Lucid Culture

This just in:

“LONDON (AFP) - Demolition experts blew up Saturday the giant cooling towers of the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, 51 years after it was opened in northwest England.

The first two of the four 88-metre (288-foot) high cooling towers at Sellafield were demolished at 9 a.m. (0800 GMT), sending a cloud of dust over the Irish Sea before hundreds of onlookers.

Four minutes later the final pair of cooling towers crumbled to the ground in a series of controlled explosions.

The demolition of the towers is the first phase in the decommissioning of the 167,000 square metre site made up of 62 buildings…”

Note that nowhere in this article do the words “what brain-dead moron came up with this idea” appear.

As has been widely reported in the media, over six thousand New York City cabdrivers are going on strike tomorrow to protest the mandatory installation of a GPS (global positioning satellite) device in every taxicab.

This was part of a deal masterminded by the big taxicab companies that brought in the big fare increase a couple of years ago. Now the cab companies will be able to make more money while keeping track of the exact location of their cabs (it seems they’re paranoid about cabbies picking up riders without running the meter). The GPS device comes without any guidance system that might conceivably have some benefit for drivers or riders.

And if that’s not enough, cabs will also be required to take credit cards, thereby pretty much eliminating the likelihood of any kind of substantial tips for those rides. Tips are a crucial part of a cab driver’s earnings; eliminating them would pretty much put them out of business (although it would be a boon to the car service business, who already charge rates sometimes twice as high as yellow cabs). Individually owned and operated cabs (who make up as much as a third of the taxi fleet) will be especially hard-hit.

Big trucking companies (UPS et al.) have been using GPS devices for years. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Plain and simple, there is absolutely no need for a cab company or the Taxi and Limousine Commission to know the exact location of a cab at any given time: if they don’t trust the cabbies, they shouldn’t be on the payroll or have a hack license. New York cabs have gone without GPS devices for two hundred plus years and nobody suffered as a result. This is simply another step on the slippery slope toward a total, 1984-style police state: spycams everywhere, GPS devices in everyone’s car, and magnetic card swipes instead of door locks so that your landlord knows when you come home at night.

 Anyone who wants you to believe that GPS devices in cabs will help improve “security” is full of shit. The spycams at Logan Airport didn’t stop the 9/11 hijackers. The spycams on every London streetcorner didn’t prevent the tube bombings. Every deli in town may have a spycam looking down on the counter, but they all still seem to have an exhausted-looking Mexican guy perched outside on an upside-down milk crate. Why? Because deli owners know that security cameras don’t prevent shoplifting, just as much as the big taxi companies and their accomplices down at City Hall know that GPS devices in cabs won’t make them one iota safer.  On Wednesday, September 5 and Thursday, September 6, please join with the taxi drivers of New York and if you see a yellow cab, don’t take it(not that you would anyway – taxi fares in this town are already on par with Los Angeles – it costs more to get from central Brooklyn to lower Manhattan than it does to get from New York to Boston on the bus).

Relax. There aren’t going to be any dirty bombs going off. It’s all a conspiracy theory.

In order to build a bomb with sufficient nuclear material to do real harm, you need to get your hands on the stuff. Sure, there’s plenty of it around, particularly in the former Soviet Union. There’s just one complication: it’s radioactive. Nuclear waste any more potent than, say, what the dentist gets rid of from his or her x-ray machine, is so lethal that unprotected exposure will kill you in a matter of hours. So if you’re planning on becoming the nuclear Osama Bin Laden, you better come equipped, with garments and gear and a high-tech facility that will cost you millions if not billions. Where you’re going to get all that stuff without tipping off the authorities is a mystery you’ll have to solve first.

Or, let’s say you’re in a hurry to get your 72 virgins and you can’t wait for the protective gear to come through. In that case, you’re going to need a new fanatic for every four hours that the stuff is in your hands. And unless you’re getting your hands on a domestic supply – fat chance of that, unless you’re buying from the same people who brought us 9/11 – you’ll have to come up with a team of suicide drivers, suicide pilots, a fleet of trucks and at least a couple of planes to get you across whatever ocean is in your way since everybody on the first plane is going to be dead about, say, halfway across the Atlantic.

