Hitch a Ride with the Next Russian Supply Ship

The National Aeronautic

Self-Esteem Administration

Speaking to al-Jazeera on a recent trip to the Middle East, National Aeronautics and Space Administration head Charles Bolden heralded a new age in international space relations:

When I became the NASA Administrator . . . [Obama] charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, [second,] he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

Bolden also said that in the past, NASA had worked with countries that were capable of space exploration, but now Obama has

asked NASA to change . . . by reaching out to "nontraditional" partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations.

So we won't be restricted by the need to work with countries that actually can explore space, but can expand to those that can't.

I applaud this escape from hidebound tradition. It's not the Muslim countries' fault they aren't capable of space exploration, and it's time to end the pale male hegemony. If we ever need a landing strip again, we may need one of these countries to provide it. Even if we don't, what's more important: our space program, or helping predominantly Muslim nations feel good about their accomplishments many centuries ago? Also, the diplomatic mission is bound to be cheaper, and it will get NASA out of the way while the private sector knuckles down.

Bankers with Pitchforks

Wall Street and San Francisco Are Revolting

Per today's Washington Post, contributions to the Democrats' House and Senate congressional campaign committees from New York are off 65 % from two years ago. The drop-off is attributed to relentless Wall Street bashing.

Although the overall drop is only 16%, the trend is much sharper among big-dollar ($1,000+) donors, down to under $50 million from over $80 million. The New York area accounts for half of that big-dollar-donor drop: $24 million then vs. $9 million this year. In 2008, 28% of Democratic House and Senate committee donations came from the New York area, including 20% from Manhattan alone. This year, New York accounts for only 10% of the total.

Contributors in San Francisco aren't much happier, with donations falling by 34%. Fundraisers explain the drop there by disaffection with overly conservative Democratic initiatives.

The Romans Took Themselves Out

The Romans Took Out Themselves:

A post from the Anchoress, who is guesting at Hot Air. Eric's point is her own.

It goes with this video.

Threats and the Tea Party

Threats & the Tea Party:

What I find very interesting about this poll is not the top-line finding, which tells us that the Tea Party is much more concerned than other Americans about the massive debt and the size of the Federal Government. I'm not even interested in what Hot Air notes -- that there is minimal difference in Tea Party supporters' and opponents' opinion on racial matters.

What interests me is the subject of percentages that view a given issue as an "extremely serious threat" to the future of the country. It's worth noting that only 49% -- under half! -- of Tea Party supporters view the size and scope of the Federal Government as an "extremely" serious threat.

What I find more interesting, though, is that there is no issue -- no issue -- that a majority of non-supporters find to be such a threat. Only 44% of those who are neutral feel that the government's debt is a such a threat, and that is the very largest level reported among non-Tea-Party-supporters. Among Tea Party opponents, no issue approaches a majority; only "health care costs" even achieves a third (33%). The Tea Party supporter is even more concerned about that issue! 41% feel that is an extremely serious threat.

Confer all of that with this set of papers on genetics and political leanings. The upshot of these studies is that conservatives are far better at recognizing threats in the environment -- but are also more likely to produce false positives of threats. Liberals are much less likely to correctly recognize that there is a genuine danger, but also much less likely to falsely perceive a threat.

That seems odd in the wake of eight years of hearing about how BushCo was about to overthrow the nation; but it does line up with these polling results. (A further refinement: looking at the table comparing "Tea Party supporters" and "Republicans," we see that Republicans are also much less worried about things -- and therefore, much less conservative on this model.) Tea Party supporters are more deeply concerned than liberals about even the issues that concern liberals. There are only three issues where the numbers flip, and Tea Party opponents are more concerned: the size of corporations (just under a third for opponents, with about half as many supporters being concerned); the environment and global warming (opponents: 30%/ supporters: 13%); and racial issues (17%/13%).

Yet even here, the liberal concerns are not great. On the three issues of greatest concern to Tea Party opponents, only one of them achieves a bare third of respondents. Two-thirds of respondents in the "opponents" category see no extremely serious threats to America at all. Over half of neutrals see no extremely serious threats to America at all.

One is tempted, at this point, to post a whole bunch of graphs that illustrate the deadly dangers to the nation; but the point is, if the conjecture is right, doing so wouldn't matter. People are predisposed to worry about these things or not. If they aren't, they won't worry no matter how ugly the graphs are. If they are, the graphs could be rather less ugly than they actually are, and would still produce concern.

This may illuminate the "incompetence or malice" debate, which is ongoing. Part of the competence issue could be the ability to recognize the harm being done. Another potential anti-malice line of argument: they really just can't see how dangerous their actions are, how badly they're harming the nation and undermining its foundations; or yet another, that at least some of the "malice" readings are false positives.

Den Beste Speaks

Malice or Incompetence? Den Beste Speaks

Everyone who has read blogs for a long time knows the name of Steven Den Beste. He isn't answering the question of malice versus incomptence, but he is raising it.

Poodle

Poodle:

I wasn't going to say anything about the Gore business, because frankly I don't want to talk about Al Gore; I can't muster the interest. However, I have to admit that this Taiwanese news animation does a remarkable job of conveying the story even when you can't speak the language. I hadn't really thought of animation as a good tool for the news: it's too easy to tell a misleading story even with actual video! Still, as long as you don't put any faith in the notion that things happened as depicted, this depiction does at least convey the content of the accusation in very clear terms.

Since we're doing an animation today, I found this one while following a link from Cassandra's page. Some of you who like animation may find it amusing.

ObamaCare

Voters Still Don't Like It

Per Rasmussen, 78% of Republicans believe ObamaCare will be bad for the nation, as do 66% of unaffiliated voters. But 67% of Democrats believe ObamaCare will be good.

I don't understand why the levels of support are veering around so wildly. There's nothing obvious in the news to explain it. The smoothed-out overall trend looks slightly discouraging for ObamaCare enthusiasts who were hoping that voters' initial enraged reaction would moderate when we "find out what's in the bill."

Another Enlightening Fact

Another Enlightening Fact:

From Professor Bainbridge, this:

A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that Senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1.4% a year and even corporate insiders on average beat the market by only about 6% a year during that period....

Under current law, it is unlikely that Members of Congress can be held liable for insider trading.

