What I’m Reading, March 25, 2014

Posted on March 25, 2014 by wellsdc

By Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons The Breadth of Hobby Lobby’s Attack On Its Employees, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money, March 22, 2014

Hobby Lobby et al. are citing a “burden” on religious practice so trivial as to be non-existent in order to impose actual burdens on the rights of their employees. This nicely summarizes how American conservatives think about “freedom.”

Nauru–From Island Paradise To Hell On Earth, Down With Tyranny! March 22, 2014

I remember Nauru from the time I was a pre-teen stamp collector. It was– still is– just a speck of a South Pacific Island, about 8 square miles and less than 10,000 people. Earlier, it had been a German colony that was taken over by the Brits after World War I– like Tanganyika (which, coincidentally, also has a village named Nauru). I haven’t thought about Nauru in half a century until last night. I didn’t even know that around the time Nauru became independent, phosphate mining had given it the highest per-capita income of any country in the world– almost all of which has been swindled. They went from wealth to poverty and Nauru was reduced to taking money from Australia to host a virtual concentration camp for refugees from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine and Pakistan.

Ladders on Everest are just the latest step in our commodification of nature, Philip Hoare, The Guardian, posted at Raw Story, March 20, 2014

For a place already blighted by litter, fistfights and unburied dead bodies, it’s not so much “health and safety” as “access all areas”. Its greatest hero, Edmund Hillary, declared in 2006, two years before he died: “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.” His successor, Stephen Venables, the first Briton to climb the peak without oxygen, agreed. “The mountain has become a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other,” he said. We humans have come to expect the natural world to come commodified, negotiated, shaped to our needs. From high to low, there’s nowhere we can’t go, nothing we can’t do. In this age of the Anthropocene – the era of human manipulation heralded by the industrial revolution – it is a given that we have tuned the environment to suit ourselves. Dominion is all; human ingenuity has encompassed the planet. Now pass me the phone: “I’m on the mountain.”

More like the Dork Enlightenment, am I right?, PZ Myers, Pharyngula, March 7, 2014

I am told I’m supposed to take The Dark Enlightenment seriously. I can’t. I just can’t. What it is is mostly a bunch of pretentious white dudebro computer programmers with a fascist ideology who write tortuous long-winded screeds off the top of their heads, with most of their ‘data’ coming from pop culture movies like The Matrix, and a few similarly clueless nerds who think it’s neat-o. I take it seriously only in the same way I take Libertarianism seriously: it’s a nucleus for idiots to coalesce around.

They also throw the term HBD around a lot. If you’re not in the know, HBD is short for Human BioDiversity, and it’s the hot new sciencey word for racism. The only people who use it are racists.

Photo credit: By Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

What I’m Reading, March 20, 2014

Posted on March 20, 2014 by wellsdc

A Brief History of Mold-A-Rama, Rob Lammie, Mental Floss, March 18, 2014

Long before 3D printing was a thing, kids of all ages were plunking quarters into Mold-A-Rama vending machines to get plastic sculptures made right before their eyes. Let’s take a look back at the history of these mid-century manufacturing marvels.

GOP Plutocrat Ken Langone And New Dem Wall Street Shill Jim Himes Are Waging Class War Against American Families, Down With Tyranny!, March 18, 2014

Langone’s siren song, while extreme and filled with the class warfare hatred the entitled rich feel towards working families, isn’t just a Republican song. When it comes to serving the interests of great wealth, conservative Democrats– particularly Blue Dogs and New Dems– are no better than garden variety Republicans.

Two Reasons That Explain Why We’re All Obsessed with Game of Thrones, Charlie Jane Anders, io9, March 18, 2014

Why is Game of Thrones such a huge cultural phenomenon, among all other fantasy series? It comes down to two huge cultural trends, that are rooted in our widespread anxieties about life in the 21st century.

***

Game of Thrones captures the real anxiety at the root of our apocalyptic fascination — the sense that disaster is coming closer at an almost imperceptible rate, and we can never really know when it will arrive. We all sense that our unsustainable economic system will collapse, and/or our biosphere will no longer support so many humans, but we don’t know if the crunch will come next week or in 50 years.

And the endless wars and scheming show how short-sighted people can overlook a looming disaster, due to political infighting and stupidity. You wonder why they don’t look over their shoulder and see the ice zombies creeping closer — until you realize that their denial is nothing compared to our own.

