The Meltdown

My obsession of late has been nuclear disasters. I've been sucked into hours of surfing, mostly about the April, 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and then on to last year's multiple meltdown in Japan at Fukushima. I was going to say that Chernobyl is our worst nuclear disaster, but as I read I see the jury is still very much out about just how bad Fukushima will end up being. The extent of damage to the power plant is certainly much greater in Japan and that crisis is ongoing (well, for that matter, the situation in Chernobyl is not stabile either).

(Right after the 1986 disaster. I wonder if the helicopter pilot knew how dangerous this proximity was.)

But I began with the Soviet Union. There's a semi-skeevy website I've followed off and on for several years called English Russia, and they've given a fair bit of coverage to the abandoned site of the power plant and the nearby ghost towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl, which were evacuated almost immediately after the disaster and are now inside an "exclusion zone" where people are prohibited. From the starting point of being a sucker for the old and abandoned, I find the pictures of what has become of these towns really magnetic; and an exploration of the ghost world of present-day Chernobyl leads one inexorably back to the events that made it so.

(Even looking around the satellite photos from Google is eerie. A fully-functional city abandoned abruptly and now being reclaimed by nature.)

(Part of an amusement park at Pripyat. It had not yet opened when the disaster struck.)

An examination of those events immerses us in a dense, technical world that is utterly foreign and incredibly menacing. And really fascinating in a ghastly sort of way. The accident in Chernobyl occurred in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 when engineers were attempting to run a kind of stress test of equipment on Chernobyl's Reactor #4. The test was not properly conducted, nor were all the numerous prerequisite safety procedures followed, and the test went wrong--almost unimaginably wrong. The detailed descriptions of the accident are mesmerizing, and are covered extensively at the Wikipedia page linked above. I know little about nuclear power, but I have to note in passing the similarity between this disaster and many airline accidents in that there was a whole series of mistakes and shortcuts and breaches of protocol that led to this very unlikely outcome. An airplane accident is almost never caused by a single thing, but rather by a series of breaks in the chain of safety. And so it was here.

That is itself something to contemplate--all the near-misses that might have averted such a monumental catastrophe. But it's the consequences that stay with one, the vastness and permanence of the aftermath and the really shocking toxicity that results from things going bad in the realm of nuclear fission. After a series of explosions and fires that pretty much destroyed the structure around reactor #4, the fuel in the reactor core overheated, causing a meltdown: the entire reactor core melted into an oozing, lava-like blob of almost unimaginable malignancy, eating through the concrete and steel floor of the reactor and oozing into the containment structure beneath (Jebus help us if it were to eat through THAT floor and enter the groundwater--a situation which Fukushima might be facing).

And that's where it now sits--a many-ton blob of pure, agonizing, flesh-melting death nicknamed "the elephant's foot" because of its size and color--though of course no person has laid eyes on it. It is so toxic that it can only be viewed with robotic cameras. The elephant's foot is emitting about 10,000 roentgen per hour--500 or so is a lethal dose for a human; so to be in its presence would cause certain and rapid death (as I understand it, people are only allowed to be in the huge reactor building itself--still quite a distance from the elephant's foot proper--for a maximum of two minutes. This at least partly explains why there have been somewhere between 600,000 and a million workers needed to stabilize the situation at Chernobyl; nobody can give more than a few minutes of their time before their eligibility expires).

The elephant's foot is of course the big central source of radiation at the site, but the explosions from April of 1986 spread nuclear fallout throughout a vast area covering parts of several countries. The intensity of the radioactivity gradually recedes with distance from the accident site. The worst of it--the exclusion zone--is an irregularly-shaped, cordoned-off area extending some 19 miles in every direction from the power plant within which human habitation is not allowed. People are allowed to visit the site only with permission and under supervision. Many places inside the zone are still dangerously radioactive, and they will remain so for hundreds or thousands of years to come. One of the websites I read said the reactor site itself would not be habitable for humans (without some as-yet nonexistent intervention) for some 20,000 years. Looking at the satellite photos, it's a mental challenge to envision a single point of such virulent toxicity that people are not allowed to spend any substantial amount of time within 20 miles of it.  20 miles! But concentrations of contaminated particles of much, much less toxicity than the elephant's foot are still enough to render large areas uninhabitable (as the map below shows).

(The various exclusion zones around Chernobyl.)

What to do with this? The destroyed reactor was hastily (and with great difficulty) encased in a metal structure nicknamed "the sarcophagus" designed to basically contain the spread of highly radioactive dust and debris from wind or water or further structural collapse. But because no one could be near the reactor for very long, the structure had to be hastily made and is neither structurally sound nor stable. Though it has served its very temporary purpose, now the sarcophagus itself is in jeopardy and plans are afoot for a more permanent encasement (the uncontrolled collapse of the building would, it is feared, cause another release of toxic matter into the surrounding area). But even then we're talking only about, say, hundred-year solutions. 20,000 years is way beyond us. You might encase the elephant's foot in concrete, if you could do it, and that would buy us what? At best 1000 years, maybe? 19,000 to go.

I daresay for most of us this is unfathomable territory, like contemplating astronomical numbers. There really is no other disaster like this in human history, one that essentially renders a section of the planet inhospitable for many times the length of recorded history. Death is death, true, but no fire, no plague, no oil spill, no chemical spill, not even the explosion of an atomic bomb; nothing in our history has this kind of deadly staying power, a fact which adds a tremendous burden of consequence to anything having to do with atomic power.