This is a failure of justice -- perfectly in accord with the law, for the lawmakers are the ones who are manipulating the law to their advantage. When law and justice sharply diverge, there are consequences.

Fisking The Declaration of Independence

Fisking the Declaration of Independence:

Snide pretentions of superiority and intentional misunderstandings are the order of the day. What if they had been, in Jefferson's time?

Well, you may as well read through it. Just expect to hear the same arguments fielded soon, for we are going to be having many of the same debates in the next few years.

We've begun, actually. Consider:

"You can’t simultaneously complain that he’s providing too much government and not enough. Pick one."

Who among us hasn't heard one or another on the Left say something like, "Well, this BP thing sure shows the case for Big Government, doesn't it?" The idea of Constitutionalism is ignored: that it is not a case of "big" versus "small" government, but of government restricted to its proper place and role. The seas have always been the Federal government's responsibility: they have the right to maintain a navy, and to set maritime rules, and rules governing letters of marque and reprisal, and so forth. It was clearly the Founder's intent that the deep waters should be a Federal concern.

The government has abandoned all traditional restraints and limits, and as a consequence it cannot, or will not, perform its actual duties. Or, as T99 put it:

"If the entire federal bureaucracy did not exist and not one penny of federal funds was available, the cleanup process would be helped instead of hindered."

Calvin Coolidge

Progress

I wouldn't have guessed who said this:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

It was Calvin Coolidge.

Grand Old Flag

On a Slightly Brighter Note

Here's an obsessive painting project after my own heart. The building covers 3.5 acres and is near Hobby Airport in Houston. It took a couple of weeks to paint.

Mexican Meltdown

When Democracy Blows Up

I failed to find anything inspiring today, other than this nice picture of fireworks. So here goes with the bummer stuff. Today is election day in 14 of Mexico's 31 states. Twelve states will try to elect governors. Things aren't going well.

Last Monday, the man favored to win the governor's seat in Tamaulipas, just south of the Texas border on the Gulf Coast, was killed in an ambush on his campaign car. His brother has replaced him in the election. A mayoral candidate in the same state was shot dead in May. Over 550 electoral officials have resigned. In the state of Sinaloa, on the West Coast of Mexico just off the southern tip of Baja, the campaign headquarters of a candidate for governor were attacked with bombs this week. Nearly 23,000 people have been killed since Mexican President Calderón launched a military crackdown on organized crime over three years ago.

On Thursday, 21 people were shot dead in a battle between rival drug gangs in the state of Sonora, about 12 miles over the border from Arizona, "along a known trafficking route for drugs and illegal immigrants."

What we are seeing in the last couple of years is a much more gruesome kind of killing, beheadings, dismembering, hanging corpses up on highway overpasses, all of that, with messages left by the cartels, all of that to send a message, either to the law enforcement authorities, who would go after them, or to their rivals or to the local government. . . . [W]e're starting to see some Mexicans even talking about, well, maybe it would be better just to make a deal with some of the cartels. . . . A lot of candidates have just stopped campaigning.

The most amazing thing to me is that the news reports generally add that this is the worst violence in Mexican elections "since 1994." Gosh, has it been that long since the last collapse of civilization? Also, I've just about given up trying to figure what might distinguish one Mexican party from another, since concepts like "right" and "left" seem to have lost all meaning down there. Per the Wall Street Journal, the current trend in distinguishing between Mexican parties is to focus on the number of voters who would never consider voting for them:

A survey by the Mitofsky polling group showed the PRI is now the country's "least rejected" political party, with only 19% of Mexicans saying they would never vote for it. Some 30% said they would never vote for the PAN [Calderón's "conservative" party], and 38% would shun the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has been hurt by internal divisions and a hard-left faction that has turned off middle-class voters.

This is what it means when we let inmates take over the asylum. Happy Fourth!

There's Always Somebody Better

There's Always Somebody Better:

Via PowerPoint Ranger:

Kittehs

Dogs and Cats Living Together

I'm too bummed to keep reading about the bungled spill cleanup for a while, so, as they would say over at Ace, it's time for kittehs and a little unnatural interspecies action. This is old National Geographic footage; my apologies if you've all seen it before.

Translation, Technology

Translation, Transliteration, and Technology:

There are two fascinating stories today on the subject of texts of supreme historic importance, and the new things that technology is allowing us to do with them. One is the Declaration of Independence: using spectral analysis, we now know something about a moment of enlightenment in Jefferson's thinking.

"Subjects."

That's what Thomas Jefferson first wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies.

But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated.

The word he replaced it with was "citizens."

The second story, which I have from Lars Walker, is to do with translating the Bible. How do you translate the Bible into a language that has no written form? First, you must work with the speakers of that language to develop a writing system.

"Wycliffe missionaries don't evangelize, teach theology, hold Bible study or start churches. They give (preliterate people) a written language," Edwards said. "They teach them to read and write in their mother tongue."

The missionaries develop alphabets. They create reading primers. They translate the Bible.

About 2,200 languages remain without a Bible. About 350 million people, mostly in India, China, sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea, speak only these languages.

This work has been going on for some time. Before the age of technology, the motto of the Wycliffe missionaries was, "One team, one language, one lifetime." Now, they say, they can do several languages in a lifetime -- indeed, they expect to finish the rest within fifteen years.

Freedom

Freedom:

Now here is a lesson. You've seen this before: but look at the subtitles, especially in the final moments.



"In anul Domnului 1314."

"Patriotii Scotiei"

"Trubaduri"

"Libertatea."

Every one of you knows enough Latin to understand what is said there, if you didn't know the English at all: "In the year of our Lord, 1314... patriots of Scotland... warrior-poets... freedom."

Yet it's not Latin. It's Romanian. Enough of the old tongue survives.

Our friend Lars Walker is writing about American echoes in Viking sagas. Yet we should also recognize that this Scottish moment was a moment that touched the world, and changed it. 1314 was the battle on the Bannock burn. 1320 was the Declaration of Arbroath, which inspired our Declaration of Independence as much as anything ever written before it. That was written in Latin, addressed to the Pope:

"Non enim propter gloriam, diuicias aut honores pugnamus set propter libertatem solummodo quam Nemo bonus nisi simul cum vita amittit."

That is to say, "It is not in truth for glory that we fight, nor for honors, but for freedom alone: that freedom that a good man lays down only with his life."