***

When we’re not consuming futuristic dystopias and world-breaking disasters, we’re obsessing about a somewhat idealized past in which men were men and women were women, and everybody Knew Their Place. Often, these visions of the past include a soupcon of social change, a hint that the Times They Were a-Changin’, and the seeds of today’s world were already in place.

***

Game of Thrones is like the perfect idealized-but-awful past. Especially in the television version, everybody looks beautiful and has perfect teeth, but almost everybody takes a turn of being that peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who shouts, “I’m being oppressed!”

What Really Happened on Easter Island, Maybe

Posted on February 13, 2014 by wellsdc

An article by Robert Krulwich at NPR offers a relatively new theory on what happened to the Easter Islanders, who allegedly turned an isolated, tree-covered Pacific island into a comparatively desolate wasteland covered in statues. In my opinion, the competing theories of what happened all seem lacking in something. I’ve read that the Easter Islanders (or Rapa Nui) cut down all the trees in order to move the moai statues, or that they nearly drove themselves into extinction through warfare. Thanks to Google, I now know that there is also an alien “theory” (scare quotes intentional), although I don’t know why I’m surprised.

The new theory, from University of Hawaii anthropologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, might make quite a bit more sense, although it is perhaps more discomfiting than the other theories. I won’t spoil it for you, because the article is worth a read and has interesting illustrations. In short, though, they believe that Easter Island was a success, not a failure—meaning that the bedraggled condition in which Europeans found them was the result of their survival. But it’s only one particular view of “success.” As Krulwich puts it:

Humans are a very adaptable species. We’ve seen people grow used to slums, adjust to concentration camps, learn to live with what fate hands them. If our future is to continuously degrade our planet, lose plant after plant, animal after animal, forgetting what we once enjoyed, adjusting to lesser circumstances, never shouting, “That’s It!” — always making do, I wouldn’t call that “success.”

Anyway, go read it.

Photo credit: Aurbina (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Televised Sunrises

Posted on January 20, 2014 by wellsdc

By Brian Jeffery Beggerly (originally posted to Flickr as IMG_0549) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Apparently residents of Beijing can watch the sunrise again thanks to a giant LED screen that broadcasts a live feed of the sunrise from somewhere that isn’t covered in permasmog.

This is disquietingly similar to a plot point in Hugh Howey’s e-book series Wool, part of the Silo series, which I have been reading lately. Without giving away any spoilers, the books are about a group of people who live in a massive underground silo. They are forbidden from even talking about the outside, which has apparently suffered some sort of massive disaster that makes the outside air deadly to anyone who sets one foot out of the silo. On one of the highest levels, i.e. nearest to ground level, a viewscreen displays a live feed of the outside, which is a dead, lifeless world with a ruined city visible in the distance. The clouds part occasionally, allowing residents of the silo to see the sun and the stars. It’s the only view they get of the rest of the world.

It’s supposed to be science fiction, though.

Photo credit: By Brian Jeffery Beggerly (originally posted to Flickr as IMG_0549) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Most Dedicated Landowners in North America, Perhaps

Posted on December 19, 2013 by wellsdc

In downtown San Antonio, a small church sits surrounded on three sides by a large, looming, currently vacant department store building. Back in 1945, local department store Joske’s wanted to expand, but St. Joseph’s Catholic Church refused to sell. The store build all around it, gaining the church the nickname “St. Joske’s.” Dillards bought Joske’s back in the ’80s, and closed the store in 2008.

Clipper471 [Public domain], via Wikipedia

Growing up in San Antonio, I always sort of admired St. Joseph’s for sticking to their guns (it is Texas, after all) and not taking Joske’s crap. I recently learned of a far more epic example of refusing to move, even as the surrounding area changes, with even more noxious neighbors (pun intended). The story takes place in Sarnia, Ontario, not far across the border from Detroit, Michigan. Sarnia is reportedly home to forty percent of Canada’s chemical industry, and boasts the country’s most polluted air. In the midst of this, we find people who ain’t moving:

Nestled inside this giant ring of chemical production, surrounded on all sides by industrial plants, sits a First Nations reservation called Aamjiwnaang where about 850 Chippewa have lived for over 300 years. Aamjiwnaang was originally a Chippewa hunting ground, but the area was turned into a First Nations reserve in 1827, after the British government snatched up an enormous amount of Native land. Today, it’s one of the most singularly poisonous locations in North America, yet neither the local nor the national government has announced any plan to launch a health study to properly investigate the side effects that are hurting the local residents, who inhale the Chemical Valley’s emissions every time they step outside.

