Our throwaway society

Being British in know that I'm supposed to be stereotypically reserved and say things like "musn't grumble", "keep a stiff upper lip old chap" and such. However I think you'll agree that ten years in the USA and a significant amount of blogging therapy is certainly helping me to rant up a storm when the occasion demands. But I can only aspire to the invective generated by Mark Morford over at SFGate. His latest column is a diatribe about our throwaway society and its predilection to develop product after product that will be used once and head straight for a landfill.

Its unfortunate that Morford never mentions the most notorious of throwaway products that our society produces: munitions. A bullet, shell, missile or bomb is lovingly fabricated by the industrial military complex, shipped to foreign shores, fired once and then forgotten. After that it is a useless piece of metal, lead, chemicals or radiation deposited in our environment. The perfect throwaway product - you don't even need to cart it to the landfill because the landfill is wherever it lands.

The problem with anything throwaway is that it takes energy, labour and time to create something. Then that something is promptly thrown away and almost always much more of those resources that went to make it are wasted than if the product were reusable in some way. It values consumer convenience over the natural resources of the planet, largely because we overvalue our short-term view of life on this planet, over the long term sustainability of life on this planet.

Such a perspective is a natural consequence of people increasingly disengaging from society as a whole and viewing themselves or perhaps their family's needs as the single most important thing in the world. This is all possible because in our modern western view of things, society and the earths resources are simply taken for granted. The hundreds of billions of people years and billions of earth years taken to create them have conveniently been swept under the carpet.

How about a nice 94% after tax pay raise Mr Corporation?

To further hammer home the point that corporations are not people, comes an analysis of the latest 2004 first quarter GDP figures.

If corporations were people would they really have managed a 62% pay raise (increase in net profits) since George Bush came into office? Weren't the last four years a period of massive economic decline, a famous "jobless recovery" and country wide economic malaise. I don't know about you but I know precious few, if any people who've managed that trick and nearly all of them were highly compensated executives.

But wait, it gets worse...

Thanks to George Bush's slash and burn tactics in the taxation department, after tax corporate profits increased by an amazing 94% since he arrived.

So you do the math. Could it be that while executives were doing the typical knee jerk "lay off workers as fast as possible" routine, and outsourcing as many operations overseas as they could get away with, corporations were reaping in the rich rewards of increased profitability? All the while workers were footing the bill from their own savings as they sat out the long dark unemployed-time of their souls?

While economists and MBAs may finger-point at the Europeans for their much tighter controls over workforce changes, they surely temper businesses plans to ramp and down their production and workforces overnight and ultimately must do much to stabilize their economies and benefit their people (not corporations) with the highest standards of living in the world. Similarly more progressive taxation and generous welfare may have an impact on corporate profitability compared to the rest of the world, however such automatic dampers have a very useful role of damping out instabilities in economic output. Lets not forget that economic growth is supposed to be for improving our standard of living to better ourselves. The definition of what "bettering ourselves" means may be up for debate, but surely it can't be just improving corporate profits and increasing stock market valuations by unfettered IPOs and acquisitions-gone-wild?

As we all know it's Republican policy to do their damnedest to reduce taxation and shrink government^*. However just remember that government spending, progressive taxation, and welfare programmes were all things introduced to temper the massive instabilities that existed in the economy before The Great Depression of the 1930's and the birth of socially responsible Keynesian economics. As usual it looks like the corporations and their money centric policies are egging on the government to run as close to the wind before another great catastrophe.

Which reminds me exactly of how they are behaving with regards to the environment...

Or at least that's their advertised policy: we all know that since GWB only taxation has been cut - government spending has actually skyrocketed on the modern day equivalent of the hunt for reds under the bed, or the tooth fairy

Bugs on a stick

In the absence of JohnnyTheo I'll have to post this here. Fresh from Edible.com (not to be confused with Audible.com) comes various bugs on a stick. From scorpions, to worms, to giant Japanese hornets. It seems like those crazy Brits are just snacking down on all the worlds bugs. They even sell the ellusive Civet coffee that has been harvested from the dung of a Common Palm Civet Cat. It has an interesting "chocolatey" taste. And if that isn't weird enough, how about Vietnamese regurgitated Weasel Coffee?

Link via The Register

What does 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year look like anyway?

A recent report from Environmental Integrity lists the 50 power plants in the USA that emit the most carbon dioxide (CO2), sulphur dioxide (S02) and mercury. The combined emissions of the 50 worst add up to 4.6 million tons of SO2, 763 millions tons of CO2 and 39 thousand pounds of mercury pumped into the air over the USA every year. And this is just the worst 50 emitters. Total emissions are 10.6 million tons of SO2, 2.5 billion tons of C02 and 45.6 tons of mercury. Not to mention all the non-power plant emissions.

I personally find the figures shocking - but its mainly a gut reaction. They sound high, but probably like you I have a really hard time imagining what a million, let alone a billion tons of anything would be like floating around in the atmosphere. So lets have a go at figuring it out...

The density of carbon dioxide is 1.977 grams per liter at standard temperature and pressure. One ton is 907,184 grams and one liter is 0.035 cubic feet. So the volume of one million tons is: 907,184 times one million, divided by 1.977 liters. That works out at 459 billion liters of gas or 16.2 billion cubic feet of gas. Which means that one billion tons of CO2 would be one thousand times as much. In total the CO2 emissions from US power plants are over 40 trillion cubic feet of gas...

Still having a problem with imagining that? Well how about if I tell you a cubic miles is about 147 billion cubic feet. That means that US CO2 power plant emissions in 2003 amounted to 272 cubic miles of gas. Thats enough to cover a piece of land six miles by six miles (approximate the size of San Francisco) with pure CO2 to a depth of six miles - which is all the way to the height that planes fly at (assuming STP applies all the way up which it doesn't). That is one huge blob of CO2.

But wait, it gets worse.

The normal concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.035 percent. Therefore the emissions from US plants in 2003 are equivalent to the CO2 normally found in 777,000 cubic miles of atmosphere. So that's a one mile depth of air over an area of land 881 miles on a side. When you consider that the largest state in the Union is Alaska with land area of 656,000 square miles, followed at a distant second by Texas with 268,000 square miles that's starting to feel like a big number. The total land area of the USA is 3.5 million square miles so that means in under five years, at 2003 levels, the CO2 output of US power plants could produce the same amount of CO2 as is normally found in the first mile of atmosphere over the entire US.

But wait, it gets worse.

In 2001 total world emissions of CO2 were estimated at 6.5 billion tons of CO2. So that means in under two years world emissions generate the same amount of CO2 as is in the first mile of atmosphere over the entire US.

But wait, it gets worse.

Just think about how that figure looks in 20, 50 or 100 years if CO2 emission aren't cut dramatically. And think about what the emissions figures would look like if China and India were to ramp up their emissions to US levels. With a combined population of over 2.2 billion, that's seven and a half times the population of the USA! So even with today's population and CO2 output they alone would be emitting nearly 19 billion tons of CO2 per year which is equivalent to 2040 cubic miles of pure CO2, or equivalent to the CO2 in the first mile of atmosphere over the entire USA every seven months.

Okay you say, but the atmosphere isn't one mile deep. Yes, that's true it is generally accepted to extend almost 50 miles up. However due to decreasing density of air as you go up, half the mass of the atmosphere actually occurs in the first 3.5 miles of atmosphere which means the 50 something miles of atmosphere over your head is actually equivalent to only 7 miles of atmosphere at sea level conditions (aka STP).

This means that current US only power plant CO2 emissions will generate the same amount of CO2 as in the entire atmosphere over the USA in approximately thirty years. If China and India were to ramp up their CO2 emissions to match ours then they emit the same amount of CO2 in just over 4 years. And if they entire world were to match current US levels then that would mean the same amount of emissions in just over one year.