The invisible and mysterious nature of radiation only adds to the sense of awe and dread. There is a field some miles from the site of the power plant (though still inside the exclusion zone) called Rossokha where some of the vehicles and equipment used to combat the disaster are quarantined (zoom into this location here): some 1,300 cars and trucks and loaders, even large military helicopters (many other vehicles are scattered elsewhere or buried, as are the hundreds of thousands of used radiation suits and facemasks and other human equipment). It's hard for me to grasp a steel truck being contaminated--a lethal, toxic contamination!--such that a good wash job would not take care of it. I've read elsewhere that even the quarantine of these vehicles was deemed inadequate and since the satellite photos were taken many of the vehicles have been moved and buried for safety. Again, this is a toxicity that I have trouble wrapping my head around.

The subject of nuclear power is another one of those topics where I suspect many people already have well-informed and firmly-held opinions, but I find myself unable to commit too firmly to either advocacy or condemnation. The monumental nature of the evil released in the Chernobyl accident raises very legitimate questions about whether any benefit of nuclear power can possibly justify the risk of such a disaster; and it raises questions about how well we understand these risks and how informed we are as a people about the risks for which we are on the hook.

I find myself thinking about the environmental fallout of every alternative form of energy, and I wonder if it isn't largely a question of how concentrated the penalties are. The consequences of our use of fossil fuel are concentrated in some places in the form of respiratory disease and acid rain and oil spills, but mostly we're feeling the effects globally as the entire planet warms, putting whole ecosystems in jeopardy and perhaps, down the road, life itself. I remind myself that while the spent nuclear fuel is itself a nasty material, the problems of Chernobyl are the result of otherwise-controlled activities going wrong. Nuclear power when everything goes as planned is clean (though its leavings are a problem to be coped with). But we must grapple with an astounding malignancy if things get out of hand--and we must evidently do a better job of designing our circumstances to prevent things from getting out of hand, even in extremis.

Fukushima puts all this front and center. While Chernobyl is a relatively remote place (and the power plant was very wisely put there intentionally instead of near Kiev, which is the primary user of the plant's output) Japan is a densely-populated island nation, and a country prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They appear to be grappling with a triple-meltdown, and if the same kind of monstrously-toxic materials as we find in Chernobyl--strike that, three times the material--should make its way into the environment, the consequences may be such as to make the tale of Chernobyl seem like a nursery rhyme.

Stay tuned.

***

For those interested, one can get quickly sucked into an almost endless chain of links on Wikipedia about this and related matters. Though I've long been interested in science and in a layman's version of physics, I grasp that physics without the maths is pretty much not physics. And that applies here, I'm sure. But the physics and chemistry involved with controlled nuclear fission seem like very heady and amazing stuff. For all those who believe that science is just religion by another name, it's worth noting that nuclear physics is a branch of pure science which is proven daily in very practical ways. There's no bullshitting your way through nuclear science, and the fact that we understand it and can build and (mostly) control it is a magnificent testament to human capacity and ingenuity. This is not intended as an argument in favor of nuclear power; I only mean to say that reading the descriptions of what it is and how it works and what we had to do to figure it out places scientists in a pretty rarified stratum. We need only to step to the wrong side of the line--which unfortunately we've done many times, and as a routine part of learning how the world works--to have demonstrated to us that "truth" is not a fuzzy concept. In the world of nuclear physics, things are right and wrong and the difference between them may be life and death.

Thoughts about insulin resistance.

(Not me, thankfully, though I'm not far behind this dude.)

I continue my long tradition here of breaking all the rules of good blogging, this time with a diversion into... medicine! (To paraphrase Mark Twain, never let a lack of knowledge stand in the way of a perfectly good post.)

***

I vowed from Day One at the JW that I would not devote any time here to dieting issues. Not because this isn't a perfectly legitimate thing to write about, and not because no one would be interested--indeed, weight struggles are something with which many of us are familiar. My rationale has been that I find blogs that concentrate on a person's life rather tiring, especially on their interior life (unless you're just a hell of a lot more interesting than I am... internally). I'm much more interested in reading about ideas and issues than I am about a particular person. (Granted, with a blog it's all personal at some point, but I still think it best to stick to ideas.)

So what to do then when one's personal life brings one into contact with ideas? Well, we just stretch the rules a bit.

So. I've been fat my whole life, really. I remember seeing 202 lbs. on the scale when I was in 8th grade (a time when I should have been what? 120 lbs?) and I was probably 220 when I finished high school. By my 30s I was in the 250 lb. range, and now, nearing the ripe age of 50, I'm around 270. By most calculations that puts me around 100 lbs. overweight. I don't think of myself that way, and I think I carry my weight in such a way that I'm perceived as being stocky but not 100-extra-pounds obese. But I am. I used to be a runner in my 20s and 30s, a tactic for trying to keep my weight under control. But I had only limited success with this, and like many people my weight has been an up-and-down-and-mostly-up-again struggle.

In addition to my attempts at exercise I--like much of America--have spent much of my life trying to diet. I rarely followed a specific program, mostly concentrating on calories-in / calories-out. But that gets harder the older one gets. A few years back I tried the Atkins diet, and I was particularly taken with it, both because I found it worked and because the concepts behind the diet were aimed precisely at me (one of my first clues that calories-in / calories-out may not really be enough). America is suffering a growing epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and Atkins was the first source I'd come across that made any real sense of this epidemic. I lost around 50 lbs. on Atkins, but I learned that a life entirely without carbs was not really sustainable for me.

