Where the Heart Is

I drive across the long dry plain of southeastern New Mexico, with the snow-covered 11,000 ft. peak of Sierra Blanca sticking up like a vision of water from another world.

The Mescaleros are prospering with their casino and high-priced inn. There is a big new church overlooking the town. Catholic, of course--no Baptists here. Sierra Blanca is their sacred mountain. You can see why.

This landscape looks so rugged compared to the lush forests and wetlands of the southeast, but it's incredibly fragile. Each ecological niche may only contain a handful of species who have adapted to its harsh dimensions. There is nothing extra here.

I'm home, at least in the larger sense. There is a lava flow at the head of the Tulerosa Basin; there's a lot of volcanic activity in this area. Tomorrow I hope to get up to Ojo Caliente to soak in the mineral springs. I sure do like this life on the road. If only my credit cards would hold out, I could do this forever.

Bingo

(see below)

Greetings Earthlings!

Spent most of yesterday on the long climb up to the caprock of west Texas. Damn, I love the west! Yeehah.

Finally got into Roswell at ten o'clock. Spotted some mysterious lights a few miles outside town, which is promising. Now I'm off to search for UFO-alia.

Politics? What politics? Culture? I'm in Roswell, New Mexico for heaven's sake! More later...I'm off to look for evidence of alien life.

Barbarians at the Gate

Blogging at you from the campus of LSU in Baton Rouge. Thank you, computer gods, for wireless technology.

I've been hiding out in a cabin on the beach in the Florida panhandle for the past few days, getting ready for the long but happy trek to Moab. Amazing to hear nothing but the sound of surf and wind for two days. No traffic, no sirens, no computers either. Thank you, goddess, for places like this. No thanks to the people responsible for the onslaught of condo development just outside the gates, though.

Developers go build in Hell.

Florida could have been a paradise if more of this land had been set aside years ago. As it is, I wonder how much of what is special about it will be left in five? ten? years' time. Unfortunately, I'll probably get to find out.

Catching up on the news, I'm delighted to see that Howard Dean has been elected chair of the DNC. May this be the beginning of a rebirth of progressive politics. And about time.

Coffee's getting cold--time to move on.

PS. The bat is up! ActBlue is taking donations to the DNC.

Contribution amount:
$

The Shoe Fits

Juan Cole takes on National Review's Jonah Goldberg; there's already been a lot of commentary so I won't add to it, except to quote this:

Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies.

Yup.

Apocalypse Now?

Oh good. Scientists say the west Antarctic ice sheet is melting, something they previously hadn't expected to happen for 100 years.

British scientists have discovered a new threat to the world which may be a result of global warming. Researchers from the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that a massive Antarctic ice sheet previously assumed to be stable may be starting to disintegrate, a conference on climate change heard yesterday. Its collapse would raise sea levels around the earth by more than
16 feet.

BAS staff are carrying out urgent measurements of the remote points in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) where they have found ice to be flowing into the sea at the enormous rate of 250 cubic kilometres a year, a discharge alone that is raising global sea levels by a fifth of a millimetre a year.

Professor Chris Rapley, the BAS director, told the conference at the UK Meteorological Office in Exeter, which was attended by scientists from all over the world, that their discovery had reactivated worries about the ice sheet's collapse.

Only four years ago, in the last report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), worries that the ice sheet was disintegrating were firmly dismissed.

Professor Rapley said: "The last IPCC report characterised Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would say it is now an awakened giant. There is real concern."

He added: "The previous view was that WAIS would not collapse before the year 2100. We now have to revise that judgement. We cannot be so sanguine."

Collapse of the WAIS would be a disaster, putting enormous chunks of low-lying, desperately poor countries such as Bangladesh under water - not to mention much of southern England.

The conference has been called by Tony Blair as part of Britain's efforts to increase the pace of international action on climate change, in a year when the UK is heading the G8 group of industrialised nations and the European Union.

Mr Blair has asked it to explore the question of how much climate change the world can take before the consequences are catastrophic for human society and ecosystems.

Yesterday, it heard several alarming new warnings of possible climate-related catastrophic events, including the failure of the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles warm, and the melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland.

But it was the revelations of Professor Rapley, head of one of the world's most respected scientific bodies, which were the most dramatic, as they reopened a concern many scientists assumed had been laid to rest.

Antarctica as a whole is a land covered by very thick ice, but the ice sheet covering the eastern half of the continent is very stable as it sits on rocks that are well above sea level.