Okay you say, but the US is just a small part of the worlds surface area. Well, this is true, the surface area of the planet more like 197 million square miles or 56 times the surface area of the USA. However, that still means that if the entire world population raises its power plant CO2 emissions to current US levels, then it would double the CO2 in the entire atmosphere in 67 years. That ignores the effect of population growth and ignores the fact that our increasing energy demands mean CO2 emissions per capita in the USA are increasing, not staying the same.

Okay you say, but what about CO2 emissions from people and animals? Surely they are much higher than power plant emissions? Well, this may be true, however the point is that for millions, if not billions of years, the CO2 emissions by animals on the planet have largely been in balance with CO2 absorption by plants. You see CO2 is part of the natural carbon cycle of the planet and if billions of tons of carbon hadn't been locked up in the earth over the years by fossil fuel deposits then life on earth would probably have evolved in a very different manner to which it has. By digging up all that carbon, burning it and pumping it back into the atmosphere while simultaneously anihilating massive swaths of the earths forests we are basically creating a huge imbalance. One to the tune of billions of tons of carbon every year.

Given that most scientist believe that only a small percentage change in CO2 levels is required to produce a significant warming effect on the entire planet can you start to see a problem with unchecked CO2 emissions growth here?

And I haven't even got around to the same calculations for SO2 yet...

How America subsidized the Wal-Mart chainstore massacre

The New York Times reported today how cities all over America have pumped up to $1 billion in subsidies into WalMart. The counter argument from WalMart is that in return they have "collected than $52 billion in sales taxes, paid $4 billion in local property taxes, and paid $192 million in income and unemployment taxes to local governments."

Its tempting to think, "well that's okay then" and conclude that subsidizing Wal-Mart is a good investment for cities. But that's a tempting but gross simplification. The point is, what if Wal-Mart hadn't come to town? Would people have spent that money anyway? Did Wal-Mart really increase retail spending by more than the $1 billion in subsidies? It seems unlikely especially given that by lowering average wages it keeps less money in local workers pockets, and more profits in Wal-Mart's koffers and more dollars on their capital asset balance sheet.

Certainly if you think that shopping at Wal-Mart is a great way to give foreign aid to overseas suppliers then you should shop there. But wouldn't a better way be to donate directly to the needy workers in these countries, or buy directly from overseas companies rather than involve some big US corporate middleman?

And as if to prove my point along comes a report that now the entire state of Vermont has been listed as an "endangered place" by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Guess what the prime reason is for its endangerment? Yes, that's right, Wal-Mart. The finger is pointing firmly at the biggest of the big boxers, Wal-Mart and their irrevokable impact on driving out small retailers and "changing the fabric of community life" in Vermont.

So when you do the Wal-Mart math, perhaps you should subtract from all those tax revenues they say they generated, the amount you would have generated anyway, and also some value for the impact of loss of diversity in the retail and community. I think you'll find that the net result will still be a very substantial negative. That's what happens when you siphon money from a community that was previously circulating internally and channel it elsewhere without a balance of payments between the community and the place where the money went. When Wal-Mart is making $9 billion a year in profit, and our balance of payments with its primary supplier was $163 billion out of whack in 2003 ($12 billion of which is attributed to Wal-Mart) you can be sure that the money is most definitely not flowing back into our local communities as fast as Wal-Mart can vacuum it out.

Free bumper stickers

Moveon PAC is offering free bumper stickers. Take your pick, either:

or

After the long dark tea-time of the soul is over

Somehow options for dealing with ones mortal remains after the soul has left have always seemed rather unappealing to me. While burial in a quiet country graveyard is the traditional English way and appeals most to my sensibilities of what is right and proper, the idea of my body slowly rotting in a wood box for decades just seems rather grotesque. The idea that centuries from now my skeleton could be dug up and put in some museum, or my idyllic final resting place back-hoed for a freeway or office block is even more displeasing. Cremation of my remains with gallons of fuel oil in what amounts to a human sized pizza oven also make me squirm, and having participated in the dumping of my grandmother's ashes over her garden it wasn't exactly the satisfying ritual for mourners I'd expected.

While some off-beat alternatives are out there - like Tibetan sky-burial, burial at sea, plasticizing, launching into space, cryostasis, etc. etc. none has really hit the mark so far. Until today that is, when I read about "Eco-burial" by Promessa Organic AB.

Basically the Promessa process involves freezing your remains to a solid in liquid nitrogen, vibrating it to a rough powder, then freeze-drying to create a stable and odourless fine powder that can be used as compost. Just bury the fifty pounds or so of powder in the ground, plant a tree over it and in six months you'll be absorbed into the soil, tree and environment.

My only issue is that the whole freeze-drying process must surely be quite energy intensive and as such would represent a final affront on the energy resources of the earth that I'd rather do without. If the process was done with 100% renewable energy then even that wouldn't be a problem for me. If you think I'm nuts for contemplating such a scheme for disposing of my remains, remember that the only tattoo I have ever coveted is a recycling logo...

Neoganic: Redefing organic the GOP way

There they go again. Those crazy GOP wingnuts in Washington delight touting their wonderful environmental record while simultanesouly plundering it behind the scenes. Its the kind of "loud bark, small bite" trick they pull all the time, and its often accompanied by a redefinition of the thing they are supposedly do good for. A good economic record is easy to sell when your definition of good is "better than the worst its been in years", and a good enivronmental record is easy to achieve when its defined as "promoting managed forests" or "not destroying all the things we could have destroyed".

Now they are at it with promoting "organic food" by redefining to include many practices common in the non-organic side of the food processing industry. The USDA has been issuing guidances to allow treatment of organic farm animals with antibiotics, feeding herbivores with non-organic animal based feedstuffs, and use of synthetic pesticides on organic farms.

The cynics might say this has something to do with the fact that Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of directors of a biotech company, and both her chief of staff and her director of communications were hired from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

The non-cynics would say its just good policy and helping consumers by clarify the meaning of organic to include food produced using safe and economic farming practices.

I would say if you want to redefine the meaning of a word contrary to commonly accepted definitions you should instead find a new word to encompass your new meaning. I would suggest that instead of "organic" the USDA should label food produced by its new rules as "Neoganic" in honour of the NeoCons in Washington who are driving this revisionist redefintion of everything to serve their own power and profit centered viewpoint.

Alternatives to neoganic exist such as psuedoganic, bushganic, geopanic (ie. GOP-anic), repoganic, and industrioganic. I'll let you take your pick, but either way, its important we fight these efforts to redefine every word we commonly knew the meaning of to fit someone elses profit centered definition.

That corporate racket

If the RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) can be applied to garnishing a tabacco company's profits from misleading the public, then why not use it to reign in all those investment banks that reaped billions by pumping up the dot com balloon with bogus evaluations? So far investment banks have only suffered small token fines in the millions which surely total a fraction of the billions they raked in as profits during the dot com era.

The Riddle of Abu Ghraib

The Tin Man will no doubt be not at all surprised to read that the US military has solved their torture problems in Abu Ghraib. Not by actually banning torture, just by banning all the means to document it. It reminds one of the riddle:

The Riddle of the Tree

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The Riddle of Abu Ghraib
If a prisoner is tortured in Abu Ghraib and no one is able to photograph it, do his screams make a sound?

Someone else did the math

While the US government fixates on the more than 770 American troops killed so far in Iraq it looks like someone else is finally starting to do the math and think about the civilian death toll in Iraq. So far websites like Iraq Body Count have been the lone keepers of the grim toll that the US government simply refuses to pay any attention to or even bother to measure. As one US military official once said "We don't do civilian body counts".

However morgues in Iraq do and after figures for violent (non-accidental) civilian deaths in Baghdad were publicized Associated Press released a story about just how dangerous the figures show Iraq still is. With an average of 357 violent deaths per month it translates to an average of 76 deaths per 100,000 per year. That's 10 times the figure for New York, and almost thirty times that of Jordan, Iraq's neighbour. The figures do not include the hundreds of civilian deaths from major explosions where the dead do not go to the city morgue, and they are for Baghdad, supposedly one of the safer cities.

