It's Life, Jim

The goal of J. Craig Venter, the gene splicing bio-wiz whose lab recently took one step closer to developing artificial life, is to "make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane, used as a feedstock for other fuels."

Neat. He'll probably win this.

But is reducing CO2 levels really the most exciting possibility of technology that will let humans "select and reorder the genetic machinery developed by evolution just as an engineer might assemble an efficient circuit board from existing components"? I think not.

Proxy War

The most concerning emerging dynamic between Hamastan and Fatah-stine would be another front in the Iran-US proxy war currently raging across Iraq and Afghanistan. with the United States and the E.U. supporting Abbas in the West Bank and Iran propping up Hamas in Gaza.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a PLO official, issued this statement:

"Iran helped Hamas to lead a military coup against the legitimate Palestinian leadership and to control the Gaza Strip. Iran supports those hostile powers in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories in order to serve its regional interests on the expense of the peoples and nations of the region."

The accuracy of this statement aside (though there seems to be no particular reason to disbelieve it...Iran has openly expressed admiration and praise for Hamas), this trope, 'Hamas=Iran', provides more fodder for Iran hardliners in the administration to push for a 'West Bank First' strategy that would "strengthen radical forces, debilitate Palestinian institutions, undermine faith in democracy, weaken Abbas and set back the peace process."

Map of the Day

Rape In Our Name

From Seymour Hersh's profile of Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, fired for his aggressive pursuit of truth in his investigation into the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib:

Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it

Map of the Day

The suburbs of Moscow. In honor of the Russian capital becoming the world's most expensive city and the rise of the post-Soviet super-rich.

Iran

We mustn't let this:

Hundreds of Iranians have been detained and interrogated, including a top Iranian official, according to Iranian and international human rights groups. The move has quashed or forced underground many independent civil society groups, silenced protests over issues including women's rights and pay rates, quelled academic debate, and sparked society-wide fear about several aspects of daily life, the sources said.

Make us forget this:

...without exception, every human rights activist and democratic dissident in Iran is categorically opposed to U.S. airstrikes on their country.

Where I Am This Weekend

Too Clever By Half?

A Financial Post piece linked off AL Daily suggests pegging the rate of a carbon emissions tax to the actual level of CO2 induced warming as measured by weather satellites in the tropical troposphere:

...climate models predict that, if greenhouse gases are driving climate change, there will be a unique fingerprint in the form of a strong warming trend in the tropical troposphere, the region of the atmosphere up to 15 kilometres in altitude, over the tropics, from 20° North to 20° South. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that this will be an early and strong signal of anthropogenic warming. Climate changes due to solar variability or other natural factors will not yield this pattern: only sustained greenhouse warming will do it.

This is pitched as a way to appease global warming skeptics: if anthropogenic warming isn't happening, the tax will stay low. The piece asserts that this system would encourage the private sector to monitor warming in order to assess future tax burdens, and would encourage companies to preemptively reduce their emissions. But it seems likely that by the time the tax would really kick in, it might be too late. Then again, it's getting late already.

More Ethanol

After a discussion with Sarah: Clearly, farmers increasing their corn production is a natural response to an ethanol fueled rise in corn prices. As for the birds, they're the casualties of a dynamic that will probably result in lower corn prices in the long run (once the market is saturated and competition drives the price back down). Already, there is a "glut" expected to hit the market this fall as "farmers have planted 90.5 million acres of corn, the most since 1945, according to the USDA."

Ethanol, of course, has its own environmental and national security benefits...And global warming isn't exactly great for the birds either.

Ethanol Killing Birds

Changes in farming practices have created distress for some bird species. Some farmers are now using land once set aside for conservation to plant more corn for use as ethanol. And the disappearance of smaller family farms in favor of larger corporate farms has led to the disappearance of hedgerows -- fences of trees or bushes that reduce erosion and lessen the force of the wind on crops, and at the same time serve as protection and nesting areas for many grassland birds.

Map of the Day

Democracy

U.S. foreign policy, torn between what could simplistically called democratic idealogues and balance-of-power "realists," has simultaneously backed the notion of "democracy" in abstract, and leaned on various fledgling democratic processes to support preferred candidates, or ignored them all together when the outcome was wrong. It happened during the Cold War, and it's happening now in Gaza and Iraq:

The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza....[Now, Bush] faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

Upon the election of Hamas, U.S. observers realized that they did have a dog in this fight, and, "organized a financial boycott of the government, in an effort to showcase Abbas as a moderate alternative in his role as president." This backfired:

the financial squeeze engendered Palestinian ill will toward the West, not Hamas, and Abbas earlier this year agreed to a unity government with his opponents. The United States had just begun delivering nonlethal aid and training to security forces loyal to Abbas when Hamas decided to strike and seize Gaza.