Worries about the ice covering the western half first surfaced more than 25 years ago when it was realised that the base rocks are actually well below the level of the sea.

In some circumstances, it was feared, such as a melting of the edge of the ice sheet from rising temperatures, sea water could get under it and eventually lead to its collapse.

Yet the 2001 IPCC report, the principal consensus view of the international community of climate scientists, thought that very unlikely, and said such a collapse was improbable before the end of the current century, or even for 1,000 years.

What puts a very big question mark over this, Professor Rapley said, was the recent discovery of the extremely rapid discharge of ice into the Amundsen sea from the WAIS at three remote ice streams, Pine Island, Thwaites, and another unnamed site.

"There is a very dramatic discharge from this region which, five years ago when the IPCC report was written, we just didn't know about," he said. "What we have found completely opens up the whole debate." It had only been recently discovered, he said, because the area was so remote. But BAS scientists, with US help, had established a base in the area to investigate. Professor Rapley said there was some evidence that the discharge was a relatively recent phenomenon and it might be caused by rising ocean temperatures.

Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, who opened the conference, added another ominous prediction when she said that major global warming impacts on the world in the next 20 to 30 years could not be avoided. Whatever we do, potentially disastrous world temperature rises will take place because they are already "built into the system," she said.

Her forecast that we are powerless to prevent major damage from climate change is accepted by scientists but it is rare for such a frank admission from a politician. It reflects the concern at a high level.

It was amplified by senior climate researchers, who said the amount of future warming to which the world is firmly committed, because of greenhouse gases that have already been put into the atmosphere, will be enough to threaten the survival of many ecosystems and wildlife species such as polar bears and penguins.

"I believe that most of the warming we are expecting over the next few decades is now virtually inevitable, and even in this time frame we may expect a significant impact," Mrs Beckett said.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm old.

Shame on You

Paul Krugman makes yet another heroic attempt to explain why the Social Security so-called "crisis" is bunk.

Saw a piece on Headline News tonight about how, after 2042, Social Security may only be able to pay 70% of benefits. Then they show today's average benefit of $849 (?--from memory), take 70% and gasp! $594!

You mean in the year 2042 I will receive benefits of only $594??

Well, no. Although you wouldn't know if from listening to this report. Social Security benefits are set to increase periodically at least through 2042, to more than keep up with presumed inflation. So a 70% cut in benefits--which will only happen if we do absolutely nothing for the next 35 years--will still mean benefits greater than those we receive today.

Deceptive? You bet. Look for more of the same.

Hey--it worked for Iraq, didn't it?

Bush will be embarking on what Josh Marshall endearingly calls his "bamboozle-palooza" tour to sell this latest lie to the American people. Fool me once....

All Computers Go to HELL

This means you. I mean me. I mean my computer HAS gone to hell for about the last week and a half, thus no posting. I managed after many trials to perform the cyber-equivalent of the Heimlich manuever, forcing it to cough up my data. A little the worse for wear, but there it is. Thank you, computer gods. Now fuck off.

New Iraq: DOA

TomDispatch.com has this piece by Dahr Jamail. If there ever was a bleaker, more heartbreaking picture of the disintegration of Iraq, I haven't seen it.

Everything in Iraq is set against the backdrop of shattered infrastructure and a nearly complete lack of reconstruction. What the Americans turn out to be best at is, once again, promises - and propaganda. During the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority ruled Iraq from Baghdad's Green Zone, their handouts often read like this one released on May 21, 2004: "The Coalition Provisional Authority has recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi children in Ramadi, Kerbala, and Hilla. Iraqi women from Hilla sewed the soccer balls, which are emblazoned with the phrase 'All of Us Participate in a NewIraq.'"

This would be merely pathetic except for the fact that we're turning the "New Iraq" into a hellhole. No clean water (therefore rampant disease) or electricity; no security; no dignity; no work. Would we tolerate such living conditions? Not to put too fine a point on it, would we expect any Western (read white) people to tolerate such living conditions? And yet we expect the Iraqis to be--what? Grateful? Cooperative? How is this not racism?

Nothing to Add

From Riverbend blog:

How is our current situation going to secure America? How is a complete generation that is growing up in fear and chaos going to view Americans ten years from now? Does anyone ask that? After September 11, because of what a few fanatics did, Americans decided to become infected with a collective case of xenophobia. Yet after all Iraqis have been through under the occupation, we're expected to be tolerant and grateful. Why? Because we get more wheat in our diets?