The Associated Press article contrasts current figures with those before when there were no illegal weapons, strict police control and very little violent crime by civilians against civilians (as opposed to by the state). Baghdad's violent death rate was around 2.9 deaths per 100,000 per year, or 4% of what it is now. So what we are seeing are civilians being gunned down by each other and the occupying forces at a rate of 25 times higher than before the invasion. Its no wonder that Iraqi civilians are fearing for their lives and feeling like the occupation is a disaster for their society.

Unfortunately there is no record of how many of those deaths are as a result of occupying forces, the article cites Amnesty International's figure that by March this year more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed "as a direct result of military intervention in Iraq, either during the war or during the subsequent occupation." which included deaths of 3,240 civilians in the one month period from March 20 to April 20, 2003 alone.

However it is clear that even if troops left today, the violence on the streets of Iraq would not simply go away. As I've pointed out many times before, even if levels of violence under occupation end up being brought down to US standard levels (which seems unlikely), they will remain many times what they were before the US invasion simply because the US "enjoys" levels of personal crime many times what other countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Japan enjoy.

Whatever happens, its the people of Iraq that pay the price. The dramatic change in availability of guns and escalation of personal violence since the invasion will clearly have a long lasting and damaging effect on the Iraqi society that will take many years to heal. For a country still baring the demographic scars of eight years slaughter during the Iran-Iraq war its a high price to pay. I only hope that one day they consider it was all worth while and not just another botched US intervention that will go down in the annuls of infamy.

Geneva vs. George W. Bush

Its been bugging me how Bush keeps saying the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib are "unlawful combatants" and don't qualify for protection by the Geneva convention. After reading an article in the New York Times I thought I would actually go look at the Geneva Convention. The "get out of jail" card for Bush comes from Article V of the GC which he claims allows him to exempt virtually all Iraqi prisons and those in Guantanamo from their GC protections. So here it is:

Article 5

Where, in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.

Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity, and in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.

I've emboldened the most relevant part, and based in it, if Iraq is considered "occupied territory" then it really does look as though Bush has found a loophole in the GC big enough to drive an entire invading army of gun toting, oil thirsty NeoCons through.

My question is, at what point did Iraq become occupied territory? I mean, if you're an invading army then at what point does the war end and occupation start, and why is the occupying force given some moral high ground to determine that resistance fighters are the ones that can now be termed spys and saboteurs. From the Iraqi insurgents perspective they are still fighting the war.

Looking back to WWII as an example - did Article V also give the Germans the right to capture and torture French resistance fighters as "insurgents"? Or how about if the native American Indians decided to start some campaign against the US government. Would they also be categorized as "unlawful combatants" and be wide open to torture or whatever the NeoCons cared to throw at them?

It seems to me that Article V allows any nation to waltz into some foreign country on whatever pretense, declare the country as "occupied territory" and the former inhabitants as "illegal combatants" and treat them however it so pleases if they don't agree to play by their rule. If so then I believe Article V is a rotten clause that should be removed from the Geneva convention.

How to out your neighbours and influence people

An article in the New York Times today shows that the rest of the world is catching on to the availability of campaign finance information at Fundrace.org. Now in glorious technicolour you can zoom into your locale and find out where the reds and the blues are hiding. People with political persuasions atypical from their neighborhood are starting to wonder if they might be outed by nosy neighbours using Fundrace.org to discover just where they have been sending their campaign donation checks.

I expect it will be only a matter of time before people start reporting being harassed and effectively "driven out of town" for not supporting the locally favoured political gang. Closet Republicans and liberals who have been hiding out in enemy territory and keeping their noses clean may find a run for the border may be necessary to escape victimisation. Eventually, because so many people in America seem to focus on narrow issues over a broader perspective on life, one may see very sharp divisions as people start to choose carefully who their potential neighbors are before moving to a new area. Can you imagine real estate listings including information on the political leanings of your neighbours?

Of course people do factor in the demographics of politics into their daily lives. If they can they will often already choose to live in a district that votes "their way", and work for a company that does things fitting their life philosophy. I'm not about to move into Bush country or every work again for a CEO who thinks its appropriate to preach politics from his pulpit of executive power, especially when they are not my kind of politics. Just why should being "politically correct" be applied to everything except speech about politics?

It would be nice to think people aren't so short sighted but ultimately we know this kind of stuff will start to happen and we could end up at a point where the blue districts will be solid blue, and the red districts will be solid red and woe-be-tied any little "anomaly" that arrives on the scene and is foolish enough to put their money where their mouth is. The answer is that everyone should always be ready, willing and able to stand up and speak freely of their convictions and not be subject to the slings and arrows of those who foolishly believe that mere dissent is the sure sign of an evildoer at work.

A world worth joining

Over at Alternet Barbara Ehrenreich's piece What Abu Ghraib Taught Me discusses the impact of pictures of women involved in the Abu Ghraib war-crimes^*. Although I'm obviously not qualified to comment on her perspective as a woman, she closes with:

To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low." It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

I find that to be about the summing up how I feel about Bush's invasion of Iraq. Bush and his clowns unleashed the dogs of war with such sanctimonious hubris it was wretched and vile to me. As Barbara puts it, they are behaving like beasts. When you march virtually alone^** into a country on the pretense that your particular way of running things (which I wont even label "democracy") is better than everyone else's then you'd better darn well demonstrate it.

My feeling is that in this "military action" the USA has failed and failed and failed again to do what it said or even should have done. This is hardly surprising to anyone who has examined the US history of military interventions and installation of governments at gunpoint. Its and almost flawless record of failure and "blowback" as the CIA calls it. More worrying is that inspite of their known ability to fail they never had an "exit strategy" to deal with failure (what, America, fail?) and have put the country and people of Iraq and world into an incredibly destabilizing an dangerous position. The UN should in fact be formulating resolutions to admonish and punish the USA, UK and Spain for their vigilante based interpretation of "United". Maybe they should even boot out the USA and UK from the UN and find someone else to fill their security council seats (or better still abolish it and make security everyones problem). And if the UN can't do it then I'm afraid perhaps there really is no "world worth assimilating into" yet.

A thought that I've dwelled on several times in the last couple of years is why is it that nations have to have geographical boundaries? Is it not possible for the people of this planet to form their own nation independently of geographical boundaries? Form your own perfect constitution, or nearest facismile of, pledge allegiance, get a passport and go about the world... After all, what is a nation these days? Its an organization that makes you uphold their laws, taxes you and gives you money and protection. There appears to me no reason why such a landless "peoples nation" could not come into existence. Some super-evolution of one of these policy based groups like moveon.org etc. I wonder if ultimately such a geographically unbounded peoples nation could find itself with a seat in the UN?

I can imagine that the biggest problem would be that a country like the USA would probably consider membership of such a peoples nation to void your US citizenship, if not tantamount to declaration that you are a "terrorist" against the state.

^* As of yesterday the Bush administration is still adamant that these are neither war crimes or breaches of the Geneva convention on the basis that these are unlawful combatants.

^** Yes I know the UK and Spain and a few others had supporting roles (against the majority wishes of their own people), but of over 500 nations, that's a pretty pathetic showing of blood thirsty sycophants. Hardly a global mandate is it?

Super size me

Last night I watched the documentary "Super size me" which follows Morgan Spurlock through a month long binge sustained only by food and drink sold at McDonald's. His health is followed by a team of three doctors, his mental (and sexual) well being are closely followed by his long suffering vegan girlfriend, and his every meal are tapped by an ever present camera. Thankfully, interspersed with the caloric binge are commentary on the fast food industry, the nations health (or lack thereof) and constant graphic reminders of America's super fat adults and children, and our distinct lack of knowledge about that most basic of daily functions, eating. Asking members of the public what a calorie is generally draws blank stares and shrugs, the best answer being "is it the calorie content of a calorie?"

