The Return of King Butts

So you thought the age of King Butts was over? Especially after that $246 billion deal the states made with the tobacco companies in 1998, ostensibly to fund anti-smoking campaigns. But the states took the money and ran the other way. Few bothered spending significant sums on anti-smoking programs, except California, which (before the Terminator) devised and implemented innovative programs that had measurable effect in reducing teen smoking.

The last weapon the federal government had was a pending law suit filed during the Clinton administration charging the big Butts with promoting teen smoking, and seeking damages. But with their infinite capacity for craven cowardice, the Bushers reduced the damages they were seeking from $130 billion to $10 billion.

Why? The operative figure seems to be $54 million, which is what the Big Butt companies have spread around in campaign contributions since 1990. Even the judge in the case smells a rat, as do several members of Congress. But for now King Butts is back, big time! Any industry that can kill some 400,000 people a year can't possibly be more important to the Bushies as renewing the Patriot Act, which is supposed to protect us from terrorists, at least the unincorporated kind.

Last-minute retreat leaves anti-smoking plan in ashes - Yahoo! News

the birds have figured out what to do with them, but have we?

Bird Brains

Humans know they have all the brains. So they can't quite believe the evidence that very small birds with almost no brains learn from each other, or can remember exactly where they've stored thousands of seeds over vast landscapes, and can find these stores even when landmarks are obscured by snow. And of course humans have no real clue as to how or why migrating birds migrate the way they do.

So of course these humans, perhaps smart enough to work for oil companies, were terribly worried that a proposed new technology for energy production, huge "farms" of hundreds of wind turbines positioned at sea, would disrupt migration paths and even kill thousands of birds who fly unwittingly into the blades.

So they studied the situation. And it seems that when birds come upon these massive turbines, they, unh, fly around them. Sometimes they fly between them. Less than 1% of the birds get within a distance where they might be in danger.

Which leaves us wondering, where can our humans get some of those bird brains?


BBC NEWS Science/Nature Wind farms pose low risk to birds

sinking slowly with the west 

The Naked Emperor of Lethal Lies


"A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents. "

Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming - New York Times

UPDATE: Three days after the aide in question resigned from the White House, he began working for Exxon. I wish we were making this up.

Putting People Last: Deconstructing Two AP Stories

"General Motors plans to eliminate 25,000 jobs in the United States by 2008" begins the AP story by John Porretto, an attention-getting lead. But it is virtually the last time in the article that indicates this might be bad news.

Do we get quotes about the people who will be losing their jobs, and what this will do to their lives, or even to the economy? What this might portend for America's manufacturing base? Not hardly.

No, this is a report on the announcement by Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner speaking at GM's annual shareholder meeting, where he "said the capacity and employment cuts will generate annual savings of roughly $2.5 billion."

The story reports on the job eliminations as one of four strategies to revive the company. It reports Wagoner's claim that the company's expenses for employee health-care puts GM at a "significant disadvantage versus foreign-based competitors," without questioning that statement, or mentioning that other nation's reduce the burden on their industries by maintaining government health care support.

But it does say that "Investors welcomed the news, sending GM shares up modestly" while nevertheless quoting an "equity strategiest" saying that "U.S. automakers will continue to ship jobs overseas."

The rest of the story emphasizes GM's need to cut health care costs, and dark warnings about what might happen to the company if negotiations to do so with the United Auto Workers aren't successful.

The subject of this story is the health of GM and its stockholders. There is not a word about the health of its workers.

Of course this is just one story. Care to lay odds on another one appearing that takes the worker's point of view?

Here's another AP story from today:

"Global military spending in 2004 broke the $1 trillion barrier for the first time since the Cold War, boosted by the U.S. war against terror and the growing defense budgets of India and China, a European think tank said Tuesday. "

Led by the United States, which accounted for almost half of all military expenditure, the world spent $1.035 trillion on defense, equal to 2.6% of global gross domestic product, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said."

But the title of the institute holds just about the only instance of the word "peace" in the rest of the article, which stresses the economic facts and the geopolitical situation.

Nor does the story reflect on the human cost of all this armament, or the harm to the natural environment, or the moral and cultural costs of economies built on armaments.

Nor does it mention the U.S. reliance on military manufacturing and arms sales as opposed to other manufacturing. Not a word here about health care benefits draining profits.

What is the point of this quick deconstruction? Both consciously and unconsciously, news writers frame new information in ways they believe will highlight significance and interest readers. Judgments of significance and interest rely on assumptions outside the story, on what the society currently deems important. The Zeitgeist.