And now I will quote a piece from Anthony Kenny's Medieval Philosophy, as regards a document written by certain Franciscan friars in 1324. William of Ockham was with them, and wrote supporting pieces in their train. It does not intend to speak to the Scottish situation particularly, but to the Pope in general. Having published it, they fled to the Holy Roman Empire for protection from the Church. There, in what is now Germany but was then a place of endless free states and cities, these ideas were welcome.

The work, Defensor Pacis ("The Defender of the Peace," 1324) became a classic text of political philosophy.... There are two types of government: rule by the consent of the ruler's subjects, and rule against their will. Only the former is legitimate and the latter is a form of tyranny. The laws of the state derive their legitimacy neither from the will of the ruler nor directly from God: they are given authority by the citizens themselves....

An irregular or incompetent prince should be removed from office by the legislature.

And if the legislature will not do it?

[W]e should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule.

Thus they said, in 1320. Four hundred years later, and a bit, they said thus at Philadelphia. Two hundred years later, and a bit, it may be time to say it again.

Constitutional Question

A Constitutional Question: How Does This Work?

Dad29 has an interesting report from Wisconsin, which made me recognize a void in my knowledge.

Jackson County District Attorney Gerald R. Fox has declared that, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling this week that the Second Amendment clearly applies to the states, he will no longer prosecute people for carrying concealed weapons, or certain other gun related offenses.

The high court's ruling in McDonald vs. Chicago, "immediately renders some of Wisconsin's current laws unconstitutional," Fox said in a news release. Therefore, he said, his office won't take any cases police might refer that are solely about violations of concealed carry, uncased or loaded weapons in vehicles, guns in public buildings or where alcohol is sold or served. Nor will Fox prosecute the possession of switchblade and other types of easy-opening knives.

When we've seen other landmark SCOTUS cases -- Lawrence v. Texas, say -- I've always heard that the ruling would overturn laws in many states besides the one where the suit originated. Exactly how that works is not clear to me. SCOTUS presumably does not do the work of identifying similar laws, and sending a note to the state governments; so my guess is that the work is done at the state level -- perhaps by the Attorney General?

Here we have a D.A. making the call, which seems strange. It makes sense that they would not want to prosecute cases that have just been rendered untenable, but it also seems odd that you might have two districts making different calls on whether SCOTUS has just voided the law.

So, my friends who do this for a living -- how does this work? What is the process for recognizing which laws have just been rendered invalid, and harmonizing them with the fundamental right that SCOTUS has just announced that it intends to protect?

Strays

More Missing Cat Humor

Not that I want to get everyone started on the kind of physics humor that took over Cassandra's site the other day, but . . . .

Gulf Oil Spill Update July 2, 2010

All Spill, All the Time

This cartoon is about the war, of course, but it seems to apply equally well to the spill. The public conversation about whether the feds are obstructing the spill cleanup is degenerating into a lot of exchanges that amount to "You lie!" "No, you lie!" Here are some links to sites where people are trying to muddle through whether and to what degree EPA regulations, Jones Act restrictions, and other federal laws are part of the problem instead of the solution.

Today's Wall Street Journal opinion piece may give the subject some welcome publicity, and it's a nice summary, but it contains no links to primary sources. The comments section, though, does have some useful links. For instance, here is a Houston Chronicle story about the Dutch consulate confirming that its offer of help was rebuffed. This Christan Science Monitor piece from a few weeks ago is a good summary of the conflicting accusations concerning the Jones Act.

This is the most recent piece I can find by Yobie Benjamin, the San Francisco reporter who's been following the issue and pursuing Freedom of Information Act requests. Ever pursued one of those? "Stonewalling" doesn't begin to describe the usual response. I honor his effort.

Even the AP has begun acknowledging the problem, which can't be a good sign for the White House. This week's article from Tom Breen quotes from the devastating Issa report and adds some more anecdotal complaints of assets kept sitting around. White House Press Secretary continues the usual line of asserting that the accusation has been repeatedly debunked, but providing no information with which to debunk it.

I've just found a useful site collecting these stories, www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill. There I discovered that, three days ago, the Coast Guard and the EPA finally felt enough urgency to alter the rules that kept most of the nation's skimmer fleet away from the Gulf in case they were needed for an emergency elsewhere. The NOLA site reports that the White House is complaining today that a separate congressional panel to investigate the oil spill response is "unnecessary." Tough; the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted 15-8 Wednesday to set up one up anyway. It's a 10-member bipartisan panel with subpoena power. "[T]he congressional commission, which would be jointly appointed by Democratic and Republican members, is attached to a bill strengthening regulation of the oil and gas industry. It's uncertain whether the president would veto the bill; a more robust regulatory system has been one of his administration's top priorities since the BP spill."

This editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune decries the red tape and speaks to the Jones Act issue, which remains elusive. The feds say it's not a problem, while the players report that it remains one. How about waiving it for a year, just in case?

Here is an SFGate article reporting on the delays caused by Hurricane Alex, including the EPA 15 ppm problem.

And here is a blog charging that the whole "obstruction" issue is Republican propaganda.

Honor

The Principled Genius

Former mathematician Grigori Perelman made the news today by deciding, after considerable delay for pondering, to turn down the million-dollar "Millennium Prize" awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which set up these prizes in 2000 for the solutions to a set of seven basic problems that had been bedeviling the field. Perelman's award, for solving the famous Poincaré Conjecture, was the first to be announced.

Perelman is another of those Russian Jews who so often seem to turn up in stories like this. He studied in the USSR, then held posts in several American universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He then turned down positions at Princeton and Stanford to return to Russia. He has since ceased working on mathematics altogether and is unemployed, living with his mother in St. Petersburg.

In turning down the $1 million Millennium Prize, Perelman explained that he did not find the process of awards in his field to be just. He already had been awarded the FIelds Medal for his work in 2006, and declined that one, too. In fact, he consistently turns down prizes, saying things like "[the prize] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed." Or "I'm not interested in money or fame. . . . I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me." He has expressed the opinion that prize committees are unqualified to assess his work, even positively.

This quotation sums up his alienation: "[T]here are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." He has also said, "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."