Many of the results are hardly surprising - eating and average of 5,000 calories a day with insufficient vitamins and excesses of fat his weight balloons by 25 lbs during the month, a 13.5% weight gain. He also finds himself experiencing sugar induced food addiction with mood swings and headaches that are relieved by a nice dose of clown food. His cholesterol shoots up from significantly below 200 to significantly above it. While his Big Mac appetite surges his sexual appetite diminishes.

The big surprise to his doctors was a rapid decline in his liver function, symptomatic of a "fatty liver" and indicated by off the scale levels of various waste chemicals in his blood. All three doctors are surprised by this, indicating they would have expected it of a binge drinker but not a binge eater. Eventually 21 days into the exercise he is advised to abandon it. The next shot is Spurlock on a couch eating more McDonald's.

While "Super size me" succeeds as an entertaining and informative film, it fails to be a heavy weight work that could bring down McDonald's house of fat. It will be easy for McDonald's to point out that eating three-squares of McDonald's a day is just not sensible. In a recent law-suit against them they claim that the dangers of this are "well known". As Spurlock points out, this is hardly the case and one in four restaurants he visited had no nutritional information available at all, and half did not have it on display. If fast food is so bad for us in excess why doesn't each burger wrapper have a government health warning on it? Spurlock's answer, hinted at in the beginning of the film, "its only a matter of time".

To further fuel McDonald's defense take the individual interviewed by Spurlock who has eaten over 19,000 Big Mac's since he first went to a McDonald's (including nine on the first day). On a diet averaging over two Big Mac's a day, he is not significantly overweight, and he has a healthy cholesterol level. Spurlock slips this detail in at the bottom of the screen during the closing "post binge" debriefing, but it stuck in my mind. There is clearly a lot of room for more detailed research if McDonald's is ever to be successfully sued for deliberately selling meals of mass destruction (MMD). To have more credibility someone really needs to do a long term study where the person eats only at McDonald's but doesn't double their calorie intake. This might help prove whether a McDonald's diet is fundamentally unhealthy or whether it was just the calorie binge that caused most of Spurlock's problems.

Hard-hitting and technically in-depth documentaries seldom if ever make compelling movie theater material. Following Michael Moore's formula of entertaining while you shock, "Super size me" takes us on a journey highlighting the ignorance of the public and the less than benevolent attitude of the fast food industry to "growing" its customer base and maintaining its dominance over healthier alternatives. "Super size me" encourages us all to laugh along while simultaneously identifying a bit of ourselves in all the hapless individuals shown along the way. Hopefully the take-away from this movie for many will be an undrunk super-gulp soda and uneaten extra-large bucket of popcorn.

Poor literacy, poor people.

Thanks to Super Sea Chimps for reminding me that a staggering 16 percent of this country's population live in poverty. Poverty, in 2002, means for a 2 person family making $12k a year or less, and for a four person family $18k a year or less (see also the US Census Bureau) Not much money to live on is it? Of course I didn't really need reminding, this kind of fact is always at the back of my mind, although I thought it was more like 12%, but it turns out 16% is for children (as Diane correctly cited) and 12% is the average for the entire population. Basically the disparity tells us that poor people have more kids than the average hence more poor kids in poverty...

Needless to say people in poverty don't benefit on ounce from $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, even though that $1.5 trillion (yes, that 1,500,000,000,000 dollars!) could give them each a handy $44,000 pay out (assuming 34 million in poverty). Sure some of them might go piss it away in Vegas, but then so do people not in poverty, every day, day in day out - there's a multi-billion dollar industry based around it. And some might go buy a big SUV with it and help destroy the environment. Sorry, that's also happening on a massive scale as rich people load up on tax-break Hummers and suck, and naturally it also has several big businesses based around it. And some might also go by a truck load of beer and literally piss it away. Well that's no worse than paying thousands for a bottle of Bordeaux and pissing that away is it?

But why assume the worst? Maybe the majority of people in poverty are just like the majority of use, but poor. They are you an me if we lose our job and find our skills are no longer in demand. They are you and me if our towns major employer moves out of town and we don't have enough money to relocate anywhere else. They are you and me if we have a wreck and medical insurance doesn't cover our bills and we get weighed down with insurmountable debt problems. Or they are you an me if are parents were poor and we lived some place where the schools are so poor funded that we ended up without the skills to get anything but a minimum wage job flipping burgers or stacking shelves at Wal-Mart.

I think the latter is probably more likely because baring a huge hand out from the government, or winning the lottery then poverty usually begats poverty. Education is the key to escape from the prison of poverty and the miraculous thing is that great education costs a tiny fraction of the benefits it can yield to society.

Lets take a look at a fact or two... The 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey measured literacy in the American population and gave a score that translated to one of five levels for prose, document and numerative areas of literacy. Briefly the levels can be describe as:

• Level 1 - Able to total an entry on a deposit slip, locate the time and place of a meeting on a form, and identify a piece of specific information in a brief news article.
• Level 2 - Able to calculate the cost of a purchase or determine the difference between two items. They could also locate a particular intersection on a street map and enter background information on a simple form.
• Level 3 - Able to integrate information from relatively long or dense text or from documents, to determine appropriate arithmetic operation based on information contained in the directive, and to identify the quantities needed to perform the operation.
• Level 4 and 5 - Demonstrated proficiencies associated with the most challenging tasks in this assessment, many of which involved long and complex documents and text passages

The NALS found that for prose tests, 21% of adults in this country have up to Level 1 literacy skills, 48% have Level 1 or Level 2 skills, and only 20% rate at level 4 or above. The numbers are about the same for document and numerative literacy skills.

Given that level 3 is widely considered the minimum level for success in the modern workplace it is clear that 48% of the US population doesn't meet this requirement and the majority, 68%, are only just meeting it.

When compared to the rest of the world, the International Adult Literacy Study found that the US ranks only 13th out of 17 "high income" countries. Sure we have a lot of immigrants with poor English skills, but when looking at only native born Americans we rate 10th, and looking at native born high-school drop outs we rate even worse at 15th. So while including immigrants does pull the average down somewhat, it seems more likely that failure to complete even the most basic education is a more important factor.

The NALS also examined literacy and average wages and found:

• at prose literacy Level 1 was $15,480, compared to $8,520 for welfare recipients;
• at prose literacy Level 2 was $25,010, compared to $9,540 for welfare recipients;
• at prose literacy Level 3 was $35,020, compared to $11,710 for welfare recipients; and
• at prose literacy Level 4 was $45,610, compared to $15,820 for welfare recipients.

So if you are working and have literacy level 4 (not even the highest but in the top 20%) then your average income will be three times that of the bottom 21% with literacy level 1.

Isn't that staggering? Even with a purely economic perspective doesn't seem obvious that something really wrong is going on in this country and that education and hence literacy could be a major benefit our "growth" not only at a GDP level, but also at the level of fundamentally improving society. After all, if 21% of the country can barely even read, to the point where they are "unable to determine the correct amount of medicine from information on the package" how the heck are they going to make any decision about who should be president without relying on the spoken opinion of someone else?

Its no wonder that TV with its all pictures portrayal of the world is so popular. And just how is someone who is barely literate ever going to function effectively in a computer screen driven world? Even using Google or Yahoo is going to be a major challenge, no wonder a point and click simplification like AOL is still needed.

A price for your head

I heard yesterday that the US Army now has people cruising around villages in rural areas of Iraq with sacks full of money. They are handing out up to $2500 in compensation for civilian deaths, and up to $15,000 to each village for collateral damage to property. Each payout is accompanied by a speech by an officer telling how its by way of an apology from the US.

While apologies and compensation are better than nothing, wouldn't it have been better to avoid the deaths in the first place? $2,500 is a pitiful amount compared to the $1.5 million or more 9/11 victims received, and the $10,000 per man woman and child the US has, or will soon have spent on the Iraq invasion? They could have just dropped that much from the sky instead of invading, it would probably have been destabilizing enough to oust Saddam without a shot fired.