The likelihood of any organization, even the CIA or Halliburton being able to pull this off? Figure it out. To say that the odds are against it is the understatement of the year.

 And even if somebody decided to steal your neighborhood dentist’s x-ray waste box and blow it up somewhere, that stuff is so low-level that even if you were downwind of the bomb, you wouldn’t be in any more danger than you would be from drinking New Jersey water. The dirty bomb is a hoax, an urban myth, a conspiracy theory. It’s just another Bush regime fearmongering tactic designed to encourage you to give your Constitutional rights away in the name of security and bring us one step closer to a 1984-style police state. Don’t buy it.  

Is brought to you by BP and Lexus… two companies really striving to make sustainable economics possible…

Along with our pop star friends, who are quite happy to take our money in order to promote something about which we could give a shit.

Why else would energy companies give a shit - unless they were making a shitload?

Green, green. Go, Go.

Just like Bono wanks his mojo.

But what is really green?
Local agriculture.
Not driving a car.
Not consuming in any way that our grandiose culture expects.

What is really green?
Not allowing ’first world’ trade agreements to impoverish the rest of the world
Not letting us grow so much fucking corn.

Not letting us abandon agriculture
Just to pass a few dollars around some useless dicks.

Those dicks now spew on the rest of the world whether we like it or not.

GMO

Crops under patent, even if it’s just in the bees.

It’s really up to Bono to save us - ‘The Green’

environmentalism for the challenged…

because at this point do we really have a brain cell?

posted by lucid 

So the non-aligned political blogs seem to be in a state of flux. Personalities are shifting, disappearing, hanging it up.

 I’m quite happy to recognize the end and make my absolution, but something troubles me:

We don’t make our own cloth.
We don’t make our own salt.
We don’t man the trucks that cart our shit to another jurisdiction.

I’m quite happy to let the light/sound wash over me, to pretend the moments of beauty in my life flush away the moments of horror in the life of another. I can be a selfish sonofabitch.

 I can also play a James Brown funk riff on the guitar until you’re numb in the teeth.

But I can never turn away.

 I cannot stand by while women are viewed as chattel, while latinos become a permanent underclass, while anyone who stands against the power of corporatism is simply deemed a terrorist.

 I will not cooperate.

 I will not comply.

I will not support those who seem to think that ‘if we can just get over this ridge, it’ll be ok’.

There is no ridge. There is no “OK”.

There is only humanity. And what that demands is equality, everywhere, at all times, without condition.

Is that clear enough?

So let’s continue to change the world.

This is where the hedge funds live, horses tethered to stables on rolling green hills behind electric fences. My sister tells me she can sometimes hear Puffy or his pilot making their way across the sky to his private helipad: somewhat ironic when you consider it sounds just like the police helicopters circling over Harlem or Compton. She also shared a rumor about Mexican laborers coming out of the woods late at night, pushing wheelbarrows full of rock taken from old stone walls now protected by the state. Apparently they have a rustic patina not available on stone fresh from the quarry, and it’s become a popular decorative touch on the estates of the speculators and the downsizers.  

My sister and her family had invited us out to watch fireworks. They schedule that early out here, perhaps so as not to compete with New York City. And the adjoining towns out here stagger their schedules, so if you’re properly situated, you can see flares and roman candles for several hours, from varying distances.

Out here holidays are a big deal: the resident servant class takes them very seriously. It took a staff of at least a dozen residents, from the grandfatherly gentleman who took my sister’s VIP parking pass and soberly announced, “Paid!”  to the squadron of middle school kids who couldn’t figure out how to orchestrate a simple nod and a wave to an open spot, to get the car parked (what made the VIP parking area any different from the hoi polloi’s lot wasn’t clear: it still would have taken us an hour to get out of there, had we stayed with everyone else til the bitter end). Perhaps the popularity of these jobs is because they’re paid, which wouldn’t surprise me, considering that property taxes out here are like a mortgage except that the only equity you get is not having your house taken by the town.

They have the same band here every year before the pyrotechnics begin, a bunch of geezers in grey ponytails and tie-dye, phoning in covers of stuff like Stand By Me and Under the Boardwalk. They only really cranked it up at the end, the horn section blaring away during an unusually long version of a Kiss song. A few people were definitely reliving their lost youth.