So what was Perelman's work all about? Wikpedia explains that the Poincaré conjecture claims that if a closed 3-manifold has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a three-dimensional sphere. Yeah, that didn't help me either. This is more my speed:

The Poincaré Conjecture says "hey, you've got this alien blob that can ooze its way out of the hold of any lasso you tie around it? Then that blob is just an out-of-shape ball." Perelman and Hamilton proved this fact by heating the blob up, making it sing, stretching it like hot mozzarella and chopping it into a million pieces. In short, the alien ain't no bagel you can swing around with a string through his hole.

The author goes on to explain that mathemeticians classify both 2-dimensional and higher-dimensional shapes. She says that the only 2-dimensional shapes are the surfaces of "doughnuts" with multiple holes:

These surfaces can be classified neatly according to their number of holes. (The picture includes a sphere; does that count as a doughnut with zero holes?) Anyway, it seems the Poincaré Conjecture pertains to the analysis of 3-dimensional shapes, which I guess are like the surfaces of 4-dimensional shapes. Geometer William Thurston (a Fields Medal winner who didn't turn down his prize) "made the daring conjecture that three-dimensional shapes, too, can be classified in a more complicated but equally structured way," which is the kind of thing that makes mathematicians use words like "daring" and really rings their bells. Perelman "proved this conjecture, which has Poincaré as a straightforward corollary" -- once again, using the word "straightforward" in a slightly eccentric sense.

The author of this article readily admits that Perelman's work "won't help anyone build a bridge, aim a rocket, crack a code, or privatize Social Security. " She concludes, a little defensively, that it's nevertheless something worth caring about "if you prefer order to chaos."

This whole thing makes me nostalgic on my father's account. The only time I can remember his expressing an opinion about what I ought to do with my life is when he mused mildly that he'd always thought it would be nice if I studied algebraic topology. That was not, to put in mildly, really in the cards. He must have thought it was awfully boring of me to study law, though he never said so and clearly was pleased that I'd be able to make a living. I still don't know what algebraic topology is. Wikipedia supplies this less-than-helpful definition:

Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics which uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism. In many situations this is too much to hope for and it is more prudent to aim for a more modest goal, classification up to homotopy equivalence.

I'm even more prudent and must aim for goals whose modesty makes that goal look positively overweaning.

Some decades ago Fran Lebowitz wrote a piece about being awakened by something unpleasant, a phone call or alarm clock. She said something like, "This is not my favorite method of being awakened. My favorite method is to have my Swedish lover whisper in my ear that, if I don't want to be late to pick up my Nobel Prize, I'd better ring for breakfast." This is a dream I learned to relinquish quite early on, but I'm still pleased to read about people who might reasonably aspire to these things, even if they're too high-minded to accept.

Grim's Hall Book Club: Vikings

I promised you Vikings to follow on this last reading of Plutarch. I was trying to decide between The Saga of Burnt Njal and The Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson. Of the two, Burnt Njal is really the one we ought to read. The lawyers among you will love it particularly; but in Gunnar, it has a Viking fit for the best-bearded and bloodthirstiest of us.

So: let us begin.

I expect this to take a few weeks. For next week, read sections 1-20.

Hanging Offenses

"Nice Gulf. Wouldn't Want to See Anything Happen to It."

Is the answer really as simple as the amnesty-vs.-secure-the-border logjam? Are the feds obstructing the oil spill cleanup in order to create leverage for Cap'n'Tax? I know I keep wavering on the malice-vs.-incompetence quandary, but even I didn't expect a report quite this shocking on the federal role in the cleanup to date, per the Washington Examiner:

Phantom Assets

The number of assets claimed [by the White House], however, does not appear to match what is actually in the field. This is corroborated by Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, who shared a similar story with investigators. BP and Coast Guard provided Mr. Nungesser with a map of the Gulf allegedly pinpointing the exact locations of 140 skimmers cleaning up oil. Sensing that the chart may have been somewhat inaccurate, Mr. Nungesser requested a flyover of the assets for verification. After three cancelled trips, officials admitted to Mr. Nungesser that only 31 of the 140 skimmers were ever deployed. The rest were sitting at the docks. According to Mr. Nungesser, the chart appeared to have been fabricated.

. . .

Resources Used as Bargaining Chip to Mute Criticism

In some instances, it appears that equipment is provided simply to quiet public criticism. Mr. Nungesser, who has frequently appeared on local and national television, was apparently visited by two White House officials at his office on Fathers’ Day. According to Mr. Nungesser, the purpose of their visit was to find a way to keep him from calling attention to the lack of equipment. Specifically, they asked him, “What do we have to do to keep you off tv?” He simply replied, “give me what I need.” On another occasion, Placquemines Parish officials requested 20 skimmers at a town hall meeting held by the Coast Guard. According to Mr. Nungesser, “They gave us two skimmers to shut us up.” These accounts raise serious questions about whether the Administration is more concerned with fighting a public relations battle than combating the oil spill.

There's more in the Washington Examiner preliminary report, and more to come this afternoon when the full report is released. OK, this report was spearheaded by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calf.), so you might think it was inclined to be harsh. Someone once told me that the best defense against slander was to live so that no one would believe it. I don't believe the Obama administration has lived so that no one would believe it. And if the Republicans take the House and Mr. Issa gets a chance to follow through with a fraction of the investigations he has promised to undertake, the only thing keeping the heads from rolling will be their position on pointy spikes.

On a more positive note, Yobie Benjamin, a San Francisco reporter who has been following the EPA wastewater-discharge-skimmer problem and pursuing Freedom of Information Act requests, reported that the EPA apparently waived its standards for the Dutch skimmers a couple of weeks ago -- a full 50 days after application. The giant A-Whale, however, still has not received a waiver, and is still sitting at the dock in Louisiana.

A-Whale UpdateThe

This Is Progress, However Criminally Delayed

The A.P. reported about an hour ago that the A-Whale, "the world's largest oil-skimming vessel," had arrived on the Louisiana coast, and that the government was "pinning its hopes" on this new asset. It's supposed to be able to suck up 21 million gallons (500,000 barrels) of oily water a day. (Recall that the Dutch skimmers, which were offered free of charge on Day 3, could pick up 400 cubic meters an hour, which is over 2.5 million gallons a day, or about 180 million gallons -- 4.3 million barrels -- so far. The entire effort of the whole fleet as of three days ago was reported to have picked up 600,000 barrels.)