But, again, the takeaway here was that Atkins' philosophy had me directly in its crosshairs; I am the poster child for the phenomena that prompted him to concoct his regimen. (There are a lot of people, I know, for whom his diet regimen is not workable, or even applicable.) I also tried Weight Watchers, which I think is a truly great program and one which IS applicable to many people. But while good-sense advice and meal planning are surely beneficial to me, I've come to see that I suffer from a particular and specific metabolic problem, and any real fix for my weight is going to have to grapple with this. (And I think ultimately WW will need to grapple with these issues as well.)

A friend was recently put on the South Beach Diet by his doctor, and that led to us discussing dietary matters. Susan has a copy of the South Beach Diet book, and my perusal of the book and my discussions with my friend reinforced my impression that Drs. Agatston and Atkins are pursuing in pretty similar fashion the same demons (and both are singing my song). Agatston's attempt to differentiate his thinking from Atkins' feels more marketing than substance to me, though I acknowledge his emphasis that fat consumption should be reigned in and specified. But in the final stage of Atkins one is consuming quite a number of fruits and veggies. (So often Atkins is characterized for the first phase of his diet, a shocking plan which runs contrary to just about everything we adults have been told for 40 years; but his "maintenance phase"--my phrase--looks about like what most of us think of as a healthy diet.)

But the South Beach Diet: I read the book--and began the plan--and it all has me chewing specifically on the topic of insulin resistance (or type-2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome or even syndrome X). These terms all address the same phenomenon, or at least stages of it. For my purposes, insulin resistance refers to a dietary condition where insulin loses its effectiveness in metabolizing carbohydrates. The condition appears to arise from excessive carbohydrates in the diet over a prolonged period; all these carbs require the body to produce lots of insulin to metabolize, and over time (for a number of reasons I have not internalized) the insulin loses its effectiveness. As the insulin becomes less effective, the body produces more and more of it to compensate; meanwhile these high levels of insulin contribute to storing these excess carbs away as fat, a condition which exacerbates the whole situation. A vicious cycle develops where the carb addict consumes more and more carbs (because the ones he's already eaten aren't turning into energy), which further increases the need for insulin. The result is the body essentially losing its ability to metabolize carbs adequately--diabetes.

As I say, I'm really a poster child for this problem (while thankfully avoiding diabetes thus far): I've been overweight all my life, and I've eaten over 90% of my meals out for 30 years. This means that a huge preponderance of my diet consists of processed food. I'm also regrettably a product of the food-industry culture, with my almost laughable Diet Coke addiction and my love of candy and chips and all the junk that exactly brings insulin resistance about. Food has long ago been dissociated from hunger and nutritional maintenance for me; it's all about wants and desires. At my twice-yearly medical checkup last week, I learned that my blood sugar is slightly elevated--not enough to be a problem yet, but it's trending where I don't want it to go, and this is on top of my already being on medication for blood pressure and high cholesterol.

This is just a stupid situation all around; I'm gradually killing myself with food.

The American diet has become very heavily weighted toward the foods which cause this metabolic disaster (the exploding epidemic of diabetes in America is proof positive): our convenience stores and drive-thrus and even our supermarkets are stocked with an overwhelming preponderance of processed quasi-foods that are triumphs of marketing and profitability but disastrous to our bodies as sustenance. I know this because these are precisely the foods I have spent my life eating--and much of my adult life fighting against the effects of (as any overweight person can tell you, being fat is a low-grade 24/7 preoccupation).

I'm at risk of sidestepping a crucial fact here: none of us is overweight--let alone trending toward diabetes--except by way of food we've placed voluntarily in our own mouths. We don't get fat without complicity. But that argument adds up to shit when we are being walked doe-eyed into an epidemic. Ongoing appeals to will power and self-control have brought us steadily backward until our present catastrophic state.

It hasn't just happened. Whether we are complicit or not, this is something that has been systematically done to us--and for one simple reason: it makes a shitload of money for big corporations. And it is being increasingly done to the citizens of other nations. Like the tobacco industry or the gambling houses of Las Vegas, the food industry has found the secret button--found, carefully nurtured and cultivated it--that gets us, zombie-like, to pursue a path that is very decidedly NOT in our best interest, and they are hiding with all the other industries behind the tree of individual free will as a means of escaping responsibility for the damage being wrought (it's a very crowded space behind that tree).

Cigarettes and gambling are perhaps instructive analogs. Cigarettes are now universally acknowledged as unquestionably dangerous to our health. They are ONLY deleterious; there is no possible upside to smoking--except, significantly, the relentlessly-marketed "social benefits" (a whole-cloth invention of the tobacco companies). And with the health questions firmly decided, society has in consequence moved consistently in the last 30 years to discouraging smoking, with warning labels and heavy taxes. (My point is not to debate whether this is the correct way to approach the problem of smoking, but simply to note that as a society we are taking active steps against a thing now universally acknowledged as harmful.) With gambling, things are fuzzier. It's possible to gamble without vice or ruin, and one's gambling does not necessarily hurt other people. For millions of folks it's fun to save up a couple grand and live it up for a few days in Vegas; no harm done. But we don't let minors do it, because it's easy for our sense of risk and reward to be misled--indeed, the entire industry is based on a predictable mis-firing of our risk/reward instinct.

