr. President | The Huffington Post

From Sen. Harry Reid's Blog:

Frankly, I don't believe that more troops is the answer for Iraq. It's a civil war and America should not be policing a Sunni-Shia conflict. In addition, we don't have the additional forces to put in there. We obviously want to support what commanders in the field say they need, but apparently even the Joint Chiefs do not support increased combat forces for Baghdad.

There's an even simpler reason, Harry. It's wrong. Going in was wrong, the people who planned the war were wrong, the administrators sent there are wrong, the ideas were wrong, the priorities were wrong, the money went to the wrong people; everything about this war was and is comprehensively wrong.

And now, after Cheney gets bitch-slapped by the Saudis, we are supposed to be their proxy army in a religious civil war between Islamist factions? We don't OWN a dog in this hunt, Senator. Not even our Islamic citizens do; as with all religious wars, it has almost nothing at all to do with the religions in question - and looked at it that way, we have neither laudable nor illegitimate reasons for trying to pick a winner.

Senator, I remind you that you represent a state of Casinos, and in the parlance of the casinos, it's not whether you win or lose; it's whether you beat the spread.

The House of Saud has lots of money, let them train and equip their own cannon fodder. Hell, let them hire mercenaries from Blackwater at the going rate.

I see no reason why we should be expending lives and treasure to protect Saudi interests. If Americans must die in this war, at least they should die very far in the black, with robust survivor insurance and pre-paid disability coverage.

We do need to increase recruitment of Regular Forces people so that the Guard and Reserves can go home, to replace casualties and to replace those who leave as soon as stop-loss measures expire. We need money to deal with the long term health care costs of the wounded and and their post-traumatic stress. And we clearly need to have a new generation of general officers, which means there must be larger classes of cadets, at least for the next few years.

Meanwhile, Sir, I suggest that research into more practical crops for bio-fuel generation than corn (ones that will grow as well or better in cornfields) and a much higher priority for both bio-fuel production and nuclear energy. We need a realistic way of dealing with nuclear waste. That's not Yucca Mountain - we need fuel reprocessing, ideally on-site.

We also need to look into sustainable crops for paper and fiber. That would be hemp, and hemp could further reduce our dependency on petrochemicals for fiber. It takes less fuel to harvest and process for paper. It makes better jeans than imported third=world cotton and you can't smoke it, unless you like migraine headaches, so lets get rid of that dumb law. Hemp is a not bad crop for stabilizing a clear-cut, so the timber companies might not scream as much as one might think, especially as the waste foliage and residue from fiber extraction could be feedstock for bio-fuel production. Oh, and giving the Mexican textile industry a huge boost wouldn't hurt our border issues any much.

Here's another suggestion for you; the deregulation of ethanol production for individuals. So long as they are using a properly designed, factory-inspected automated distillation apparatus, they may produce as much as they like for private use or sale.

At one stroke, you've made it possible for many small businesses to turn their waste streams into fuel for their business operations, for households to generate an additional revenue stream in poor areas and all without a single tax dollar being spent. Of course, a fuel still would not make drinkable ethanol from organic kitchen and yard waste with the occasional dog turd thrown into the mix. At best, one could hope for "relatively non-toxic."

But, yes, it is predictable that this will result in a proliferation of private distillation for consumption. Whether this is a problem depends mostly on how we chose to react to that reality. If nothing else, ethanol stills are a lot less toxic than meth labs, and sketchy folk can make money brewing 'shine, maybe they won't blow themselves up or poison their kids with toxic methamphetamine fumes. At the very least, alcohol is somewhat less personally destructive. Certainly it would be possible to create an infrastructure for reliable testing and grading of potable alcohols, and that gives you the ability to place a tax upon it, if you care to. If a tax stamp on a bottle of shine means "assured to be non-lethal," I think that's likely a tax paid for a useful service.

We need to start thinking seriously about simple and incremental means to soften the blow of a fuel crunch in case of a general middle east conflict and we need to free ourselves from being caught up in that dynamic. Driving down the world price of crude oil will definitely suck a lot of energy out of various terrorist campaigns and some very unfriendly regimes. Every barrel conserved or replaced is tiny victory in preventing widespread warfare over dwindling oil supplies as well as a significant boost to our economy and every individual bottom line.