They really are surrounded on all sides by industry, and the San Antonio really doesn’t even compare to their plight. Unlike the parishioners of St. Joske’s, the people of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation face potentially life-threatening health problems. Hormone-blocking effects of the chemicals might be responsible for the community’s unusual two-to-one female-to-male birth ratio. Since 2002, the community has been fighting back. You can keep up with them on Facebook.

Photo credit: Clipper471 [Public domain], via Wikipedia.

Snow in Egypt

Posted on December 18, 2013 by wellsdc

An historic snowfall in Cairo does not prove by itself that global warming is some sort of hoax, but that won’t stop certain people from saying so anyway. It is important to remember that at this point in history those people’s miscomprehension of climate science is a conscious choice on their part. Ed Brayton explains further.

Living under Human Rules in the Wild

Posted on November 17, 2013 by wellsdc

A photogenic elk was reportedly euthanized by park rangers last week for, as far as I can tell, being too interested in people (h/t Ryan Clinton), as Knoxville’s WBIR reported:

An elk who went viral after a close-up encounter with a photographer was euthanized Friday, Great Smoky Mountains National Park officials confirmed Friday evening.

Park officials said the elk could not be re-trained to be fearful of humans. They said the elk had been coming back to that area in search of food, and had begun associating humans with food.

Spokesperson Molly Schroer said placing the animal elsewhere would be passing along a potentially dangerous problem.

If you haven’t seen the YouTube video, I have to imagine that the experience was terrifying for the photographer (those antlers look pointy), but at the same time, this seems like an elk being an elk.

WBIR reports biologists said elk normally mate during the September to October time-frame, and may have thought [photographer James] York was competition for a lady-elk.

The phrase from WBIR’s article that keeps bothering me is “the elk could not be re-trained to be fearful of humans.” We require dogs, cats, horses, and other domesticated animals to live by our rules, even if they don’t understand them. This makes a certain amount of sense, because we bring these animals into our homes. Plus, we have bred them over millenia to be dependent on us. The burden is on humans to train domestic animals how to behave. In a cruel twist of fate, however, the animals pay the ultimate price if the humans’ lessons don’t take. I don’t have a better way to do it, necessarily, but I think we can all at least acknowledge the cruelty.

But what about non-domesticated animals like elk? They live in the wild, while we mostly only visit there. Whatever that elk was doing, it was doing it on its home turf. Maybe it’s still on us humans to watch what we do in that world.

As I said, I don’t have a ready-made solution here, but I hope the wild gets to stay wild a bit longer.

In other news, some people are far more interested in pretending to dominate the wild, but at least they can’t do it without well-deserved public backlash:

Outdoor television show host and avid hunter Melissa Bachman caused a huge controversy after she shared a photo of herself with a dead lion yesterday with the accompanying tweet:

“An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60 yards on the this beautiful male lion… what a hunt!”

My favorite comment on the story (aside from Ricky Gervais’ uncouth tweet) came from Ona Lynn Nass, who offers a local perspective:

Melissa….He was beautiful before you so savagely killed him…..She should be ashamed of herself. This is a total disgrace….what we called “canned hunting”. Wipe the smile off your face,. any idiot can take a high-powered rifle and a hunt lions that cannot escape and have got ‘human imprinting”. I wish there was a way to get rid of these places that offer these facilities to tourists. It’s all about the money. Btw Melissa, did you need to eat the lion to survive? Wasn’t he so beautiful and majestic while alive, before you took his life? Why didn’t you rather shoot him with a camera. I hope you, never, ever put a foot in our country again….and that goes for ALL you trigger happy tourists. Keep your blasted dollars, yen, euros or whatever. The average South African doesn’t want your kind or your money here. Just ……. off. We don’t want you here and if we could close those shooting ranches down somehow we would. I hope you have nightmares about that lion for the rest of your life……..

How to Help People in the Philippines (i.e. Don’t Send Old Shoes)

Posted on November 13, 2013 by wellsdc

The typhoon that hit the Philippines has caused damage measured by the shitload, and we Americans are admirably pitching in to help. The problem is that some of what we’re doing apparently isn’t helping at all.