Food strikes me as more like gambling. But it differs from gambling or smoking in that everyone HAS TO eat. You can steer clear of Vegas if you feel unable to control yourself at the craps table, but steering clear of food is a non-starter. And what a leg up for industrial food producers! The process of getting people hooked on an obscene proliferation of bad foods--our supermarkets are now about 80% junk--has been a gradual one, but it piggybacks on our inexorable need to eat something. A company need only find a way to make THEIR something THAT something and the profits that are the be-all and end-all of industry will come rolling in: caffeine (in the case of Coca-Cola, it was cocaine originally--the ultimate way to addict your patrons to your product); sugar--LOTS and lots of sugar; intense, lab-crafted artificial flavors.

And billions of dollars spent yearly on marketing, especially to kids.

So all this to get to this question: At what point do these companies bear responsibility when their relentless drive for profit causes them to take actions which they know and we know will cause many people to bypass their common sense and best interests toward an outcome that's disastrous for us (but not for them)? At what point do we hold McDonald's--maybe the largest food vendor in the country--accountable for marketing and selling products which they know to be deleterious to our health--more than this, they know to be actively contributing to a medical epidemic? To say they bear no responsibility is, IMO, bullshit.

(This seems an especially germane question as I look around China and see a new generation of fat, American-looking Chinese. These have never been seen in China! This is like discovering a pristine land and quickly destroying it to get to the precious metals underneath, except the pristine land is 1.3 billion human beings. Convenience stores in China are much smaller than ours and have very little of our standard junk food, but the phenomenon is clearly growing. I generally see only young folks in the 7-11s, and mostly kids in the McDonalds, but there is a huge effort underway by McDonalds and Subway and Burger King and KFC and many other American brands to turn China into an immense new source of revenue. As the population in China ages, hundreds of millions of consumers of American junk food are being created--and, predictably, millions of people who will suffer from insulin resistance and eventually type-2 diabetes.)

So what to do? Good socialist that I am, I propose that what appears to be working for the tobacco industry should be applied to the junk food industry: we should tax the shit out of processed foods which cannot be demonstrated (scientifically, independently) to have some dietetic reason to exist--not marketability, not profitability; manufacturers should have to demonstrate dietary merit for any processed food or we should be required to pay something extra for the privilege of exercising our freedom of choice to eat what we know will hurt us and burden our health care system. Put that money in the health care fund.

I love me some jalapeno Cheetos, but I have to look myself in the mirror and acknowledge that they're killing me; them and peanut M&Ms and Double-Stuff Oreos.

This is not going to happen, guaranteed, because we are easily kept from speaking with one voice and in any case we're no longer in control of our government. But that's another post.

Penn & Teller

From their series Bullshit! (which is kind of like Mythbusters for adults):

Today's Word...

...murmuration.

This term applies specifically to flocks of starlings. I had no idea that there were such species-specific words for these things.

Courtesy of Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True:



Spectacular!

Eternal Summer

This is an interesting chart from over at Talking Points Memo.

It shows the numbers of record high and low temperatures being set yearly over the past 60 years or so. Not surprisingly to most of us, we are now setting record high temps at twice the rate of record low temps (we should expect these numbers to be roughly equal).

But it's all a hoax, right? Or maybe it's just as Stephen Colbert says: Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

A Most Fascinating Couple Hours

This comes from Richard Dawkins's blog.

This is part one of a two-hour discussion between four of the great rational & scientific thinkers of our age: Dawkins himself, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and authors Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I've read a bunch of stuff from each of them, and though I don't know Dennett particularly well, the other three would be on the top of my list of recommended authors. Richard Dawkins's work popularizing biology is of inestimable worth, and Hitchens and Harris have both done fantastic work debunking religious hooey.

I think one would be hard-pressed to ever find four finer minds assembled in one place for an informal chat. This is like getting invited to sit at the dinner table with the crowd that would never have me. So get yourself something to drink and a comfy chair and settle in.

Scientists Speak

I keep finding remarkable and salient things over on Professor P Z Myers' blog, Pharyngula.

Here's a fabulous YouTube clip he featured showing a Charlie Rose interview with two of the world's most renowned living scientists: James Watson, 1962 Nobel laureate for the co-discovery of the structure of DNA, and Harvard Professor Emeritus and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning biologist Edward O. Wilson. Their topic of discussion here is Charles Darwin, whom Watson calls "the most important person who ever lived."

I was struck by Watson's observation early on concerning the public's views on evolution. He says that there's no real point in discussing the numbers of people who "believe" in evolution versus those who don't, as the two camps are not moving in the same worlds. Those who claim not to believe in evolution are virtually all uninformed about the subject. It's not that they have taken courses on biology and genetics and then determined after thorough study that the evidence isn't there to support the conclusions; no, they START with an unwillingness to allow their worldview to be realigned to the reality which biology has uncovered for us. They are rejecting evolution rather than disbelieving it; belief isn't really germane to the subject.

The Shadow of History

Just finished with In the Shadow of the Moon, David Sington's fabulous and stirring documentary about the Apollo moon missions. The film revisits, four decades after the fact, the accomplishments and experiences of the members of the most exclusive of clubs: those who have walked on another world.