The fireworks started later than usual. The truck carrying them had been stopped at the Connecticut border, the local authorities fearful that its contents might be destined for Al Queda. A furious exchange of phone calls, emails and faxes ensued, the final result being that the police stopped traffic across the bridge until both lanes were clear, then gave the truck an escort across, finally allowing mystified travelers - who were by now backed up for miles – to resume their journeys. As I mentioned, they take their holidays seriously out here.

I watched my niece run through the neatly manicured grass, chasing her glowstick as the sun went down. By now, it was almost 10. My nephew grew tired, so my sister took him home: the rest of us stayed, drinking beaujolais from plastic cups as our blanket and the field underneath grew moist with dew. A second band played. “Younger folks,” my brother-in-law told us. This made sense: they seemed genuinely psyched to be there, doing a lot of Beatles covers. The bass player had obviously taken the time to learn all the right McCartney licks, and this was a good thing considering that pretty much all you could hear was bass unless you were right next to the platform the band was perched on.

Then the fireworks started: New York has absolutely nothing on these little country hamlets. There was no crush of onlookers, no demon chorus of car alarms, and we were right on top of the action. Fireworks were literally going off over our heads. My niece put down her glowstick and enjoyed the show; I put my hand over my wine to keep out the cinders and the ash. “It’s like a Civil War battlefield,” laughed my brother-in-law, as the clouds of gunpowder smoke grew thick and pungent. We figured we’d get a jump on the other VIP’s – a motley crew in minivans and pickup trucks, mostly – and head out before it became impossible to leave.

I wonder how many other three-year-olds missed the fireworks this year because the truck got held up crossing the state line.

So in recent weeks, I’ve quoted some linked articles in Alexander Cockburn’s ongoing tirade against the global warming hypothesis. Today, I finally waded through the source material of this tirade – an ongoing ‘debate’ between Monbiot and Cockburn hosted by Znet after Cockburn’s first column appeared in the Nation several months back. Bracketing any dispute I may have with Cockburn on the ‘global warming’ issue, after reading the exchanges, I can now completely understand why his columns took the direction that they did – and I have completely lost all respect for Monbiot. Let’s start at the beginning.

Let me begin this response with an admission of incompetence. I am not qualified to comment on the scientific claims made in Alexander Cockburn’s article. But nor is Cockburn qualified to make them.

George, you are a journalist who writes almost exclusively on environmentalism and environmental science. If you are not ‘qualified to comment’, you should seek another field. But this point is just the opening volley of a gross appeal to ‘experts’, to people who seem more qualified to offer their opinions simply because they have letters after their names and their writings have been ‘peer reviewed’

When a non-scientist attempts to dispute the findings of an entire body of science, a good deal of humility and a great deal of research is required. Otherwise he puts himself in the position of the 9/11 truthers.

Right, so when someone appeals to the work of scientists who disagree with the prevailing paradigm, they are immediately to be deemed conspiracy theorists who believe that no plane hit the Pentagon. Great. Got that point.

Cockburn’s article cannot be taken seriously until we have seen his list of references, and affirmed that the key claims he makes have already been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This would not mean they are correct, though it does mean that they are worth discussing.

And we reach the point – the only science ‘worth discussing’ is that which appears in peer-reviewed journals. Before I dissect this, I would like to backtrack to one more statement made in this foray by Monbiot:

If you want to believe that HIV does not cause AIDs, you can find a professor of medicine who supports that view.

Well, given your high appraisal of peer review, I ‘d like to see the peer-reviewed article in which 1. HIV has been isolated, 2. HIV has been shown to be present in vivo in blood and fluid, 3. HIV is shown to have a clear pathogenesis resulting in AIDS, and 4. That the non-specific antibody tests for HIV actually predict an AIDS diagnosis in the absence of other factors which could result in an AIDS diagnosis. Don’t put yourself out George, Kary Mullis has been asking the HIV royalty for this ‘peer reviewed’ article for about 15 years, neither Gallo nor Montaigne have coughed it up. And for your information, some 2,500 scientists, doctors & academics have concluded from a review of the literature that HIV does not cause AIDS. There are several Nobel laureates, there are a vast array of people formerly working in the field, there are a vast array of some the most prominent scientists currently alive on that list.