Without a trace of embarrassment, the A.P. spins this as the fastest result anyone could have expected, and some kind of coup the White House has pulled off, because the A-Whale has "just emerged from an extensive retrofitting to prepare it specifically for the Gulf." In fact, the A-Whale's owners have been fighting the Coast Guard and the EPA since at least June 25, and probably a lot longer than that, for permission to join the clean-up team, having hired a fine firm, Bracewell & Guiliani, to press their regulatory case. The reporter does admit, as an aside, that there still is that pesky little EPA/Clean Water Act problem:

[the vessel] takes in contaminated water through 12 vents on either side of the bow. The oil is then supposed to be separated from the water and transferred to another vessel. The water is channeled back into the sea. But the ship has never been tested, and many questions remain about how it will operate. For instance, the seawater retains trace amounts of oil, even after getting filtered, so the Environmental Protection Agency will have to sign off on allowing the treated water back into the Gulf.

So on Day 73, the EPA is still hung up on that same issue (see 6-27-10 post) of whether the water can be returned before it can be proven to contain no more than 15 parts per million of oil. For the life of me I can't understand why Republican Senators and Congressmen, if not all of them, aren't pounding this issue in Congress and in the press. We should all be calling and emailing our reps relentlessly.

Missy the Missing Cat

Make Me a Poster

Knowing that I'm always trying to deal with one stray animal or another (as she is herself), a friend sent me a link to this entry about a long-suffering IT manager dealing with his co-worker's missing cat.

Hurricane Alex

A Dark and Stormy Night

It's been clear for several days now that we were very unlikely to get anything dangerous from Hurricane Alex; we didn't even start putting up storm shutters. We are getting what looks like a week of pretty good rain, which we desperately needed. Until a few years ago, I lived all my life in a place with something like 50 inches a year of rain. When you move south down the Texas coast, it dries up fast. We've learned to be grateful for every drop. I think we're over three inches now; a good ten-inch week's event would be A-OK. Unfortunately it does make the satellite web connection dicey.

"Just the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive."

Spy vs. Spy

Boris & Natasha

I'm pretty confused. Kremlin officials acknowledged that at least 10 of the 11 suspects caught in the U.S. spy dragnet were Russian citizens. Then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin complained that American police were "out of control" when they threw them in jail. . . . Because they were Russian citizens? Because they weren't really spies? Because they admittedly were both Russian citizens and spies but when countries are friends they overlook these little episodes?

I'm also confused by the narrative that's struggling to coalesce around the arrests. The U.S. is stuck in a Cold War mentality? The arrests were intended by right wingers to embarrass the President and undermine his nuclear treaty with Russia? (And they managed to pull this off with a New York Times exposé?) Alternatively, the arrests were intended to undermine the U.S. effort to engage Russia in a joint effort to put the screws on the Iranian nuclear program? Wheels within wheels.

Jammie Wearing Fool notes that one of the arrested spies was a leftist journalist who wrote for El diario, including muckraking pieces about how the U.S. prison system is an institution of slavery, as well as pieces bucking the MSM's harsh criticism of countries like Venezuela. JWF adds: "I wonder if [she] was a JournoList member?"

There's an endearing hokiness to their tradecraft. They were trained to identify each other with the code phrase, "Excuse me, but did we meet in Bangkok in April last year?" to which the correct reply was: "I don’t know about April, but I was in Thailand in May of that year." Or as my sister used to say to random acquaintances in bars, "Dubrovnik, '68. I took you two-love, two-love." The pair in Seattle spoke in what sounds for all the world like a Boris-and-Natasha accent. They fit in seamlessly at the office by going on anti-George W. Bush rants. They were crazy about their two-year-old son.

The Russians are arguing that the U.S. shouldn't take much action because, among other things, the spies never managed to do any actual harm. Were they just trying to send back enough low-grade nonsense to justify their continuing to live in a pleasant country? Or was their endearing bumblingness all part of a very deep game indeed?

The Red and the Green

The Red and the Green:

So, we've read about the Red Menace. But here's something you haven't seen before.

Skip to 1:00 in.



Now how do you like a Russian, playing a traditional Irish skin drum -- the bodhran -- and better than most Irishmen? That's a man who can throw down on the drum.

But if you'd prefer something more traditional, he's a young Irish lad with a good voice for singing. Surprisingly, he has a bit of talent on the instrument as well.



Actually, the lad has quite a bit of talent -- try this, on a wholly different instrument.



'Well, that's fine, Grim,' you may say. 'So he can play two store-bought instruments. But what if we asked him to build his own mandolin out of trash lying about the house?'

Well, skip to 4:20.



So, a lad with some merit to him. Hopefully he learned to box and fence as well as play; but it's not a bad start, all together.

I really hope this works:

I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse.

--Andrew Breitbart

Folding

Automated Origami

I've been reading about DNA, RNA, and proteins lately. I didn't realize how large and unwieldy proteins were, or how important it was for them to fold up into the right shapes. It's like origami, but instead of being folded by fingers, the final form is driven by a combination of molecular shapes, electrical charges, and whether each piece of the structure likes or avoids water. This picture is of a protein called PPAR, which is important in the study of diabetes.

This self-folding characteristic of protein molecules has got labrats thinking. Per Science Daily, Erik Dermaine, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, is "one of the world's most recognized experts on computational origami." (Talk about carving yourself out a niche!) In this field, thin foil-like sheets are imprinted with circuits so that the sheet will fold up in various ways when current is delivered, like an animated Transformer toy. This is a one-minute clip showing a sheet that will fold itself into either a boat or a plane, per instructions:

One of the practical uses of such a device may be things like "materials that can perform multiple tasks, such as an entire dining utensil set derived from one piece of foldable material," or, per the Christian Science Monitor, a "Swiss army knife of sorts able to form a tripod, wrench, antenna, or splint." Or artificial muscles.

MIT is a hotbed of this out-of-control folding business. Here are detailed instructions for how to fold the MIT logo out of paper in only a few hours.

The more traditional among us may prefer this dragon, which is way better than the cranes I used to play with:

A Celebration

A Celebration:

So today the Supreme Court of the United States recognized what all of us have always known: that the right to keep and bear arms is one of the fundamental rights of citizens. Well done! It was never in danger, for we were always ready to defend it: but how wonderful to see a moment of wisdom on behalf of the powerful, who seem so short of it these days.