Here is another of humanity's Big Projects, maybe the ultimate one; the complexity and scope of the undertaking simply takes your breath away. It's Penn Station times five, and this time in pursuit of a goal that almost defies belief. The obstacles to be overcome are so numerous and so unanticipated for those of us without intimate knowledge, that to see the details up close is almost to witness a different phenomenon altogether from the one we expect. Everyone knows the basic arc of the story, but the devil was entirely in the details; this film reacquaints us with some of these details, though it doesn't aspire to be exhaustive.

Think of it: a 360-foot-high, seven million pound rocket blasts off ferrying three men inside a tiny crew capsule at the very top, shedding stages as it accelerates to some 17,000 miles per hour. What makes it to orbit--two separate, tiny spacecraft modules packaged together--is but a small fraction (in mass) of what began the journey only a couple minutes before. They orbit the Earth a single time before lighting another rocket engine that widens the craft's trajectory against the Earth's gravity until it escapes and shoots off toward the moon. Timing is everything, and their escape from Earth orbit must be aimed with incredible precision to hit exactly the necessary spot--which is itself in motion--to establish a stable orbit around the moon. (It's not like they can just turn the wheel slightly to the left and make a correction; there's essentially one way to get it right and literally an infinite number of ways to get it wrong.) Once in lunar orbit, a decoupling and docking maneuver is performed, and two of the three crewmembers crawl from one spacecraft--the Command Module--into the other spacecraft--the Lunar Module--and detach themselves for a descent to the surface, while the third man remains in lunar orbit in the Command Module. Getting down to the lunar surface and landing is entirely new territory, since without an atmosphere (or some medium in which they can deploy drag devices) they must slow their descent and land entirely under controlled rocket thrust--for which, of course, a predetermined amount of fuel must be carried. After the landing and exploration of the moon's surface, the Lunar Module itself splits in two, leaving the landing portion of the craft on the moon's surface, and blasts the other tiny portion back into orbit for a rendezvous back with the Command module--using yet another carefully predetermined fuel cache. After another ballet-like docking procedure up in lunar orbit, the crew reunites; then the Lunar Module is discarded and the Command Module fires yet another rocket at the precise moment to escape the moon's gravity and head back toward earth. This particular rocket firing must facilitate reentry to the Earth's atmosphere, which requires even more precision than the moonshot; a very specific angle and speed are required to prevent the spacecraft from glancing off of the atmosphere and bouncing out irretrievably into space. The reentry itself occurs under the protection of the ship's heat shield, which calculatedly destroys itself as the ship decelerates to a speed where the parachutes can be deployed.

I mean, is that not a description of an insane aspiration?! I would have dismissed this plan as being completely and wildly impossible to pull off. There are just too many opportunities for disaster. All of these numerous steps are contingent upon the previous steps occurring without a hitch, and all rely on complicated, untested machinery, much of which must work correctly and predictably out of the box if dire consequences are to be avoided. What a triumph of science that all of this--from orbits and trajectories to fuel calculations to numerous mechanisms and control machinery to the structure of the whole undertaking--was worked out theoretically, since so much of it could not be tested practically. But the theorizing worked brilliantly, and they did it--no fewer than six times. The only fatalities in the whole undertaking were three men killed on the ground during a routine test. This is not inconsequential, of course, but it's space exploration! Under the circumstances, it's an unbelievable accomplishment, and done with remarkable safety.

However mesmerizing I find this mission, the movie is really about the astronauts who actually did the near-impossible; and almost all the narration is done by the participants themselves. It's easy to forget that this fraternity of men is exceedingly small, and fortunately for this film many of them are still alive. It's an amazing group of specimens that we see collected at the time, fit, young, can-do men who volunteered for a really dangerous job. The men we meet present-day in the film are surprisingly self-effacing; certainly they're all realists about what the job entailed and what their accomplishments amounted to in practical terms.

But the undertaking by its very nature overreaches simple technical and scientific challenges to probe something fundamental about humanity itself. It's one of those ironies, talked about by Gene Cernan in his book The Last Man on the Moon (and reflected upon by Michael Collins in the film), that the personality type chosen, and the training given for the job made the participants ill-suited to grasp the emotional charge of the situation. The hazardous nature of the job made the ability to fly experimental aircraft and to improvise in a crisis situation the chief talents sought, and so people were chosen from among the fighter pilot corps. Needless to say, these men would likely have a collectively different take on the experience than, say, a group of writers or philosophers. So, almost like a Bach fugue, the substance and import of the mission is buried beneath a tightly controlled layer of stoic professionalism.

Now, in their twilight years, these men have had a lifetime to chew on their experiences. They've softened a bit and even look back on the events with awe and wonder, and with an understandable pride of accomplishment. The deep emotional aspects of this undertaking would be hard for anyone to cope with, let alone people not given to poetic rhapsodizing, and it's very interesting to see these men talk confidently about their tasks and duties and then be kind of at a loss for words when they try to comment on what it all means.

The ten or so men featured in the film are all quite engaging. They all seem in very good shape for their age (just as they were necessarily in great shape at the time), and even in their elder years they remain mentally keen. Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot from the pioneering Apollo 11 is especially engaging, with an affable manner and a delivery like Don Knotts. Buzz Aldrin is more reserved and contemplative, and the reclusive Neil Armstrong is notable for his absence on the film. There's quite a bit of talk about him, but he does not appear. Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean (the fourth man to walk on the moon) is another engaging character, funny and charmingly open. We also hear from John Young, Eugene Cernan, Dave Scott, Charlie Duke, Harrison Schmidt, Edgar Mitchell, and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell.