Why are their opinions not worthy of grants George?

Peer Review.

I have long had issues with the ‘peer review’ system. We now seem to accept it unquestionably as the only way to vet knowledge. It wasn’t always such. And it serves a far more nefarious purpose than one would imagine. David Noble has written a great article on the history of peer review that should be a both a revelation and reiteration for anyone following science in the ensuing decades.

Led by New Deal senator Harley Kilgore they put forth a plan for a postwar National Science Foundation that emphasized lay control over science and political accountability. It was to be headed by a presidentially appointed director advised by a board whose members would include citizens representing consumers, labor, and small businesses as well as large corporations and scientists. The agency would let contracts to firms and universities on an equitable basis and would retain public ownership of all patents. Kilgore envisioned the new agency as a democratic means to socially responsive science.

This democratic proposal alarmed Bush and his elite academic and corporate colleagues who formulated a counter proposal, for National Research Foundation (later, also called the National Science Foundation). Central to this plan was an agency that guaranteed professional rather than lay control over science, was insulated from political accountability, and gave its director discretion over the awarding of patent ownership. In essence, the Bush agency was designed to guarantee public support for scientists – and, indirectly, for the corporations they served as well - without public control, a regime of science run by scientists and paid for by the taxpayer.

And

In 1950 a compromise version of the Bush bill was passed and signed by Truman, now once again under (cold)wartime exigencies. The new agency included a presidentially-appointed director but a board composed only of scientists committed to continuing the comfortable patterns established by the OSRD during the war. As a bulwark against democratic oversight and lay involvement in the awarding of scientific contracts and grants, the agency adopted a new mechanism of exclusion: “peer review.” Only peers - fellow privileged professionals, whatever their unacknowledged ties to commercial enterprise - could be involved in deciding upon the merits and agenda of science.

Hence the origin of ‘peer review’ – a political attempt to keep ‘science’ under the control of government and the corporate interests they serve. Keep that in mind the next time you ask for ‘peer reviewed sources’.

But this gets to the crux of the matter. What has this legislative dictum wrought? Precisely what we have today – a world in which the status quo is reaffirmed by grant after grant, and those doing real science, those questioning, those debating, those doing whatever they can to cobble together research that contradicts the ‘right’ ideas, are completely excluded from the ‘scientific world’. They are cranks, quacks and snake oil salesman. It doesn’t matter if they’ve won Nobel Prizes or are recognized in other ways as some of the greatest scientists of all time. They’re still heretics in the face of ‘peer review’, because their ideas don’t serve political ends. 

Just shot through Cockburn’s most recent article at Counterpunch. Along with a rather fascinating look at eugenics, immigration policy, Zyklon B & the El Paso delousing facilities that later became the model for Nazi death camps, there is a fantastic article by MIT prof Richard Lindzen he quotes at length on the interstices between science, advocacy groups, and public policy:

The interaction of science, advocacy and politics in both the global warming and eugenics cases share a number of characterisics:

Powerful advocacy groups claiming to represent both science and the public in the name of morality and superior wisdom.Simplistic depictions of the underlying science so as to facilitate widespread ‘understanding.’

Events’, real or contrived, interpreted in such a manner as to promote a sense of urgency in the public at large. Scientists flattered by public attention and deferent to ‘political will’ and
popular assessment of virtue.

Significant numbers of scientists eager to produce the science demanded by the ‘public.’

Given the automatic tendency of our educated elites to form advocacy groups, the above interactions would appear to have a certain inevitability, and the advantages of advocacy groups over individual scientists in communicating with the public will inevitably give advocacy groups an opportunity to dominate the presentation of the science.