Jessica Alexander, a humanitarian aid worker writing at Slate, says that the best thing we can do is send money, not hand-me-downs (h/t Anne Laurie, Avicenna):

After the tsunami, similarly well-intentioned people cleaned out their closets, sending boxes of “any old shoes” and other clothing to the countries. I was there after the tsunami and saw what happened to these clothes: Heaps of them were left lying on the side of the road. Cattle began picking at them and getting sick. Civil servants had to divert their limited time to eliminating the unwanted clothes. Sri Lankans and Indonesians found it degrading to be shipped people’s hand-me-downs. I remember a local colleague sighed as we passed the heaps of clothing on the sides of the road and said “I know people mean well, but we’re not beggars.” Boxes filled with Santa costumes, 4-inch high heels, and cocktail dresses landed in tsunami-affected areas. In some places, open tubes of Neosporin, Preparation H, and Viagra showed up. The aid community has coined a term for these items that get shipped from people’s closets and medicine cabinets as SWEDOW—Stuff We Don’t Want.

It’s a very noble instinct that leads us to donate, but I suspect the best place to donate our used stuff is somewhere local.

The Red Cross is generally a good place to go if you want to contribute. Hemant Mehta also has a good list of places you can donate. Let’s all do what we can to help, but let’s do it in the way that is most helpful.

One Way That Pollution Might Actually Increase Freedom

Posted on November 7, 2013 by wellsdc

I love the smell of freedom in the morning. Smells like…..my lungs are burning……

The Chinese government has recently begun to come to grips with the fact that rampant pollution is making the country very foggy, and therefore making it nearly impossible to spy on the populace with the 20 million-odd surveillance cameras they’ve placed here and there. Apparently part of the difficulty with addressing the pollution problem is that years of referring to it as “fog,” not “smog,” has led to measures that deal with the former but not the latter. (Pro tip for repressive governments: don’t internalize your own propaganda.)

It’s not just the surveillance cameras on the ground that are having trouble, though. China’s ~~air pollution~~ “fog” has gotten so thick at times that it obscures the view of entire cities from earth orbit. That has got to be frustrating to anyone with spy satellites in the area. China has such an interesting array of giant things that show up in satellite photos, even if the Great Wall of China is not actually visible from space. It would be a shame for all that stuff to be obscured, but I also understand the importance of not being spied upon. If lung-clogging smfog is the price of liberty, then—no, wait, I’m not going there.

Photo credit: click from morguefile.com.

A Settlement Proposal for BP

Posted on August 16, 2013 by wellsdc

By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

On the plus side, scenes like this would probably totally scare off alien invaders.

BP has filed suit against the federal government over the EPA’s decision to suspend it from new federal contracts, after the company pleaded guilty to manslaughter and obstruction of justice (h/t Jennifer). The company now alleges that the EPA’s continued ban is “an abuse of discretion.”

The Deepwater Horizon incident was a clusterfuck of historic proportions, but those guilty pleas only resulted in a fine, plus probation and something called “independent monitoring.” Of course, the fine was for $4 billion, which seems like a large chunk of change to me and (I assume) you, but what is that to BP? As a result of the fallout from Deepwater Horizon, BP’s 2012 profits were “halved,” according to the Telegraph, to $12 billion.

In other words, the criminal penalty paid by BP for the deaths of eleven people, an 87-day ocean-floor oil gusher, and who-knows-how-much resulting damage, was one-third of their profit from 2012. Not their revenue, their profit. And if the Telegraph is right, it is only one-sixth of the profit they were expecting. If an individual pleaded guilty to killing eleven people and poisoning a large portion of ocean, that person would likely be spending some time in a very small room. That person certainly would not get any traction with a lawsuit against the government for refusing to hire them. Since corporations are supposed to be people, what gives?

I have an idea for a settlement that the EPA might propose, one that is undoubtedly fair based on BP’s own assurances: The EPA will lift the ban on BP contracts if all BP senior executives and directors personally perform community service by assisting with cleanup along the Gulf coast, specifically including time spent in the water with the “cleanup” chemicals the company used, that it assured everyone was safe. BP said that Corexit was no more dangerous than dish soap, so it shouldn’t be a big deal for the BP higher-ups to get at least elbow-deep in the stuff, right?

Of course, I know the EPA would never make that sort of offer, and I definitely know BP would never go for it. I’d just love to hear how BP tried to weasel out of it.

Photo credit: By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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