With an appropriate sense of occasion, the whole endeavor was carefully chronicled by NASA. And the resulting still and moving images of the people and machinery are really stunning. So surreal that you'd believe them fake if we hadn't been there to witness it. Even in this age of flawless special effects and Photoshop, the shots of the Earth retain their power to amaze. In all human history only the 24 men who flew to the moon have had a whole-planet view of Earth, its colors (so bedrock to our sensibilities) a striking contrast against the backdrop of the absolute blackness of space. Those first whole-Earth pictures that were taken with a hand-held camera out the tiny viewports of the spacecraft are more monumental than any fiction.

I think most anyone would find this interesting, and some, like me, extremely so.

Grade: A

The Economic Ass-Kicking of Wunelle

Here's another in my famous line of posts wherein I, blinking like a fish, contemplate as though it were a new idea something I'm supposed to have assimilated by, say, high school (or certainly college). It's long and meandering and doesn't lead anywhere.

Feel free to skip it.

***

I've often enough talked about the very conservative nature of many of my coworkers. A body of (almost all) men who come in high proportions from military backgrounds, working in a profession that does not demand creativity or liberal education; this makes for a core demographic from the very marrow of the Republican Party. These are the guys who keep the Party's coffers full. This circumstance most often deprives me of much chance of gratifying conversation while I'm locked in a broom-closet-sized room for hours, or it restricts our interaction to aviation-related things. Honestly, I don't chafe at this too much; I've flown an airplane now for 15 years, and it is what it is. I'm the odd man out here, and I've long ago learned to be happy doing my own thing and making the best of it.

But sometimes it's hard to keep my mouth shut. I know my speaking up is unlikely to lead to anything positive, but I get tired of these guys automatically assuming that their (sometimes highly offensive) views are shared and welcome. And once in a blue moon this inauspicious beginning leads to an actual conversation. And it's unsettling to find that I'm not always able to mount much of a defense for my positions, at least on political matters.

I've noted many times that I'm not historically very political: I don't give money to the parties, I don't employ their yard signs or bumper stickers, I don't attend conventions or rallies. I'm mostly cynical--or at least highly skeptical--about strongly-held opinions from either party line. My strong-ish convictions present-day (which have led to a flurry of angry political posts) are more an instinctive recoil from the disastrous course of the Bush Administration, rather than a fervor for politics generally. I don't necessarily know how things OUGHT to be, but it's clear that our current state of affairs is shamefully wrong.

Not surprisingly, this is not the most effective bunker from which to launch an ideological offensive--or to defend against one.

My most recent pass through the Conservative's Gauntlet has (rightly) challenged me to support my thinking about economic and tax policy. This is a subject of which I'm pretty sketchily informed, but (again) I find my despair at the damage done by George W. Bush causes me to reactively espouse the polar opposite of anything I even think he advocates. So amid Republican talk of excessive taxation and the burdensome welfare state, I rush headlong to the other camp: the view that the rich in this country are living high on the hog at the expense of the economic lower and middle classes, and that W's tax cuts--promised for all but generally only delivered to the very rich--have disastrously deprived the country of revenue while lining the pockets of those whose pockets least needed lining. But I simply don't know enough to have come to all these conclusions on my own. And my defense of this view when challenged is correspondingly pathetic.

At least part of it: I think the fact that we have embarked on a multi-trillion-dollar war without raising any revenue, and that our national debt and budget deficits are in a perilous state, is indisputable. But what of the idea that the rich are being taxed to death?

Well, what does the data say? I did a little digging around the web and found several sites which corroborate some facts about American tax distribution which I might otherwise have been inclined to dispute. (This page at Wikipedia is a good summary.)

This is for income tax:

The top 0.1% pay 17% of the total income tax (from 9% of the earned income).
The top 1.0% pay 37% of the total income tax (from 19% of the earned income).
The top 5.0% pay 57% of the total income tax (from 33% of the earned income).
The top 10% pay 68% of the total tax.
The top 25% pay 85% of the total tax.
---and this surprising figure---
The bottom 50% pay 3.3% of the total income tax (from 13.4% of the income).

(These tax burden figures obviously do not demonstrate an even distribution across the population; nor do they correspond directly to the percentage of earned income for each group. However, they do mirror pretty closely the actual distribution of wealth in the country. Food for thought.)

This is quite a bit more progressive than I realized. And to look at only this one (admittedly large) tax, the top tiers are getting hit pretty good. (I suspect Jeffy will have some good perspective on these numbers.) It's the final figures in the above list--that 50% of the population pays almost no income tax, and that 75% of the population pays only about 15% of the total income taxes--that get raised again and again in taxation discussions with my conservative coworkers.

But there are other taxes, of course (though the income tax is by far the biggest single hit on my paycheck). According to this chart, income taxes were responsible for nearly half--45%--of total federal revenues in 2007. The next highest source, at 34%, was the payroll tax. And this tax is actually regressive: it's a flat tax rate for incomes up to about $100,000 and additional income above this level is exempt from the tax. The meaningful beneficiaries of the regressivity are a tiny proportion of the population, and they're the ones getting hit hardest by the income tax brackets; so this regressivity levels the field a bit. Not surprisingly from the figures above, 3/4 of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes (since they're essentially not paying income tax).