American fall-guy

As the New Yorker prepares to hit newsstands on Monday with its "Rumsfeld authorized Iraq torture" story, the big question is who will be Bush's fall guy? Will Rumsfeld push Stephen Cambone over the edge, or will Bush force Rumsfeld to take one for Team Neocon?

As Rumsfeld and Cambone prepare for judgment day, my money is on Rumsfeld as the next Olive North taking the heat for the know-nothing President Bush who hears no evil, sees no evil and reads no-evil. Unless of course, its is perpetrated by someone in the Axis of Evil.

From Here to Economy

There's a pretty good primer on economics and sustainability over at Grist Magazine. If you're interested in the topic then also worth reading is their three-part article profiling ecological economists.

He ain't a terrorist, he's my brother

When I was a kid my big brother was the innovator in the family. Being the oldest he was the first to do everything - first to get a bike, first to end up in hospital after crashing his bike, first to slice off part of his finger, and first to generate 6 inch sparks from a high voltage gizmo he built out of spares from the junk yard. Etc. etc.

He was also first to head off to university and live in the big city for a while. One time after returning home for the long summer holiday he produced a map of tunnels which went on his wall at home. With it went tales of disappearing into a manholes and exploring the underground tunnel systems that lie just benneath the streets of London. It was fun, it was exciting and only a little risky.

Now I read today some kid in Austin, probably just like my brother, decided it might be fun to do some subterranian exploring. So he filed a freedom of information act request to obtain maps of the tunnels. Next thing he knows he's being interrogated by the FBI who suspect he might be a terrorist or associated with some evil-doing activist group (i.e. still a terrorist).

Okay, I admit, the FBI were just doing their job, he could have been a terrorist, and Bush could have been visiting UT Austin in the near future. Is that what the deal is? But really, this kid is no more a terrorist than my brother is and exploring underground tunnels is pretty much a rite of passage for any inquisitive mind, just like exploring computer networks as I did as a student.

While I was exploring the rest of the Unknown News site I discovered their bumper stickers. I might have to get a "Who would Jesus bomb?" sticker.

Execution

I do not believe that criminals should be executed, or tortured for that matter. Lets face it, for the most part life in America, Europe and many other areas of the world are so safe, trouble free and easy that it is all to easy to assume everywhere else is the same. However I recognize I live far from the places in the world where death, torture and persecution are a daily reality everyone faces. But still we continue our daily lives safe in the knowledge that ignorance is bliss.

So when images of Berg's execution come our way its naturally disturbing to many, being far from one's daily life experience or expectations of normal treatment of human beings. One is easily drawn to the conclusion that it is barbaric and the perpetrators are obviously "animals". What exactly was barbaric though? Was it the taking of a life by any means? Was it the use of a knife and beheading? The release of the video?

If it was the taking of a human life, even an innocent one, is that any less barbaric than the thousands of civilians who have died during the Iraqi invasion and occupation? Where those civilians for the most part guilty of anything worse than being in the wrong country at the wrong time?

If it was the beheading then who are we to judge what is barbaric? This is the supposedly quick means used to kill animals on a farm. If they had shown a street execution as by Nguyen Ngoc Loan, would that have been any less repulsive? Remember that "civilized countries" have been beheading, shooting, injecting, gassing and electrocuting people for centuries. While many countries see themselves about such things now the USA still managed to execute 65 people last year. How about if they had strapped Berg in a chair and electrocuted him as is still done in Florida.

If it was the release of the video that disturbed so many then I say don't watch it. No US TV network to my knowledge has shown it, you have to go hunt it down on the Internet. The people complaining about the video are simply rubbernecking on the Internet. The availability of images from the Berg execution video are less disturbing than those release by mainstream media channels (AP) of the burned security guards in Fallujah, or the photos of degrading torture of live people in Al Ghraib.

Ultimately I have to say I do find the Berg execution barbaric and if I watched the video I know I would find it repulsive and disturbing. I previously saw a video of an execution in Afghanistan by similar means and I have to say it was the most disturbing thing I've ever seen in my life and I don't really want to see it again.

Nor do I condone the execution or sympathise with the executions in any way. I feel that the perpetrators are no less guilty of a crime than any other person, army or state that kills people in the name of some cause that they believe is fundamentally better than everyone elses.

Tea-time, now with added comments

I'm pleased to announce the availability of comments on this blog.

I have to admit I'm not a big fan of comments, or at least not this for this particular blog at this moment in time. Enabling comments is basically an experiment, and for the benefit of those who like comments, I hope that it may help foster some kind of virtual long dark tea-party of the soul around this site. So: have at it!

Due to the political angle of this blog I know that I will regularly receive comments from those with opposite opinions to mine. That's fine and even desirable - bring it on! I will choose to respond and engage in contrarian thought as I see fit. I know I will also, on occasion, get abusive, offensive, or otherwise unsuitable feedback. Rest assured I will feel free to exercise my editorial power to expunge the latter as necessary.

The first day of the rest of your life

There's a saying "Every day is the first day of the rest of your life". The problem is that most days you don't really feel like it and more likely don't even remember it. For me today is one of those days when I definitely feel like today is the first day of the rest of my life.

The last time I felt like this was when I decided to leave my last job with its nice office, nice view, job security and a friendly work environment full of friends and happy memories. I left it to join a crazy dot com, with a long commute, crazy work hours and crazy bosses who dreamed the could change the world, but eventually just pissed away $34M with nothing to show for it except a brand name and a lot of unused office stationery. This all happened right after watching the movie "American Beauty" and I would say the two events were definitely causally connected.

That was almost five years ago and yesterday I retired from the remmanents of my dot com (long since assimilated into a larger all together more evil public corporation). Another way to say it was "I finished my job", or "quit my job", or "became a discouraged worker", or "become unemployed" or even "got laid off because California workers are too expensive". Yet another way to say it is "I didn't want to move to Idaho to continue doing a job I basically couldn't care less about".

Anyway, whichever way you look at my transition from the "working state" to something else, the consequence is today I'm not working and have no definite plans to go back to working any time soon. That decision is entirely in my own hands and it feels good to be back in control of one's own destiny.

Maybe three months, six months or whenever I might want to start working again for whatever reason except for money. Hopefully that reason will be to do something interesting, more productive and definitely more worthwhile than just plain making money for a psycopathic corporation.

The end of days

This is my last day of working for a faceless corporation and its legions of pointy haired bosses. As of tomorrow I am determined to make a public corporation's problems with making money a distant second to my own human problems. Naturally I'll let you know how it goes - there's always a few speed bumps on the road to freedom.

Stupid is, stupid does...

Thanks to South Knox Bubba for this great Slate article on George W Bush, The Dunce in Chief.

The article considers how Bushes "malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms" collectively known as Bushisms, make him sound like "a grade-A imbecile". I'm wondering if "Bushism" has made it into the OED yet? It also reviews his lifetime record of underachievement, and how at a late age he managed to fall onto the wagon, and ended up catching the gravy train of power.

The closing paragraph says it all:

As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.

Rule of law

I find it ironic that Bush is standing up, patting Rumsfeld on the back and congratulating him on his job well done in the war against terror. Sure Bush may have duped some of a gullible American public into believing invading Iraq had something to do with the war on terror with logic like "well the 9/11 hijackers came from there, so of course our country should go kick their countries ass..." But the majority of right thinking, rational human beings in this country still know that invading Iraq had nothing to do with the war on terror. It was just a diversion to take our mind of how pathetically little progress that "war" was making, just like the "war on drugs".