When editors place a story on a murder on page one, it is because they assumes readers will find the murder horrifying. Further, they will assume it will be of interest because the victim or killer or both, are celebrities. The story will not go into the economic benefits obtained by the killer, except as motive. We are assumed to be more horrified at the killing of a (prominent) human being than in the impact on a company's stocks.

In these two stories, we are not assumed to be horrified by thousands more umemployed, or a world that spends a trillion dollars on devices with the sole purpose of tearing human beings to shreds.

Thirty years ago, the GM story would probably have been about the impact on workers. But that was then, and this is Bushworld, a descendant of Reaganworld. We all know more about the stock market now than any but a handful of people did thirty years ago. We are presumed to identify with corporations more than unions, with stockholders more than workers.

This is the AP, not the Wall Street Journal. This is the wire service that goes to every news outlet in America.

This is where we are, and who we are, and what we have become.

Good Luck, Tony; Good Luck, World

"The science academies of the world's leading nations are urging their governments to take prompt action to combat possible climate change.

They have agreed that all countries could and should take cost-effective action to cut carbon dioxide emissions. "

"UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is to hold talks in the US with George W Bush on Tuesday to discuss the issues at the top of the G8 agenda - aid to Africa and measures to target global warming. "

BBC NEWS Science/Nature World scientists urge CO2 action

Darfur

"Mr. Bush values a frozen embryo. But he hasn't mustered much compassion for an entire population of terrorized widows and orphans. And he is cementing in place the very hopelessness he dreads, by continuing to avert his eyes from the first genocide of the 21st century. "

Uncover Your Eyes - New York Times

The Way the World Works

We were party to a conversation about whether Bush actually believes what he says when he insists charges that abuse is going on at Guantanamo are "absurd," or whether he is really disassembling.

We think he thinks he doesn't believe it, but he knows it's true, because that's how the world works. It's a belief that links upper class guys like him to working class guys like the saps who voted for him.

The upper class gets it as part of their birthright. It reminded us specifically of a story that Buckminster Fuller told Hugh Kenner. Fuller came from a prominent New England family with a long pedigree (which included the Emersonian inspirer and transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller). When young Bucky was thought ready to be told, a rich uncle took him aside and explained how the world works. "It is not you or the other fellow," his uncle explained. "It is you or a hundred others." If you are going to succeed, you will be required to slit the throats of those hundred (metaphorically speaking, perhaps.) This is what Bucky would have to do, what men have to do. There was no point in telling the women. They can live in their fantasy Golden Rule world, because men like his uncle had taken care of the 100 barrier/competitors to his aunt, so she was already protected.

This is what men learn, in all classes. The difference is that the upper classes are also told how to lie about it, because the rest of the world is like the women, and would be very upset if you told them that the Golden Rule is fantasy. It would make them unhappy. So you don't tell them.

You tell them everyone is given their rights, and more. Even the people who hate America. We know they hate America because why else would they be at Guantanamo? Who believes reasoning like that? Nobody except those who need to. What these men know is that it doesn't matter if you violate some rights, muss up a little hair and take away years of some innocent fellow's life; what matters is you get rid of the enemy, you hold on to power. If it comes down to that, you kill 99 innocents to make sure you get the one who might get you. The only thing that matters is who is standing when it's all over.

At a certain point you are so good at lying about this that you become sincere. In public. But when you are with the men, it's safe to speak the truth and it's important to learn the truth. Men understand this. Real men, of course. Not the girly men.

It is a factor, by the way, also in how you get away with "disassembling." That leaders should be well-spoken and smart, or even that the expensive education is important for any other reason than it was expensive, and you partied with the right people, is another pretty little fiction you have to pretend to believe.

If your handlers can make you look good, so teachers can hold you up as a model, that's good. But when it comes to the real world, how could it possibly matter? More than family connections, business connections, a web of deals and influence that spells power? Real men know this. It's the way the world works.

In Other New...

Director's Cut Version of an essay on the political meaning of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" via Spielberg's blockbuster, which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, is at Soul of Star Trek.

Also new there: the first installment of The Star Trek 60s

Pick Your Bad

Those whacky science folks got us all worried about a sudden new ice age, but the latest crew is saying not to worry. It's just going to get hotter than hell, like we thought before.