(It's off track a bit, but sales taxes, which are state taxes, are arguably also regressive, since a poorer person is likely to spend virtually all their income to survive--and pay taxes on whatever they buy with that income--whereas a richer person will spend only a portion of their income to get by.)

Whatever the numbers, I find the whole subject raises a bunch of very basic questions which I've never really thought much about. Not just economic questions, but moral ones: If I object to the current structure, what do I think it should be? What is tax justice? Is the redistribution of wealth something that's in the legitimate domain of government? How much of an individual's income should go for the common good? It seems natural enough that people with higher incomes would pay more into government coffers than poorer folks, but I'm at sea about the particulars. How do we decide what proportion over and above that required to subsist is fair game for government seizure? Is it a fundamentally sound policy that the wealthy minority of a country provide a safety net for the poorer majority? What is due from those who have used the American system of personal freedoms and free enterprise to become successful? And, perhaps beneath all of this, what exactly is it the domain of government to do for its citizens?

Hell, I have only vague ideas of how I would answer many of these questions. Most discussion of these things seems to presuppose that we're settled in our views of these issues, but I'm certainly not; nor can I imagine I'm so much different from many people. For many of us, I suspect what we deem just is a function of where we are on the economic spectrum. (How many of us try to suss out what is right from what we want on these matters?) If you're poor, it only seems right that the world's richest country should lend a helping hand and provide some basic services--health care, basic nutrition, education, equal opportunity--to its needy citizens, regardless of where the money comes from; and if you're rich, it only seems right that the government not penalize you for your success, not get more of your success than you get yourself. Income tax rates as recently as the '70s ran as high as 70%! It's hard to see the justice of that. (Of course, a country's policy towards its needy--schools, housing, transportation, medical care--will have an impact on the quality of life of the rich folks who fund that policy, so it's all connected.)

It's not that this all causes me to now espouse the Angry White Republican's argument that he's being taxed to death; I can't bring myself to entertain the idea that the rich are suffering much under our current system relative to the rest of the country. But it does make me think about what I believe and why.

And my primary impression as I chew on all this is a growing conviction that government has become grossly bloated and is now beyond the control of its citizens (without even talking about the Bush Administration). While I feel comfortably laissez-faire about social issues--I think the mandating of behavior and morality is outside the legitimate purview of government--economic matters are harder, as they must involve the federal government. I have long marveled sourly at how our government gets a cut every time money changes hands: they tax my company on its earnings (and they tax the individual transactions from which those earnings accrue), they tax the wages paid to the employees, and then tax the usage of the remaining wages by the employee--and the income of the places which receive the employee's money! On and on. It results in a stupefying torrent of trillions of dollars flowing to Washington, and yet our federal budgets are in dire straits (and W has made them considerably worse). At some point the monster becomes all-consuming; the population takes on the role of iron lung for the government, which (it seems to me) inverts the natural order of things: the government should be supporting us, not vice-versa. WE are the important part of the equation, not THEM.

Lastly, it dawns on me that most of my coworkers are conservatives almost entirely on the basis of these economic and taxation issues (as befits people whose incomes put them in the high tax brackets). My own long-standing objection to the Republican Party is almost entirely based on their ideological adjacency to the church, and with the airless society they would mandate for us all. But the Republicans with whom I work don't seem to pay much attention to the church when they talk politics (though there are plenty of other things like jingoism and sexism and xenophobia and racism to keep me at arm's length). They're mostly default Christians--who would happily constrict others' freedoms, you know, "for their own good"--but their own convictions seem to stem from economics.

I might be willing to take a tour of the libertarian wing of their gilded palace--I kinda think of libertarianism as Republicans without Jeheezus; it's something that has some resonance for me. But the quest for votes has caused the libertarian hallway to lead right to the chapel door. And this societal vision is far more odious to me than paying too much in taxes.

So Much for the Bible (Chastity) Belt

The pot-stirring USA Today had an article yesterday about how Texas is leading the nation in the number of teens who are having multiple children. Texas overall has come to seem like a pretty dysfunctional place (islands of beauty and creativity and enlightenment as revealed by Flow Blue Bud notwithstanding), and it tops the list for many of society's blemishes.

But it's not just Texas, of course. Sam Harris, among others, has hit on this same subject: the places most strongly under the control of the religious right are those furthest from the markers of civilization (and that often applies to countries as well). The numbers for illiteracy, murder, assault, robbery, teen pregnancy, and even abortion seem directly linked to the redness of the state.

Sam Harris talks in his book Letter to a Christian Nation about the church's teaching in sexual matters (and, more specifically, about the policies of an administration bent on mandating the church's views in our schools), and the effect this thinking has on the country as a whole:

American teenagers engage in about as much sex as teenagers in the rest of the developed world, but American girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant, have a baby, or to get an abortion. Young Americans are also far more likely to be infected by HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rate of gonorrhea among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their peers in the Netherlands and France. The fact that 30% of our sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than $200 million a year) surely has something to do with this.

The USA Today article offers the following statistics from 2004:

• 22-24% of teen births were not the mother's first in the following states: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia.
• The next tier was for the 20-21% range: Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas.
• The rate was 17-19% for Western states (minus Wyoming), the Midwest, and the Rust Belt.
• The lowest rate, 12-16%, was reserved for North Dakota, Wyoming, and that hopeless bastion of liberalism and moral decay, New England.