Meanwhile Bush is also trumpeting how the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse will be punished according to rule of law. That's all well and good, but who's rule? If it was common US civil law they would all be doing years of prison time, if its pre-Bush invasion Iraqi law civil law then who knows - does stoning or some other revenge against them apply? However when its US military law which apparently conveniently applies... well they may just lose some pay, get demoted, dishonorable discharge, or even just suffer an administrative discipline. I believe the worst they can get for actual unlawful killing is about a one year stretch in the brig. Is there any wonder why Bush is afraid to submit US forces to international rule of law that he is so happy to subject other "evil-doers" to?

Fortunately for us we can still rely on the stupidity of the few who feel inclined to document their own crimes, and the honorable few who feel inclined to speak out and expose them. But its a tough fight all the way to the top to get anyone to do anything about it. When Iraqis complained of abuse at Abu Ghraib and even created art to document their experience, no one listened. Its clear that for many in the US administration this whole affair is just an inconvenient irritation that never should have made it into the public eye and should be swept under the carpet as quickly as possible:

"We're functioning in a (with peacetime constraints) wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media...

"Unbelievable photographs"? Who the heck made that comment? Well our own Rumsfeld of course. As the Tin Man told me:

Isn't that an amazing quote?? Rumsfeld is sorry that they got caught and that they don't have unlimited power. That's all he's sorry about. And his choice of adjectives is interesting, "unbelievable". Sounds like he'd love to court martial for the guy who slipped the disc to the media.

For those detractors like Rumsfeld who poo-poo the whole affair by saying its no worse than frat-house hazing rituals, or as Limbaugh said "fun, stress relief" (thank you again Tin Man), well wasn't that exactly the point I made in What price the American dream?. When fully integrated with our vision of how society should be, Iraqis will have to tolerate our US standards of what is acceptable levels of crime, acceptable levels of unreported abuse in our institutions (prisons, homes, police, military), acceptable "fun", and acceptable corruption (Enron, Global Crossing, ...) and whatever else is just an acceptable price you pay for the current Bush v2.0 of "The American Dream". That is: shopping, guns and cheap oil for all, except all those pesky evil-doers and dissenters who need to be sent to the Guantanamo Gulag.

Random coincidences..

People are always freaked out by coincidences. However, given the almost unlimited opportunity for coincidences to happen I'm just surprised we don't see them more often.

Anyway, today The Tin Man sent me a job ad:

Qualifications:
Between 5'10 and 6'1"
athletic build
male or female
excellent acting skills
excellent drumming skills
willingness to relocate

He tells me its the Blue Man Group recruiting in LA, sure enough here's the ad on their site. Unfortunately I can't play drums, act and I'm not going to relocate. So that one is out.

Then today I'm looking at the stats for LDTT and notice a blip from an IP that resolves as Method Studios. I check out their website and click a few links in and stop a photo of the Blue Man Group. Turns out that Method Studios did some work with BMG and Intel on the Pentium III roll out.

Well that's a little coincidental given how infrequently I get job listings for the Blue Man Group (well actually, never before) and pay that much attention to my stats on the same day. After a bit I decide to blog about coincidences and I go back to the web site and the Blue Man group image is no longer there! Eventually I discover that they have a huge portfolio of work and rotate the images from them that they show on their home page. So that's even more coincidental - they list almost 588 items in their portfolio, and show only 14 at a time on their home page. That means there's a 1 in 42 chance of seeing the Blue Man Group portfolio image the one time I go to check their web site.

But wait a minute... 1 in 42 WTF!

WTF? Yeah WTF because 42 is the answer. I mean, not just the answer, but The Answer. As in the number dreamed up by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy series. And you know what else Douglas Adams did? Yeah, he wrote this book, called "The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul" about a holistic detective called Dirk Gently who believed in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

But wait, there's more....

Those of you who know the domain used in my personal email address should go look at the home page for that domain and read the introduction.

Okay, by now you should be freaked out by this massively impossible coincidence that surely must have some deeper cosmic meaning. The kind of thing that should make me stop in my tracks, quit my job, and walk the Earth like Caine did in "Kung Fu". Well guess what movie I just saw tonight? Yes, "Kill Bill Volume 2" which was directed by Quentin Tarantino and starred David Carradine (who played Caine in "Kung Fu") as "Bill". And Tarantino also directed the movie "Pulp Fiction" (a personal favorite of mine) in which the character Jules witnesses something that he swears is a miracle but the other observer believes in a coincidence. Jules decides to quit his job and walk the Earth like Caine.

Holy moly. Guess what I just did last week? Quit my job...

Well, sorry to disappoint, but I really could just carry this train of coincidences on forever but I'm not going to. However its all true - there's not a single thing I've mentioned so far that didn't happen today. However I don't call myself Blog Gently for nothing, its because I believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. So really, this kind of thing is bound to happen almost daily.

A little light music

Since JohnnyTheo.com hasn't quite made it back to the land of the living yet, I'll just have to post this here. Special mention goes to Hey Hey 16k and Realistic-Internet-Simulator. Warning, Flash required and many items are more profane or mundane - YMMV^*

^*Your Mileage May Vary

Corporate control by another name

Doesn't this quote from Colin Powell sound all too familar?

"[Some] of that sovereignty they are going to allow us to exercise on their behalf and with their permission. It is not as if we are seizing anything away from them. It is with the understanding that they need our help and for us to provide that help we have to be able to operate freely, which in some ways infringes on what some would call full sovereignty."

He could just as well be talking what happened to the (natural) people of the United State's sovereignty since corporations began their covert annex of control in 1886.

Dating for dummies...

Fresh from The Tin Man, SingleRepublican.com. Like irradiated mosquitos he suggest democrat males should lure a Republican female and neutralize the opposition. The amusing thing is what you get if you instead type SingleDemocrat.com.

Yes, both domains are registered by the same person

A Letter from Michael Moore

May 5, 2004

Friends,

I would have hoped by now that I would be able to put my work out to the public without having to experience the profound censorship obstacles I often seem to encounter.

Yesterday I was told that Disney, the studio that owns Miramax, has officially decided to prohibit our producer, Miramax, from distributing my new film, "Fahrenheit 911." The reason? According to today's (May 5) New York Times, it might "endanger" millions of dollars of tax breaks Disney receives from the state of Florida because the film will "anger" the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. The story is on page one of the Times and you can read it here (Disney Forbidding Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush).

The whole story behind this (and other attempts) to kill our movie will be told in more detail as the days and weeks go on. For nearly a year, this struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge (well, OK, sorry -- it WILL upset them...big time. Did I mention it's a comedy?). All I can say is, thank God for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax who have stood by me during the entire production of this movie.

There is much more to tell, but right now I am in the lab working on the print to take to the Cannes Film Festival next week (we have been chosen as one of the 18 films in competition). I will tell you this: Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show. But there's nothing they can do about it now because it's done, it's awesome, and if I have anything to say about it, you'll see it this summer -- because, after all, it is a free country.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

What did the salad bowl say to the tossed salad?

It used to be said that the United States is a "melting pot" of ideas, beliefs and ethnicities. The idea being that no matter who we are and what we believe before we get here, eventually we all end up as homogenous, fun loving, and shopping happy Americans. Not long after I arrived here I heard an alternative description which is a "salad bowl". That is, lots of different ingredients all together in one place but not really lossing their individual identities.

I myself buy the latter description because after ten years it is clear to me, that there is no one "American" identity that we all melt into. America is defined by diversity and always will be. As an example of this, consider the variety of responses from the public that the FCC received when Oprah decided to let a guest describe the sexual euphemism "tossed salad" on her show aired at 4pm. Hint: click on each letter to read the next.

No matter what you think of Oprah's judgement or lack thereof, I think you'll agree the range and diversity of responses from the public clearly indicates that we really are living in a salad bowl and not a melting pot.