"Frostbite and snow-blindness are less likely to be in our future than heat stroke and malaria," one of them says. We might be repeating conditions that led to a greenhouse event 55 million years ago, which scientists can study through evidence left in soils. They see big changes in patterns of wet and dry, but mostly movement towards hot:

During the greenhouse spike of 55 million years ago, tropical mangroves and rain forests spread as far north as England and Belgium and as far south as Tasmania and New Zealand," Retallack says. "Turtles, alligators and palm trees graced Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, which is now the treeless abode of musk oxen and polar bears."

They offer additional comfort by pointing out that this last "greenhouse event" was temporary. It only lasted, oh, half a million years.

New Research Indicates A 'Troubled' Greenhouse Is Brewing

In Other New...

Great Mall of China at Shopopolis...

Brit Industry Ready to Deal with the Climate Crisis

Still not convinced the Climate Crisis is upon us? Check this out:

By Roger Harrabin
BBC Environment Correspondent

A group of Britain's leading industrialists has written to the prime minister urgently demanding long-term policies to combat climate change. The heads of the 12 leading firms say climate change is a huge challenge that needs serious investment by business. But they say they cannot invest because they are not sure what future government policies on climate will be.

The letter is signed off by the heads of BP, Shell, HSBC Bank, BAA, John Lewis, Scottish Power and more.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is that these industry leaders, including fossil fuel behemoths, are endorsing a view long held by alternative energy advocates. Here's what the BBC story says:

But in their letter the business leaders say they believe emissions cuts of 60% can be achieved in the UK without damaging competitiveness if firms use energy more wisely and harness new technology.'

They believe measures to hold CO2 emissions to a safe level would reduce economic growth by no more than 2% by 2050. They say bold policy action could actually boost Britain's profits by making the UK a world leader in low carbon technology.

The group say some of the technologies to achieve this goal already exist but need to be developed. Some are yet to be invented.

This is the kind of breakthrough that's needed---when people like this see a business opportunity. Will the dinosaurs of American based global industries follow? Or be left behind?

BBC NEWS Business Industry chiefs' environment plea

Good News for the Can't Wait for the Rapture Crowd

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: May 27, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 27 - A monthlong conference to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty ended in complete failure today, many of its participants said, with the nuclear and non-nuclear states so far apart that they never engaged in a detailed discussion of how to fix the gaping loopholes that many experts say have allowed a resurgence in the spread of the most dangerous nuclear technologies.

Participants Say Talks Fail on Strengthening Nuclear Treaty - New York Times

That's Historical! It's Just Not Funny

Speaking of six months ago, here's how Paul Krugman ended his most recent column, another brilliant one to which this is a kind of ominous aside:

Everyone loves historical analogies. Here's my thought: maybe 2004 was 1928. During the 1920's, the national government followed doctrinaire conservative policies, but reformist policies that presaged the New Deal were already bubbling up in the states, especially in New York.

In 1928 Al Smith, the governor of New York, was defeated in an ugly presidential campaign in which Protestant preachers warned their flocks that a vote for the Catholic Smith was a vote for the devil. But four years later F.D.R. took office, and the New Deal began.

Of course, the coming of the New Deal was hastened by a severe national depression. Strange to say, we may be working on that, too.

America Wants Security - New York Times

Six Months Too Late

(CBS) Four months into his second term, President Bush is increasingly viewed as being out of touch with the American people, according to a CBS News poll.

Six in ten Americans say the president does not share their priorities, while just 34 percent say he does – the lowest numbers for Mr. Bush since the eve of his first inauguration.
CBS News CBS Poll: Bush Out Of Touch May 25, 2005?21:00:10

Something Positive For A Change

Some 15 states and 3 cities offer incentives to people who buy hybrid vehicles. While only 1% of the auto market now, hybrid sales are growing fast, while SUV sales are trending downward.


States hoping more will buy hybrid vehicles - Yahoo! News

American Gulag

Amnesty International finds human rights abuses so extreme and systematic at Guantanamo, the organization is calling for it to be shut down.

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group issued a 308-page annual report that accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.

Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo - Yahoo! News

Space War Continued

"The Air Force is pressing hard to develop defensive and offensive space weapons without adequately considering the potential adverse consequences," the New York Times editorializes today.

"Congress and the administration need to assess whether a multilateral treaty to ban space weapons might not leave the nation far safer than a unilateral drive to put the first weapons in space. "

Weapons in Space - New York Times

In Other New...

Review of three new books on the past, present and future of the wired, wired world, in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

Review of DEATH SENTENCES: How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management Speak Are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson at Books in Heat.

Birth of An Empire (Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith) at Soul of Star Trek.