Now, with Abbas dissolving the unity government, Hamas seizing Gaza and Fatah hunkering down in the West Bank, this fault line between Hamas and U.S.-preferred (but incompetent) Fatah has been starkly, and geographically, realized. But the U.S. shouldn't take the bait, says Daniel Levy:

America should resist calls to play off the West Bank against Gaza and Fatah against Hamas. Instead, allow Palestinian politics to take its course, prepare to re-launch a serious Israeli-Palestinian political process as soon as any opening exists, and work where possible to create such an opening.

Another lesson on the limits of America's ability to shape the political realities of the Middle East.

Why Hitchens Hates Mother Theresa

She was a creepy pro-lifer!

From Ben Smith, Mother Theresa's order objects to Theresa's image appearing in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad. Says the leader of Fidelis, a conservative catholic organization that brought the ad to the attention of Sister Nirmala, Theresa's successor:

"We pointed out that the use of Blessed Teresa’s image was particularly inappropriate and disturbing given Sen. Clinton’s staunch support of abortion both here in the United States and abroad. Mother Teresa tirelessly fought to protect unborn children, while Hillary Clinton staunchly supports abortion on demand in all nine months of pregnancy, including partial birth abortion and taxpayer funding of abortion."

In 1979, during her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Saint Theresa said:

I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself.

Certainly makes one more sympathetic to card-carrying grump Christopher Hitchens when he writes:

Mother Theresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Apple 'In The Crosshairs'

Apple's (justifiably) smug approach to security may come back to bite them with their release of Safari for Windows. The Windows browser will be "right in hackers' crosshairs," and Apple's relationship with the geekos who will spend hours testing for security holes is less than stellar. From Wired:

...some in the security community think Apple's stance towards security is as bad as Microsoft's was in the days when it was called the "Evil Empire."

Eek.

DNA

The new perspective reveals DNA to be not just a string of biological code but a dauntingly complex operating system that processes many more kinds of information than previously appreciated.

Like Vista.

All Politics Is Local

This seems to be a significant, but overlooked, dynamic in Iraq right now: the eroding legitimacy of the Iraqi parliament, even as the Bush administration struggles to hold them accountable to a legislative agenda focused on reconciliation. Via NYT:

The same forces of entropy and obstinacy have also severed links between the party leaders and their constituencies. In Shiite areas of southern Iraq, Sunni areas of the west and for Kurds in the north, Iraq’s central government has become increasingly irrelevant as competing groups within each faction maneuver at the local level for control of public money and jobs. In many cases, especially through mosques, Iran and other foreign powers often provide more institutional support than Baghdad.

Not that the central government ever had much control over what was happening outside Baghdad (or even inside Baghdad). Obviously the Baghdad Security Plan isn't working as intended, but even to the extent it is (i.e. creating some sort of "zone of stability" inside Baghdad to facilitate political reconciliation), parliament is not taking advantage of it. From today's WP:

Iraqi leaders have made "little progress" on the overarching political goals that the stepped-up security operations are intended to help advance, the report said, calling reconciliation between Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni factions "a serious unfulfilled objective."

As fired laborers protest in southern Iraq and Kurdish factions feud with Sunnis in Mosul and Kirkuk, it's apparent that Tip O'Neill's wisdom is just as true in Basra as it is in Boston.

Map Of The Day

Click on it.

Pedophelia Defense

What do Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter referred to as the CCP) have in common? Why, their bizarre defense of dubiously moral actions on the grounds of protecting children from predators and porn.

Here's Alberto Gonzales on why he'll stick with his job, despite being a torture-loving, Bush fellating partisan hack:

On 3/22/07: "I’m not going to resign. I’m going to stay focused on protecting our kids."

On 6/11/07: "You know, I’m focused on protecting our kids....I think that’s what the American people expect the attorney general of the United States, is to be focused on making sure our country is safe from terrorism, making sure our kids are safe from predators, making sure that the public trust is being upheld."

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the CCP's partisan hacks are justifying widespread internet monitoring and censorship with their own brand of opportunistic child protecting. From Zhang Xinfeng, vice minister of the Ministry of Public Security, unveiling a new censorship initiative:

On 4/12/07: "The boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds."

Geeky response: Social control and power relations legitimized by appeals to our deep-seeded discomfort with, and ambivalence towards, child sexuality.

Cheeky response: A bastard is a bastard all over the world. And boy do those bastards love their jobs.

First.

This is mostly a forum for me to decompress from my mildly intellectually stifling communications job, toy with patterns emerging from the cloud, and flex my typing fingers. No promises. Let's see how this goes.

Where 'Bad Upholstery' comes from. I'm no Lacan expert, just someone who appreciates savvy linguistic and narrative analysis.