Total ownership

If you watch the documentary The Corporation you'll see various people arguing that the reason we have pollution and depletion of natural resources is that not everything on this planet is owned private entities. The idea is if every square inch of land, sea, air is owned then market forces will have their way and environmental destruction will just be economized out of the picture due to market forces. No matter what you are doing, depleting, saying, thining - someone will have an economic interest in making sure its not hurting their interests. So when you pollute the air someone will charge you for it because they are charging someone to breath that air and they can charge more for clean air so you'd better compensate them for making it dirty in the first place...

This idea extends to all kinds of intangibles such as the radio-frequency spectrum, genes, organisms, music, patents, trademarks etc. etc. The perfect corporate world is one in which every second and every facet of your existance is an interaction with, and subject to the control by a for profit corporate entity. Only then, they tell us, will we no longer have to worry about air pollution, side effects of smoking, impacts of cars, depletion of fisheries, dangers of genetic modifications etc. etc.

Personally I find that idea frightening. It basically says that at no stage in human history will society evolve to the point where we can put money aside and just do things for the common good. It surrenders our humanity to pure economic issues of dollars and cents. As Douglas Adams said:

This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

Basically I agree with Adams and believe that even when this total ownership scenario comes to pass people will still not be happy. I think many things in life need to be kept in the public domain and owned by a government and the government needs to be elected and run by the people and for the people. We need to take money out of that loop or forever be doomed to unhappiness.

Disney can't stand the heat and drops the ball

Once again South Knox Bubba has delivered me a juicy scoop via the New York Times. Apparently Disney has told its subsidiary Miramax that it can't distribute the new movie by Michael Moore, he of "Bowling for Columbine" fame. The movie documenting Bush-Saudi family ties in relation to 9/11 is called "Fahrenheit 911".

I have to say I'm shocked that Miramax ever got involved as a potential distributor for this movie, just what were they thinking? I turns out the principals of Miramax are Bob and Harvey Weinstein who are big ticket Democrat donors. But really, no one at Miramax should be surprised that their Big Brother, Disney pulled the plug on the deal. The explanation mentioned in Bubba's source article in the New York Times is that Disney told Miramax the movie will sour its relationship with Jeb Bush and jeopardize special tax credits that it is receiving. Publicly Disney is just saying it doesn't think a family oriented company like Disney should be distributing movies that might alienate part of its fan base.

Now as a regular reader of LDTT you should know that the former argument is clearly the real one with more truth in it. True, Disney is a bland family entertainment company, however that is what it created the Miramax brand to sell all its violent non-family oriented productions without tainting its squeaky clean Mickey Mouse image. Never mind that "Fahrenheit 911" could probably make it hundreds of millions that would far exceed the value of tax credits. Its the cozy "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" relationship with the Bush family and Jeb in Florida (HQ of the Axis of Disney) that Disney doesn't want to upset.

I have to admit I always had Disney pegged as staunch GOP supporter, its exactly the squeaky clean family oriented corporation that goes hand in hand with the puritanical GOP manifesto. However it seems I couldn't have been more wrong and like many big corporations Disney plays both sides of the fence. Open Secrets shows that the Disney Political Action Committee actually gives almost exactly equally to both the GOP and the DNC. In fact in 1998 it gave more to the Democrats then Republicans (60/40 split). In 1997 it worked with both Democrats and Republicans and got passed a bill to extend copyrights, handily preventing the copyrights on Mickey, Pluto, Goofy and Donald from falling into the public domain in the next ten years which would have cost it billions in lost merchandizing revenues.

Does anyone else see how clearly corporate personhood issues are at work here?

I think perhaps Moore might be even smarter than we think. I think I can see this will drum up plenty of free publicity for his movie and a new distributor will swiftly step up to the plate, quite possible on of Disney's competitors. Regardless, I don't think this is going to do anything to hurt the success of Fahrenheit 911, and it at least removes any possibility that a distributor like Disney might want to exert some heinous editing privileges on the release.

Black hydrogen

There's a heart warming story over at Wired News that describes how Sierra Nevada brewing company is installing hydrogen fuel cells to generate up to a mega-watt of power. They wanted independence from California's notoriously flakey and expensive energy grid, and also to cut emissions caused by their brewery.

They are initially getting their hydrogen from converted natural gas thus using what has been dubbed "black hydrogen". Black hydrogen is any hydrogen generated from fossil fuels such as natural gas, coal, or oil, or even hydrogen from other sources (such as water) but using fossil fuels to obtain the power to generate the hydrogen from them. Not surprisingly black hydrogen is the form that is a particular favorite of Bush and Big Oil because it has the veneer of respectability, without any of the inconvenience of actually stopping the big oil machine. Also being a less efficient process of obtaining power it actually requires more oil to be extracted from the ground.

The heart warming bit is that Sierra Nevada is hoping to switch over to using the methane by-products of its own brewing process to generate the hydrogen and become completely energy and emissions neutral. I sure hope they can pull it off because such renewalable, no resource depleting systems are the only thing that can sustainably support our life on earth in the long run.

Mommy, what's VD?

It's an innocent question I asked my mother when I was a kid. I was watching some news on TV a little later than the watershed for kids my age and they started talking about this mysterious vee-dee. So I just asked. I might as well have been asking why the sky is blue. But I never got an answer, I don't think she wanted to get into the whole birds and bees conversation at that point. In fact I never had that conversation. And when #2 brother got married I heard that circuitously that #1 was asked to ask #2 if he knew everything he needed to know. That was about all we ever heard.

Anyway, this entry is not about venereal disease, its actually about perfectly innocent and straightforward questions people ask, but never get an answer for. The question I had in mind is "Isn't torturing prisoners a war crime?". I mean that's what I imagine people should be asking when they see the photos from Abu Ghraib. But for me its not an innocent question, its a loaded one. To me the answer is "But it is". But unfortunately America has been busy exempting itself and all its people from prosecution at the International Criminal Court specifically so it would never have to worry about being accused of war crimes.

Well of course that's because Americans would never commit such things right? Because Americans are the good and only evil people commit war crimes and any charges brought against an American are clearly trumped up charges designed to make America look bad. And yet there they are, photos and counts all the heinous deeds of torture you could want, bar actual killing of prisoners. However even as I write this I go looking for information and find yes, even that happened. Prisoners were actually killed in Abu Ghraib. That's not "died", that's "killed" or as Reuters puts it, "murdered".

You see its not America that is evil, any more than Iraq, Iran or North Korea are evil. Its just a few "bad eggs" who got some power to use and abuse in a way that they never should have. If America says "These images do not represent what America stands for nor do they represent the high standards that our military is committed to upholding," then why should anyone believe us? When we say "What occurred was wrong and it will not be tolerated." what action is there to support it? Some slapped wrists of enlisted servicemen and women. Is that it? People will try to spin-doctor that in any way they can, but when Saddam is torturing and executing prisoners, how is that really any different from Americans doing it? Its taken three months for the February report on Abu Ghraib to surface so someone was sitting on this timebomb to supress it.

So I'll make a suggestion. If America is serious about making amends it should start by apologizing, recognizing that all nations no matter who they are have some "rogue criminals" and recognize the International Criminal Court. Then it should indict the appropriate people for a war crimes investigation by the ICC. If the ICC is good enough for the rest of the world's war criminals it should be good enough for the USA.

Unfortunately for the Iraqi's there's a problem. As my friend The Tin Man points out, America believes hostilities are over and its not a war. Therefore its just a domestic issue for the Iraq government to prosecute if the see fit. But wait, America is still sovereign in Iraq since we took over and therefore, well, maybe we'll just let it slide this time and write it all off as a big mistake. Embarrassing, but a mistake. Trust us, it wont happen again...

So when your kid see hooded men with their testicles wired up and asks, "Mommy, isn't torturing prisoners a war crime?" just turn off the TV and tell them its way past their bed time. Trust me, it's really much easier that way.

My mum always said...

Courtesy of South Knox Bubba I came across this rather entertaining table of State average IQ vs. Presidential voting. I have to admit I take it with a pinch of salt, I'm not sure how much weight I put on the reliability of such a thing as average IQ but you must admit, it does seem to show a high degree of correlation.