While I have issues with Cockburn’s position on global warming, I think the above applies to just about every biological discipline which can result in public policy - most notably, health policy. The public will always be unaware that ‘consensus’ is not something built by scientists, but by advocacy groups with underlying motivations [or by industries with profit motivations]. In fact there are very few areas of science in which there is ‘consensus’ - and the history of science [at least as seen through Kuhn] is based precisely on the breaking of accepted scientific paradigms. We all need to keep this in mind when faced with other current idiocies like ‘global bird flu pandemic’, etc.
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In other news, my favorite Hasbara troll, dcoronata, made a lovely appearance today, trotting out some of his greatest hits:

What country was that? (3+ / 0-)
Recommended by:redcardphreek, Doughnutman, MBNYC
If you know your history, the area was a British protectorate, previously a part of the Ottoman Empire.

There was no previous country in history, that went by the name of Palestine.

Right, so it’s fine that a bunch of Europeans came in, stole the land from the hundreds of thousands of people living there & then instituted policies of ethnic cleansing that continue to this day… Just so that’s settled…

In that diary though, mattes linked to a very interesting article I hadn’t seen before on the Mizrahi rejection of Zionism. Very good read & completely blasts the myth of the great Arab expulsion of Jews after the creation of Israel.

Anyhow - have at it vipes.

I came across this quote in a Wapo article via Angry Arab:

Bush said the split in the Palestinian territories is purely the fault of Hamas. “It was Hamas that attacked the unity government,” the president said. “They made a choice of violence. It was their decision that has caused there to be this current situation in the Middle East.”

Uh huh. Backtrack a few days as linked at OG&P.

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas elections, last January, Abrams greeted a group of Palestinian businessmen in his White House office with talk of a “hard coup” against the newly-elected Hamas government — the violent overthrow of their leadership with arms supplied by the United States. While the businessmen were shocked, Abrams was adamant — the U.S. had to support Fatah with guns, ammunition and training, so that they could fight Hamas for control of the Palestinian government.

We continue to ply our trade worldwide - the assassination of democracy. Wherever there are leaders we don’t like, sell someone some guns to take ‘em out. Then we can turn on the ones we install and double our money selling guns to the other side… After all, the global arms trade is all that is left of the American manufacturing base.

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Meanwhile, our friends in donklephant land are frontpaging scientifically baseless fear propoganda and taunting those seeking the truth with juvenile savagery…

Priorities, priorities. Sigh.
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update 1:19. Just came across a rather fascinating, if far fetched article over at narconews on plans for “Atlantica” and other mini-states mirroring the Balkanization of Mexico post NAFTA that readers of both LC & OG&P will enjoy. A snippet for New Yorkers:

Maybe, kind reader, you are still in New York City. Do you think you escaped the invasion of the spoiled brats by moving out to Williamsburg? Think again: the fauxhemians have arrived to offer your landlord more rent than you can pay at your New York shitty job, and the NYU or Colombia student’s dad is offering him six months rent in advance. (The landlord, and not the immigration officer, has thus become the new government.) Are you thinking of leaping farther out into Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Northern New Jersey, or have you already done so? Those places, too, are becoming dumping grounds for the wealthy parents of the world to send their little darlings, not to mention the Euro-trash tourists lined up around 34th street to see the Empire State building from its roof deck, and spending $200 a night (six grand a month) at even the seediest of run-down hotels. Meanwhile, where did all the fun people go? The ones you see in Hollywood movies about New York? Where are those legends that inspired you to visit there? They either left… or they are simply trying to survive, having a lot less fun.

And what rough beast slouches toward dystopia to be born?

The FBI will be contacting you soon about your computer. Here’s a link to today’s article on the BBC site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6752853.stm

Under the guise of ferreting out email spammers who surreptitiously take control of scores of other peoples’ computers, the FBI will be contacting a MILLION (sic) computer users. One can only wonder what they’ll be looking for. Suffice it to say that now is the time to safeguard your most important data, ESPECIALLY financial stuff.

The good news is that the sweep is so wide that there’s no way that they’ll be able to personally peruse your entire hard drive. The bad news is that their computer software is extremely fast and sophisticated. Typically, they look for code words, including such easily misinterpreted terms as “bomb” and “drugs.”

 According to the FBI, if your machine is running slowly, you are more likely to be contacted than if you aren’t having any trouble with it.

Obviously, spam is annoying, but is it getting rid of it worth compromising everyone’s privacy? Isn’t this akin to demanding that everyone take their curtains down so we can make sure that nobody’s watching child porn?