So how about a song mocking over-reaching government?



Sgian Dubh, by the way, means "black knife." This is the small knife meant to be worn concealed. Now Highlanders had a fine idea about bearing arms openly, but they also believed in a little something more. It's not so much distrust of our beloved Lady of Fate, but a gesture of respect for her merry nature and love of practical jokes. Or, as Corb Lund put it, 'A good sharp edge is a man's best hedge against the vague uncertainties of life.'

By coincidence, that marks the two next phases of the fight: Knife rights, and concealed carry outside the home.

Play

A Play:

[The Royal Shakespeare Company's] Morte d'Arthur is, in spirit, chainmail-rattlingly close to the original. If the adapter Mike Poulton has made a little free with the details of the text, well, in that, too, he is faithful to his source. Sir Thomas Malory (the 15th-century knight convicted of robbery and rape who fought for and against his king) repicked and remixed the old British stories and French romances spun around the legends of Arthur and fitted them to the pattern of his own time.

So he did, although the charges of "rape" were only charges. Specifically, they were charges brought by the woman's husband -- the same woman on each occasion -- to which she refused to testify. A far more likely explanation, given the high words that Malory has for women and womankind throughout his famous work: she was his Guinevere, or La Belle Isolde.

Seems like a fine play. It's a pity I won't be where I could see it, while it is playing.

Grade Inflation

This Explains a Lot

A judge in Austin, Texas, has ruled that school districts can't force a teacher to award a student a higher grade than he earned. "The districts argued that their policies prohibiting teachers from awarding grades lower than a certain number - typically a 50 - helped keep students from getting discouraged and dropping out of school." Teachers countered with the quaint argument that "the minimum failing grading polices were dishonest and didn't prepare students for college or the workforce." Surprisingly, this argument won the day.

Apparently, in 2009, while I wasn't looking, those kooky conservatives in the Texas legislature passed SB 2033, a law that forbids school districts from requiring its teachers to enter a set minimum grade for their students’ schoolwork. In some schools, the required minimum grade was 50, in others 60 or 70. The law passed unanimously -- then was routinely ignored in practice. El Paso I.S.D. at least told teachers to use their professional judgment in whether to award a minimum grade regardless of whether any work had been done. Other districts ruled that the law applied only to grades of assignments and tests, and not report card grades, although the actual practice intended to be addressed by the law was report card grades. Fort Bend I.S.D. (southwest of Houston) actually prohibited scores of less than 50.

The battles lines are drawn over whether it is more important to ensure that accurate information is made public regarding a school's progress in teaching specific information, or to prevent students from becoming discouraged and dropping out. The strong feeling among educators was that all doubts should be resolved in favor of avoiding discouragement. The educators already were struggling with a "new" law dating from 1995, which “required decisions on promotion or course credit to be based on academic achievement or demonstrated proficiency.” What novelties will these bomb-throwing anarchists come up with next?

When teachers complained that they were still being required to inflate grades, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott issued instructions to school districts that they would be required to comply with the 2009 law. In response, 11 school districts, mostly from the Houston area, sued.

One school administrator explained, "The purpose of it was to keep the kid from throwing his hands up and saying 'I'm failing so I might as well not go to school.'" I guess not much thought was given to persuading the kid to draw another lesson: "I'm failing so I'd better work harder unless I want to repeat this class in summer school."

In other news, Texas Democrats, discouraged by years of virtual one-party rule in that state, proposed a law to award 50% of the votes in an election to the candidate who is trailing in the race. Okay, I may have made that last part up.

Second Amendment Ruling in Chicago Case

Μολὼν λαβέ

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment's protection of the right to bear arms is effective not only against incursions by the federal government, but also against incursions by state and local government.

As late as the 19th century, the Court typically held that the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government's power. More recently, the trend has been to extend the limitations to state and local government via the 14th Amendment.

Update:

Justice Alito wrote:

Chicago and Oak Park (municipal respondents) maintain that a right set out in the Bill of Rights applies to the States only when it is an indispensable attribute of any “‘civilized’” legal system. If it is possible to imagine a civilized country that does not recognize the right, municipal respondents assert, that right is not protected by due process. And since there are civilized countries that ban or strictly regulate the private possession of handguns, they maintain that due process does not preclude such measures. . . .

[T]he constitutional Amendments adopted in the Civil War’s aftermath fundamentally altered the federal system. Four years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, this Court held in the Slaughter-House Cases, that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only those rights “which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws,” and that the fundamental rights predating the creation of the Federal Government were not protected by the Clause. Under this narrow reading, the Court held that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only very limited rights. Subsequently, the Court held that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government in [the] decisions on which the Seventh Circuit relied in this case [to rule against gun rights in the decision now on appeal]. [citations excluded]

After the Civil War and the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the Court began to sort through which rights were so fundamental that no civilized society was imaginable without them. It found that freedom of speech was fundamental, but the right to a grand jury indictment was not. The standard then shifted to "whether a particular Bill of Rights protection is fundamental to our Nation’s particular scheme of ordered liberty and system of justice." Justice Alito concludes: "Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present, and the Heller Court [striking down a federal gun ban] held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right." In Heller, the Court found that handguns were the quintessential tool for defense of home and family.

A-Whale

Does He Still Give Himself a B+?

According to HotAir.com, the entire American effort in 66 days has skimmed off 600,000 barrels of oil. The owners of a massive ship called the "A-Whale" claim that it can skim 500,000 barrels a day.

So where is the A-Whale now? In the Gulf? Not yet. It’s on its way there after being tied to a dock in Norfolk, Virginia, and won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.

It does appear that some progress is being made on the Clean Water Act problems -- you, know, the bureaucratic decision that we should annihilate the Gulf in the name of enforcing an absurdly inapplicable Clean Water Act regulation just because no one in authority can figure out how to waive it -- though I can't quite tell if all we've done is let the skimmers in, or if we've actually started letting them operate as designed, which is to discharge partially cleaned-up Gulf water even though it doesn't meet drinking-water standards. According to a June 24 piece in the Daily Caller, the Federal On-Scene Coordinator announced quietly on June 18 that the U.S. now admits it needs the foreign help that has been offered since days after the oil spill began:

The European Union maintains a multi-faceted inventory of [oil spill recovery vessels] OSRVs. The Netherlands alone lists eleven ships that exceed this 9,400-barrel capacity, including vessels like the Geopotes 14 (pictured) that reportedly can pick up and contain 47,000 barrels at a time. That’s ten times larger than any U.S. ship we’ve been using.