However I must remind you that correlation does not mean there is a causal link between IQ and voting preference. Even so, I find it hard not to be reminded that I believe there is a connection between lower education standards and less critical thinking. Which means a public that is more susceptable to mass media election propoganda or brainwashing (call it what you will). Which means the party spending the least on education and most on election advertising will have a distinct advantage when it comes to maintaining dominance in power.

I think it would be interesting to see a state by state break down of percentages in the recent poll about Iraq, al Qaeda funding and 9/11 involvement misconceptions. Again belief of disinformation and propoganda is required to keep the status quo in Washington where the Bush's intellectual elite vulcans are hiding out.

And the educated intellectuals who conspire to challenge and dissent? Just send them off the to the Gulag or Tuol Sleng - it worked for the Bolsheviks and the Khmer Rouge.

Guest post: Bolsheviks!

Here is a special guest posting from an LDTT regular we'll call "The Tin Man":

This Abu Ghraib thing has finally caused me to see the light... the Bush administration is constructing a prison system that's essentially the same as the infamous Soviet Gulag. We've got an archipelago of autonomous regions outside the U.S. that are islands of lawlessness. In cancer terms, they're like tumors metastasizing all over the globe.

The Soviet gulag wasn't born overnight. It developed over decades. Lenin started it, Stalin perfected it. Solzhenitsyn describes it in a chapter of Gulag Archipelago called "The history of our sewage disposal system". Bush and his gang are installing the plumbing as fast as they can.

Control of the press, manipulation of history, a penal system that's accountable to noone, forcible exportation of ideology, opposition to a political party equated with treason... My god, Bolsheviks have taken over the White House!

-- The Tin Man

Privacy and truth

Wired featured an article today about monitoring of sex offenders. Since Megan's law was passed states are required to notify residents when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood. Meanwhile Derek Smith of ChoicePoint, a data warehousing company, is calling for increased mining of personal data to screen the good from the bad - his company performs over 8 million background checks for Fortune 500 companies every year.

California has no central system to manage its Megan's law disclosures this so cities are simply posting names and addresses of sex offenders on their web sites. Unfortunately sometimes the wrong names and addresses are published, and sometimes a person who is trying reform and live out the rest of their life with some shred of decency finds a vigilante at their door...

ChoicePoint was the company that supplied the list of names to Florida for purging of ex-felons from their 2000 electoral roll. Unfortunately they included the names of thousands of people who only had a misdemeanor conviction, thousands who were convicted outside of Florida and thousands more who simply shared a similar name to those who were ex-felons...

Well its better to be safe than sorry right? Well what about when its your door that vigilantees turn up at, or when its you that's turned away from the polling booth?

To be honest I don't know what the answer is, I don't even have a clue. I understand the rationale that leads people to want to know when a convicted paedophile is living next door - its a known factor that recidivism exists and that incarceration as a "cure" for crime is signifcantly flawed. And I understand why people want to do background checks on people to see if they are suitable for employment - people do lie on resumes. But its also a known fact that data contains errors, courts make errors, identities are forged or confused, and sometimes people do reform and change their ways. So we end up with people effectively convicted in society for life by some record of their past deeds that may or may not be accurate or relevant.

What is society to do? Do we continue to protect privacy at all costs and rely on people telling the truth? Or do we just tear down the walls of privacy and collect, sort, collate and analyse every scrap of information on our neighbors just in case...

Its hardly a question I need answer because the latter is already happening. It is, as they say, a slippery slope. With the first taste of data fresh on its lips there is little we can do to persuade the government to put the privacy genie back in the bottle. Even though constitutionally protected, it is only a matter of time before we are expected to yield more and more personal data, and allow its collection and monitoring in return for privileges such as social security benefits, medical treatment, education, employment, purchasing property, performing any kind of financial transaction, and ultimately to live in this country at all.

We will soon reach the point where data collected and stored will include every cent you spend, every web site you visit, every phone call you make, every person you meet, every product you buy and every place you travel. It does sound far fetched but the technology to do this exists right now, and ultimately you just have to trust those in charge of that they do the right thing with it and never screw up and their computers never get hacked and they never make a wrong association and decide to shut your life down and haul you in one day. Well you can protest your innocence until you're blue in the face but who is going to argue when the truth about you is all there in black and white?

Like I said, I really don't have any answers. I do understand why people are tempted to errode our right to privacy one piece at a time. Each individual step seems to make sense and seems to have some tangible benefit that makes it a worthwhile sacrifice. Then one day you wake up and its 1984 or some society like in "The Minority Report" and you wonder just how the heck you got there. The only solution I can possibly think of is that society devote some serious effort into technology like the truth machine in Halperin's novel of the same name. In fact its no coincidence that the main character of "The Truth Machine" was inspired by the death of his own brother at the hands of an ex-murderer who never should have been released. Not that I believe such a device could ever be made to be 100% infalible, as it needs to be, but read the book and I think you'll agree that the questions raised by the existance of such a device offer some interesting insights into society and how we deal with truth and privacy.

Ban them, ban them all...

Guy Kewney makes and argument in eWeek that baning mobile phones in planes is over-reacting, but personally I'll be happy to see this ban extended indefinitely. While I understand his point that the risk from interference is miniscule, its still a risk. After all, everyone assessed the risk from box-cutters as miniscule until 9/11.

If there is a known risk that has caused interference before then why bother taking that risk? Even if there was never an incident in the less than one thousand flights I'm sure Kewney has taken in his life, there are millions of flights every year and a one in a million event that could down a plane is still one or more planes a year. Even one is one too many for the convenience of using a phone on a plane. I'll leave the technical assessment of mobile phone interference to experts over pundits with gut feeling convenience arguments.

The real problem is, that although 22 countries in the EU can standardise in the GSM phone network, they couldn't standardize a protocol by which phones could be remotely disabled, or put in a harmless low power mode. As useful would be the ability to enforce a silent ringer mode. Which brings me to my real objection about using phones on a plane...

Even if using a phone on a plane could be proved to be safe, its hard enough to get to sleep on a plane as it is without some dick-wad (that's a techinicaly term) beside you yacking away at full volume over the engine noise to tell some friend of his "yeah, I'm on the plane, I'm over the ocean, and would you believe there's this cute blonde three rows up I'd like to give some mile high attention". Yes, you better believe it, you will hear that kind of stuff flight after flight as soon as mobile phones are allowed and work on planes.

When you're jammed into a plane for 12+ hours (or even less) its bad enough to have to put up with ever phyiscal nuance of your seat companions, but to have to listen to their blathering for an equal period will be shear hell. I predict that within a month of phones working people will start calling to ban them, and on-flight "air rage" will start to escalate.

If you want to communicate on a plane it should be restricted to email and text messages, or quaint gesticulations of empty drink glasses and napkin waving.

George Bush and Janet Jackson

Quickly now, what's the connection between George Bush and Janet Jackson?

Answer: They both have boobs that get edited out after the fact.

Yes, while TV land is busy censoring Jackson's star spangled boobs it appears its also got the video chopping block working full whack on Bush's boobs. Unfortunately for GWB there's still this embarrassing thing called raw footage that lingers on. As a recent article at Alternet describes, Bush not only says bizarre things that never make it onto the news, he also does them. Like cleaning his glasses on a strangers sweater without even asking.

Bush does this so often that Dave Letterman has created a segment just for them - Stupid President Tricks. One of the reasons that Letterman ends up airing such content without invoking the wrath of corporate media is that Letterman's show is owned and controlled by Letterman himself. Therefore CBS can't tell him what to do on his show without risking loosing Dave, the show and all its ratings. Smart move Dave.

Eleven questions for the Shrub

Mark Morford does it again with eleven tongue-in-cheek questions for the Shrub who thought he was President. It contains plenty of good links, including Gee-Dubs resume and even a reference to our locally made Hangar One vodka.