Terror isn't just worrying about a plane hitting a skyscraper--terrorism is being caught in traffic and hearing the crack of an AK-47 a few meters away because the National Guard want to let an American humvee or Iraqi official through. Terror is watching your house being raided and knowing that the silliest thing might get you dragged away to Abu Ghraib where soldiers can torture, beat and kill. Terror is that first moment after a series of machine-gun shots, when you lift your head frantically to make sure your loved ones are still in one piece. Terror is trying to pick the shards of glass resulting from a nearby explosion out of the living-room couch and trying not to imagine what would have happened if a person had been sitting there.

The weapons never existed. It's like having a loved one sentenced to death for a crime they didn't commit- having your country burned and bombed beyond recognition, almost. Then, after two years of grieving for the lost people, and mourning the lost sovereignty, we're told we were innocent of harboring those weapons. We were never a threat to America...

Congratulations Bush- we are a threat now.

Squeaky Wheel Manifesto

Media Matters looks at who appears on cable news. It's time to expose the liberal media myth once and for all for the self-serving lie that it is. I don't know about you, but I'm awfully sick of our national discourse being hijacked by the right while they pose as victims. They want to whine and complain, fine. Let's give them something to complain about.

Please make note of the contact information in this article. Use it well.

Animal Story

So let's see--the administration would like to make permanent tax cuts the bulk of which go to the wealthy and which, along with the cost of occupying Iraq, have rung up deficits to the tune of $412 billion last year. Then, in order to try to pull the country back from the brink of financial ruin and to prove that they're really, really serious about cutting the deficit(!), they're going to propose cuts in Medicaid?

Let there not be a shred of bipartisan cover for this or any other attempt to shift our debt burden onto the backs of the poor and disabled. Let Democrats utter the words "moral values" as often as Mr. Bush spoke of "freedom" in his speech yesterday--a word that curdles in his mouth like toads falling from the lips of the evil sister in a Mother Goose fairy tale. In fairy tales, of course, the bad characters get eaten by wolves. Life should be so simple.

Fun With Math

From the Progress Report, some telling numbers:

$40 million: Cost of Bush inaugural ball festivities, not counting security costs.

$20,000: Cost of yellow roses purchased for inaugural festivities by D.C.'s Ritz Carlton.

200: Number of Humvees outfitted with top-of-the-line armor for troops in Iraq that could have been purchased with the amount of money blown on the inauguration.

$10,000: Price of an inaugural package at the Fairmont Hotel, which includes a Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon reception, a chauffeured Rolls Royce and two actors posing as "faux" Secret Service agents, complete with black sunglasses and cufflink walkie-talkies.

22 million: Number of children in regions devastated by the tsunami who could have received vaccinations and preventive health care with the amount of money spent on the inauguration.

1,160,000: Number of girls who could be sent to school for a year in Afghanistan with the amount of money lavished on the inauguration.

$15,000: The down payment to rent a fur coat paid by one gala attendee who didn't want the hassle of schlepping her own through the airport.

2,500: Number of U.S. troops used to stand guard as President Bush takes his oath of office.

26,000: Number of Kevlar vests for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be purchased for $40 million.

Pretty much says it all, dudn' it?

On the Nature of God, or Wake Up and Smell the Sneakers

This is not about politics. This is about a fish.

Ergo:


This beastie was found on a beach in SE Asia after the tsunami, along with other assorted denizens of the deep who, I'm sure, have never (literally) seen the light of day before. The displacement of water at deepest levels had brought them to the surface.

Life, we're told, occurs in the most inhospitable places. (I can almost imagine creatures like these living beneath the surface of Mars or Titan.) It takes on strange and wonderful, even grotesque forms.

What combination of random chance and ruthless elimination came up with this critter? It's almost easier to believe that there is a god, if god were a troubled teenager with a drawing pad and a sick sense of humor. (And almighty powers--also a few stubborn zits, a nose ring, a bit of stubble and a t-shirt [black] that says "god".) Take that, Jerry Falwell. Take that, James Dobson. (What twisted evolutionary process came up with them?) Fall on your knees before the smelly sneakers of the almighty, dude.

For lo! the lord loves bottom-feeders, but there is no place in all creation for any such as you.

Update: Apparently these creatures were actually found as part of a joint Australia-New Zealand deep-sea expedition in 2003.

Babylon Addendum

A reader points out in response to a previous post that we're leaving plenty behind in Iraq: depleted uranium, flattened cities, dead people, hate. Fair enough. And that legacy and its consequences will remain, maybe forever. It's all the things we say we didn't intend that will live on. Meanwhile, our grandiose plans--our sense that we could make a people over into the image of ourselves and that they would be happy about it--are collapsing under their own delusional weight. It's everything we said we did intend that will disappear as if it never existed.