Being addicted to mid-east oil makes it impossible for us to be an honest broker. Furthermore, it's a low cost way of developing a technology that could dissipate the looming Chinese energy crunch, forestalling a nasty resource crisis, and one that cannot be seen by the Chinese as "meddling," which almost any other approach could be. I'd much rather sell them a solution than be on the wrong side of their problem, and I feel I'm on firm Yankee ground when I say that.

Democrats - and indeed, Republicans and every stripe Independents need to start thinking outside of the box. We cannot afford to prop up current energy conglomerates to keep them doing what they are doing. We have already lost six critical years due to the Cheney "energy plan," and clearly sustainability was not part any part of that. It's time to throw wide the doors,and redirect the tax breaks and grants to sustainable energy. Let the market sort things out. After years of windfall profits, they have the resource to do very well by themselves if they choose to do well by us. They DO need to be reminded who is in charge of this nation, every bit as much as every other special interest who has been on the Iraqi Gravy Train to Hell.

Them what caused the mess outta be on the front lines of cleaning up the mess - or paying for it. But it would be wrong to think that the Iraqi clusterfuck was the result of malice. Had it been just that, we would not be in such an intractable mess. No, we have been ill-used and ill-advised by a generation of Neocon idealists, people who wanted to change the world for the better, in the very worst way. And lo, they were half-way successful. They did change the world, and they did it in the worst way.

But the fault was not in their lack of compassion, or of foresight; it certainly was not for a lack of sheer brainpower. It was due to the though that you could actually set off vast changes in how we do everything and predict a particular outcome.

Nope. You can initiate vast changes and influence a positive outcome by spotting and amplifying positive trends while damping negative ones. OR, you can aim toward a particular future with some reliability by focusing very narrowly and influencing change toward that particular end while accepting random fluctuations. You cannot do both at once on a massive scale and get anything you particularly want.

When things go to badly wrong, when the friction and stress levels in a particular area get too bad, you get rising levels of violence and even open warfare. Warfare is a symptom of large, systemic problems, so starting a war as a matter of foreign policy is akin to curing a cold with a syringe full of live rubella. Yes, you can then cure the rubella and when you have done so, if the patient survives, likely the cold will have passed as well. But they weren't cured of one disease; they simply survived two.

Their planning did not account for people who did not use their economic and social models as a basis for their own thoughts. It did not account for people who did not think in classical western terms, or with the biases built into English or the assumptions about the cultural roles of religion Americans take in with the mass-market formula we are given in place of that nasty pornographic breast milk. There was no place in their plans for chaos, for randomness, for sheer human perversity - and that is what you are dealing with in nearly pure form in the theatre of war.

Overwhelming firepower will overcome a large amount of chaos - but only by means of paradoxical destroying the remaining traces of order. And armies just plain suck at creating conditions suited for orderly civilian life; people who understand that don't do well in armies. Hell, that's one of the most persuasive reason we HAVE a large army; expensive as it is, it's both more useful and far cheaper than the prisons it would need to be replaced with.

The problem was not so much that the Bushes hadn't done sufficient planning; oh no. The problem is that they had far too many plans, far too many ideas, far too many people who were sure they knew how to get the job done! Not one of them would stray from their ideological purity to accept the plans or the input of the people who grew up there, knew the culture and had an idea of what would work and what was doomed to failure.

So we have the Neocon pattern of Faith-Based Failure, the folly of creating chaos and then trying to mold that chaotic mess as if it were wet sand at the beach. It's an apt analogy, for even if it had worked, it could only have worked to that extent; a superficial appearance of a vast and intricate order at the mercy of the first wave, rainstorm or passing spaniel.

But we are left with a big pile of chaos, and we must make the best of it. The best thing to do with chaos is to treat it like a big old murky pond filled with old tires, catfish and crawdads. You bait a line, throw it in and let your mind wander to your granny and her famous gumbo.