The Daily Caller piece applauds this move, because it will reduce the time spent going back and forth with the dirty water. It notes, however, that the EPA still will prevent the skimmers from discharging the fairly-cleaned-up water, because it fails to meet the EPA wastewater-discharge standards.

Another opinion piece in the Caller reports:

During a hearing before Congress this past Thursday, several Democratic members of House accused the Administration of turning its back on those on the gulf coast by refusing overseas cleanup help. During Friday’s session of the Senate, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), George LeMieux (R-Fla.), and John Cornyn (R-Texas) joined together and introduced legislation that would temporarily waive the Jones Act to allow foreign marine vessels to assist with the oil cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico.

That's good to hear, and yay Texas, but it's still not clear to me that the EPA has backed off yet. Still trying to confirm.

Here's an anguished June 8 Facebook entry from a guy named Chris Johnson who identifies himself as a marine biologist clean water expert, somehow involved in the federal government, who has been frantically trying to work the back channels to solve this EPA-wastewater screwup. (He reports, by the way, that the standard in question is 5,000ppm, not 15ppm, or 99.5% purity, and I suspect he may be a better source than the run-of-the-mill journalists or even the Dutch guys who are their sources.) He confirms the misuse of EPA standards reported in the other articles and says, "I swear I am not making this up, as stupid as this sounds."

Turning to the question of what to make of this Mother of all FUBARs (a mistake?! or did he do it to us on purpose??!!), some input from various commenters at Patterico and HotAir:

I think it is incompetence but also a lack of motivation. If it had been someplace they love, they would have been motivated to overcome their incompetence.

I agree that it would have made little difference. It could be any one of the 57 states, even those speaking Austrian, and Obama would mull over what would Niebuhr have done ? The only thing that engages Obama seriously is a piece in Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone that is perceived as straying from the party line. The first thing an infant learns is the difference between “self” and “non-self.” Obama is still working on that.

There is a difference between “stuck on stupid” and “forged out of pure stupid”…

Tinfoil hats really not needed…Soros has his money in PetroBras…and they NEED platforms…..oil still gushing, ban still being appealed….you do the math.

This is a full-blown crisis with all the value attendant to that….destruction of the oil industry, punishment of red-state voters, demon[i]nization of private business, kowtowing to environmental nutjobs, opportunities for grandstanding and photo-ops, speech opportunities, $20 billion dollar slush funds, total dependence of the voters of Lousiana on the federal government, ability to smear the Brits on an hourly basis. . . .How is this ship going to improve the situation in any meaningful way.

And a final comment in a more practical vein:

A couple of questions I have:

1. The Jones Act does not influence operations beyond 3 miles from shore, as I understand it. Why is that even an issue?


2. Vessels at sea, picking up “wild” oil, are not under EPA jurisdiction, as far as I know. This would fall under the admiralty law…the law of salvage. Under what authority could anyone stop them?


3. Why the [h**l] doesn’t somebody seek an injunction against the EPA? Seems there are sensible judges on the Federal bench who would grant that in a heart-beat…


4. Why doesn’t somebody just go do this, and defy an effort to stop them?

In closing, just to destroy any lingering confidence you might have in federal environmental bureaucrats -- people I used to think were the good guys but who lately seem as crazy as a rat in a coffee can -- here's an article about applying EPA oil spill regulations to dairy milk. EPA regulations say “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria.”

Non-Islamic Man-Caused Disasters

Non-Islamic Man-Caused Disasters

I've been hearing about the U.S. government's rebuffing offers of foreign help to clean up the Gulf, but mostly in the context of the Jones Act problems. And there were those stories about stopping boats from laying out booms because they didn't have enough fire extinguishers or lifejackets, or about stopping the building of sand berms because of the possible impact on fish.

Now Instapundit has linked to an article in the Financial Post that shows the stupidity has reached hitherto-unguessed levels. Our environmental laws treat a skimmer ship as if it were a factory discharging wastewater:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill. . . .the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge.

. . . .Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

It turns out that American skimmers have to suck up the dirty water and transport it back to port for later disposal, which severely limits their daily capacity.

Someone might almost think they want this to go badly.

Smooth

Apparently, What They Need at the U.N. Is Softer Blankies

I've never been much of a negotiator -- probably that empathy thing you're supposed to have. Often I have almost no idea how other people come to their decisions. Here's some research on factors that may be creeping into the process under the radar.

Research psychologists at Harvard, MIT, and Yale recently reported that our judgments are surprisingly influenced by the texture of objects we're in contact with during or just before the decision-making process. For instance, interviewers judged job candidates as better qualified and more serious about the position sought when they were given the resumes on heavy clipboards. The heavier clipboards also were associated with interviewers' higher opinions of their own accuracy in judging candidates.

In the same vein, listeners to a story about a social interaction described it as harsher when they had been given rough puzzles pieces to assemble as opposed to smooth pieces. Similarly, they described one character's attitude in a story as more rigid or strict when they had been given a hard wooden block to hold, instead of a soft blanket. When participants in a mock bargaining session were seated in comfortable chairs, they turned out not only to be more flexible in their responses to successive offers, but also more likely to judge their opponents to be "more stable and less emotional."

Looks like we should be presenting our resumes on heavy, smooth, soft tablets. If nothing else, you guys might view your wives as less emotional and unstable if you'd take the precaution of settling into a comfy chair before listening to their complaints. No fair going to sleep, though.

I couldn't find a clip from the "Day of the Dolphins" where Fa and Bee explain that they like humans because they're smooth, like dolphins, not rough like sharks, so I went with this:

Nor is it just these Ivy League researchers who are into the new "tactile tactics" in social conflict. No one was surprised when researchers from the University of Minneapolis and the University of British Columbia concluded that shoppers were more comfortable on carpet than on hard vinyl tile. What was a little surprising is that the comfortable flooring had opposite effects on their purchase judgments, depending on how far away they were from the products on the shelves. Moderately distant objects were judged "more comforting" by the shoppers who were standing on soft carpet, by some kind of unconscious confusion of the tactile sensation of one object with the inherent worth of another. In contrast, nearby products appeared to suffer from comparison with the softness of carpet: a gift basket was judged "less comforting" when the carpet-treading shopper was very close to it.