And that's as close to a definition of futility as I can think of.

Hope that helps.

Leaving Babylon

In the desert of southern Utah, where I live most of the time, we are surrounded by the legacy of ancients; the ruins and rock art are part of the timelessness of a landscape that reveals itself in billion-year-old layers of stone. There is a fourth dimension of time that you can see and touch, and it makes the desert vivid and strong, more real than mere three-dimensional reality. Maybe my reverence for it comes naturally--I like old things, and I was taught to respect my elders--but it seems to demand it too, unforgiving beauty always ready to remind me of my place in the scheme of things.

Which is why I was so saddened to read in The Guardian about how the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq has been damaged by the occupying forces (mostly American) who have used it as a military depot(!). They've dug trenches, built helicopter landing pads, crushed ancient stones with their vehicles.

"The significance of Babylon is not lost on the coalition," [a military spokeman says]. "The site dates back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, but there are very few visible original remains to the untrained eye."

Which is of course exactly why it should have been left alone in the first place. (Or do they mean that it doesn't matter because what's valuable there can't be seen? Or do they mean that there's little that remains after two years of destruction?)

When I stand in the desert I am humbled. Our grandiose vision of ourselves as the "liberators" of Iraq, the creators of a brave new world of justice, consumerism and 24-hour cable news, will surely crumble, leaving not so much as a stone behind.

Agenda Item

News is the Social Security Administration is creating a "tactical plan" to market the idea that it faces "dire financial problems requiring immediate action".

Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush's agenda.

Their mission is to support Bush's agenda? Gee, thanks. Whatever happened to the days of faceless bureacrats who cared for nothing but doing their jobs either badly or well?

Actually, agency employees are complaining that they're being used to fight an ideological battle, and with trust fund monies at that. The "planning" is being conducted by Andrew Biggs, associate commissioner of Social Security for retirement policy and former Cato Institute analyst.

Be Very Afraid

As reported in Newsweek, the blogosphere and elsewhere, the Pentagon is considering sending US Special Forces to

advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers...

Shades of the contras (no coincidence I'm sure, since John Negroponte, who coordinated the Reagan-era contra campaign from his post as ambassador to Honduras, is now running the show as ambassador to Iraq), Operation Phoenix and every other murderous, desperate attempt to salvage a losing war.

Maj. Gen. Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service, says:

"The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," [he said]. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

So we will have Kurdish and Shiite hit men--excuse me, "freedom fighters"--carrying out a campaign of collective punishment against the Sunni population in order to balance the terror equation. Can you say recipe for civil war? Can you say, death squads for democracy?

Will we as a nation be able to retain any shred of good will, credibility or respect when this is all over--if it ever is? Or are we becoming the new Evil Empire? (This is not a rhetorical question.)

Smarter Than Monkeys?

Salon's Michelle Goldberg writes a rather pessimistic article about how the Dover PA school board decided to include the teaching of "creation science" in its schools. Only I guess they're calling it "intelligent design" now...whatever.

Whatever they choose to call it, it ain't science. Science means that you have a theory based on a sound, experimentally tested hypothesis. How exactly do you test "creation science"? How do you prove or disprove it? By flipping a bible to see if it lands heads or tails?

Faith-based science isn't science. But maybe they don't believe in that either.

Getting a Grip, Part One

Catching up with news and events after the holiday break has been difficult because it all seems so overwhelming: the looming shadow of the new Bush administration and the start of the congressional term; the nomination of the odious Alberto Gonzales as Democrats roll over yet again; the horror of the tsunami in South Asia; the mind-numbing violence in Iraq. And those are just the headlines. One hardly knows where to start.

But since we have to start somewhere:

Is it just my imagination, or has all this heartstring-plucking, button-pushing reporting on the tsunami disaster become more than a little grotesque? See the videos of screaming tourists fleeing the oncoming wave! (Guess which ones made it and which didn't.) See the devastated but cute orphans clutching their bottled water! I don't mean to diminish in any way the scope of this tragedy--but this is voyeurism, not news. It's not helping us to understand how and why this happened--the poverty that pushes people into areas that aren't safe to live in, the degrading of the coastal environment, the reckless development. It's disaster pornography, an artificial heightening of emotion that reassures us that we can still feel something--at least until we change the channel, or until the next celebrity murder trial.