The worst possible mistake would be to attempt to plan a new energy infrastructure. That could take decades and we certainly do not have twenty or thirty years to piss away on this. The best way is to encourage as many potential solutions as possible so that competition and experience can narrow things down. Arguments over which fuel-stocks congress should support are dumb, just as arguments over whether we should emphasise wind, solar, nuclear or geothermal research and development. In all cases, the answer should be "yes." I'd say the idea would be to think in terms of tax breaks or subsidies contingent on units of energy delivered, with an eye toward making start-ups possible, and real dollars dependant on engineering and production efficiencies.

In other words, make it possible for as many people to try as many different approaches to this problem as possible. Start an energy rush!

This is not cause for panic or despair. Yes, it is the end of an era; we must change the way we do things because we are well past the point of diminishing returns. We certainly must take global warming seriously, and I think it prudent to prepare as well as we can for potential worst cases, not because I think the worst case predictions are that likely to come true, but because we will be prepared for the shocks, disasters and dislocations that we cannot possibly have anticipated.

I absolutely do not think there's any need to consider it as the likely end of civilization. It does mean a change in how we go about obtaining our needs and our comforts, it certainly implies rethinking how we upholster our caves - but a huge amount of the necessary thinking and prototyping has been done, is well understood and is already creeping into use. Some judicious tweaking of building codes could turn that into a wholesale rush.

The great advantage of a combination of passive conservation and diffuse technologies such as ethanol and bio-diesel produced in useful quantities close to or even by the end user is that aside from the obvious advantages, it's another layer of disaster-proofing that requires no central co-ordination or management.

It means that if mass energy distribution is disrupted by some disaster, there is in place a nearby capacity to brew up needed fuel, and a great deal of fuel in individual hands. The sheer advantage, for instance, of a higher percentage of people having a full tank of fuel in a time of evacuation is obvious - as is the advantage of having a large and distributed excess capacity for fuel generation from whatever biomass is at hand.

In national security terms, it means that nobody can hold us hostage - cutting off petrochemical supplies would be an inconvenience, not a disaster.

In cultural terms, it should mean a gradual drift toward sustainable living at or above the level of comfort we have become accustomed to and with the degree of mobility a free people require. I do not see this as an either-or, I see it as a range of choices; there are urban dwellers that wouldn't bother with cars if they had viable alternatives and could rent a car any time they felt the need. Enough people do this now that it's clearly both practical and cost-effective. More urban rapid transit would make this more possible.

But there is no way that people can be forced to change their whole way of life overnight as many radical greens would like. The only way a society changes is because it's to the advantage of individuals to change where they go, what they do and how they go about doing it; what they choose to buy and what they consider valuable to them. From that perspective, there is no single magical solution. There are many millions of tiny improvements that can add up to a magical result, if we go about things intelligently. It's possible, even easy to generate huge multiples of effect by tossing regulatory and incentive snowballs downhill - so long as you don't try to predefine who's yard the huge snowball lands in. Toss enough snowballs, and the "right" people will have more than enough to keep them fat, rich and busy for the next hundred years.

As I said, we need an energy rush. This will inevitably lead to a glut, because all of the parallel efforts to reduce energy dependence. So then you are left with all the things you could do if there were cheap enough energy to throw around... and the really smart folks are thinking about that opportunity already.

A lot of our problems could solve each other if we simply introduced them to one another. You put your hog farm together with a co2 emitting power plant and bio-reactor producing oil rich algae from hog waste and co2-rich stack gas. Suddenly your two waste streams are raw material for a whole new industrial process with nearly zero additional footprint and the operation costs covered by now-absent disposal overhead.

Instead of emissions and waste, you have a new raw product which can be used in the power plant, and the compressed, energy rich residue that can be animal feed. That smells green to me - as in greenbacks.

We have to step away from a culture that spends far too much time and effort trying to keep people from doing things we think they shouldn't outta do and start thinking about how to get folks actively exercising their perversity bumps for profit. The people who are generating the solutions, who are doing the non-linear thinking, the very people who support the progressive politics that swept you into the Majority Leader's suite are the very people the other guys have been pandering to, with their obsessions about social conformity and their willingness to create a living hell on earth for others in the name of forestalling hell for themselves.

Now, I learned in Sunday School that human sacrifice was a bad thing. Is that still taught in Sunday School, Senator? I think it's an important question to ask of your particularly Christian colleagues to your right.