I suppose the trick here is to present the gift basket to the object of your affections when she's moderately far away on a soft carpet, but don't put it into her hands until you're maneuvered her onto some challenging parquet. But if you want to bring out the big guns:

Why can't the RNC do this?

Get out the Vote

I don't know about you guys, but this video doesn't just make me want to vote. It makes me want to crawl over broken glass on my knees to get to the polls. "Rise, and rise again . . . ."

Not that the November elections give me much room to act as a Texas voter in a district that Ron Paul apparently owns for life, and not that I would ever miss even a petty local election for any reason. (For one thing, I'm an election judge -- I have to show up early and stay all day.) But I really want to see a Brobdingnagian turnout.

Plutarch.

I chose Nicias and Crassus as a follow up to Alcibades and Coriolanus because of the connection, as Nicias was general in Alcibades' disasterous expedition to Syracuse--and so the situation would be somewhat familiar.

Nicias was general on the expedition, but thought it a bad idea in the first place. Crassus, nortoriously got himself and his army destroyed in Parthia, on an expedition that many thought ill advised, but he went ahead with it anyway.

Who agrees with Plutarch's comparison?

AZ Disappointment

Signs:

She sounds as if she may be expressing disappointment with the President. Obviously, he needs to fire and replace her in order to demonstrate that he is a strong leader, in command of the situation.

Toxic News

Now You Know How Bacteria Feel

When you take an antibiotic, you expect it to kill your infection without hurting you. Lots of antibiotics take advantage of differences between your “eukaryotic” cells (cells with nuclei) and bacteria’s “prokaryotic” cells (no nuclei). A typical antibiotic will shut down protein synthesis in bacteria’s ribosomes, which are the fantastically complicated little factories in cells (about the size of a small virus) where proteins are built according to instructions delivered by RNA. Stop protein synthesis and the cell dies. Luckily for you, your ribosomes use a different construction process from bacteria’s, so the antibiotic doesn’t shut down your protein synthesis and kill your cells.

Castor Beans

Unless you ingest ricin, that is. Ricin is a protein found in the seeds of the castor bean plant (Ricinus communis). It messes up the protein synthesis in the ribosomes of eukaryotic cells, that is, nucleated cells, like yours and mine. In other words, ricin did to Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 pretty much what tetracycline does to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. There is a difference, though. Unlike the natural toxins in common antibiotics, which lock on one-to-one with their target molecules to disrupt bacteria’s protein synthesis, ricin jumps from ribosome to ribosome, shutting down one after another. As a result, a single molecule of ricin can kill a whole cell. This makes ricin one of the most toxic natural substances known, a thousand times as toxic as cyanide. A mere 75 micrograms can be a deadly dose in an adult human; one castor bean contains something like 1,000 micrograms.

Biochemists report recent progress in developing a ricin antidote and a ricin vaccine, but don’t count on them yet. Likewise, we may figure out someday how to target cancer cells with ricin, but for now it’s just bad news for all of your cells.

There are worse toxins than ricin, but few so widely available. Castor bean seeds are used in the production not only of the laxative castor oil, but also brake fluid, varnish, soap, and ink. Ricin is soluble in water but not in oil, so castor oil is OK from the point of view of health, if not of taste. But stay away from the bean pulp left over after castor oil production, and don’t eat unprocessed castor beans, unless you’re trying to cure Gaia of her human disease.

More cheerful news about poisonings throughout history here.

Two from ALD

Two From Arts & Letters Daily:

A piece on stoicism, which contrasts it to the products being generated by our own age:

Ours is not a philosophical age, much less an age of Stoicism. As Frank McLynn explains in his new biography of Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome's "five good emperors," commander of Rome's prolonged campaigns against the invasions of barbarian German tribes, and the last important Stoic philosopher of ancient days, our philosophers (academics) no longer profess to help the average person answer life's great metaphysical questions. Contemporary philosophers might contemplate such abstruse problems as whether mental properties can be said to emerge from the physical processes of the universe; what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for self-interest; where the mind stops and the rest of the world begins-not, perhaps, the pressing existential questions presented by the normal course of a human life.

Beyond the realm of professional philosophy, an ever-expanding tribe of self-appointed lay philosophers profess practical strategies for worldly success: how to win friends and influence, how not to sweat the small stuff, how to free ourselves from shyness, anxiety, phobias, poverty, extra pounds...

That part about university philosophers is mostly true as far as it goes, which is this far: Anglo-American philosophy departments. There is a lot of interest in broader questions in non-English speaking Europe, but there the problem is that they are mired in dead-ends.

That only means that the time is right for something new: a hailstone, or, if you like, a mustard seed.

Philosophy is more important than people understand, as the second article shows. It is on fertility:

Many conclude that if you value your happiness and spending money, the only way to win the modern parenting game is not to play. Low fertility looks like a sign that we've finally grasped the winning strategy. In almost all developed nations, the total fertility rate—the number of children the average woman can expect to have in her lifetime—is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children.

What, though, is being measured in these happiness surveys? People are asked how happy they are. Well, how happy are you? What am I asking you to evaluate? That is a question of philosophy.

What is a good life? The first article will point you in the direction of Marcus Aurelius' answer. If you can adopt his model, the question, "Are you happy?" means something entirely different than the question modern Americans hear you asking. They think you are asking them, "How do you feel?"

That shift in mindset has tremendous consequences. You decide to make it, perhaps, because you read a biography of Marcus Aurelius. Or perhaps you read some arguments about Aristotle, and how he defined happiness. Or perhaps you only watched Oprah, and stick with "How do you feel?" Whichever you do, you find that this decision -- an apparently minor preference for one way of thinking over another -- changes your life and everything about it.

Eric often says "Facta, non verba," and that is true as far as it goes. Some of the words, however, are necessary conditions for the deeds. If you don't have the thoughts, you'll never pursue the acts. You may never feel pain or know much by way of sorrow, and you may feel content. You will never, however, be happy.