The whole issue seems reflective of our schizophrenic interface with sexuality. On the one hand commercial interests are maniacally eager to exploit sexual themes and imagery for monetary gain, while on the other hand society at large remains very squeamish about simply educating kids about the thing that occupies--by design!--a huge part of the teen-age brain. It just all seems an indictment of our educational system, and the state-by-state color map is almost a temperature indicator for how well the nation's schools are working.

This Red State / Blue State stuff was covered brilliantly by James Wolcott a year ago in Vanity Fair. I'll leave off with some statistics culled from the article:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 10 states with the highest number of total inmates per 100,000 residents in 2003, 9 were red. Of the 10 states with the most female inmates per 100,000 residents that same year, all were red. (Conversely, of the 10 states with the lowest incarceration rates of female prisoners, 9 were blue.)...

Red states have a near monopoly on capital punishment. Since 1976, the highest number of executions have been carried out in red states, with Texas—no surprise—ranking No. 1 on the hit parade...

Red States dominate the rankings of violent crimes despite their emphasis on judgment and incarceration.

Red states...account for all of the top 15 states in rates of death by firearms (2003).

Of the 15 states with the highest adjusted rates of suicide (2003), 14 are red.

The 10 states in the union with the highest divorce rates in 2004 (among the 45 states for which figures are available) were all red.

Illegitimacy rates? According to the National Center for Health Statistics, of states with the highest percentages of births in 2003 to unwed mothers, 9 of the top 10 were red.

According to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, supported by the C.D.C., in 2004 14 of the 15 states with the highest percentage of obesity were red. Moreover, there is a correlation between corpulence and economic deprivation. Based on a three-year average of obesity rates, "the five states with the highest obesity rates—Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky—exhibit much higher rates of poverty than the national norm," the Associated Press reported in August. All five states are red states.

It's an open question as to which is the chicken and which the egg: are the states less educated / more religious because they're poorer, or are they poor because they lack good education? One thing seems certain: we will not be lead toward the light by a particular former Governor of Texas.

Red Scare

I continue in what has become by now a time-honored tradition here at Le Jour-nelle of outing my adult self as the unfortunate offspring of Ineffectual Public School System and Unmotivated Student.



So I'm reading Jung Chang and John Halliday's biography of Mao Tse-tung. OK, I remembered that he played some starring role in making the Earth's most populous nation a communist state, and I had a vague recollection that he was a generally unsavory character (though I would likely feel this about any head of state of long standing). But I really had no idea how great his influence has been on the 20th Century, or just how unsavory he was.

Or how sociopathic. I was honestly shocked to learn that he is responsible for 70,000,000 deaths.

Seventy million human lives.

Jesus. How did I get thru college without that number burned into my consciousness? How do I remember six million jews and not remember a figure nearly twelve times that? A friend posits that for some inexplicable reason Americans are only able to keep one holocaust in the mind at a time, and we seem to have lit upon Hitler as the 20th Century Satan to whom we can most relate. But in this select trio of megalomaniacal sadists--Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung--(and I mean no disrespect to the victims of any of these monsters) Hitler ends up being the small-timer of the three. I suppose that, of these three nations, Europe is the world culture most like our own, and so it's easier to see ourselves in the events that swept over Europe in the '30s and '40s. Soviet Russia was further removed from first-world Western culture, and China was different animal altogether. Human suffering should be some kind of universal for us, but our ability to grasp the big picture of a thing reduces somewhat in unfamiliar circumstances; our vision narrows. Maybe this has nothing to do with it. Maybe the rest of the world understands Mao perfectly well while I apparently majored in navel lint farming.

I'm only a quarter into a quite long and detailed book, but several things stand out so far. First, there is that same quality in Mao that I've noted before with Lincoln and J.F.K, that quality of being extraordinarily inner-directed and able to focus on a goal often in the teeth of opposition. Maybe by practical definition nobody gets to be a world leader without this quality, but it is something foreign, in degree or kind, to most of us--certainly to me. That Mao wrested control first of the budding Communist party, and then of the entire country, at so young an age is plainly remarkable, a stark demonstration of some functional, if diabolical, genius.

The second thing that strikes me--as it clearly has struck most normal people who study the man--is that he pursued these inner-directed goals with a chilling and complete absence of conscience. He was willing to do or say whatever would further the goals that only he had clearly in mind, and the number of people killed and the amount of suffering his goals would require gave him not one nanosecond's pause. What might have been an antisocial tendency blossomed early on into full pathology, enough so that the question that often recurs to me in these situations of what liberties genius may rightly claim against the unthinking, uncomprehending masses is pre-emptively dashed.

This second point--here's where this whole blather becomes a civics lesson--puts me in mind of a quote from Sam Harris to the effect that the cornerstone of science is not really manipulation and measurement of the natural world, it's intellectual honesty. Either one is engaged in the pursuit of honest truth or one isn't. At its most elementary, science--and, I think, life--must be about an honest assessment of what is, and not of what we wish. And this seems the most functional bit of philosophy we might possibly carry around in our pocket, a principle the sanctity of which we should safeguard above everything else. I'm usually railing against religion when it comes to the willful blurring of the line between fact and fiction, but politics is right there. It's an issue wherever power is involved. In reading this biography, I am immersed in Mao's personal life, and also in the doctrines of communism. Our societal take on Communism is hugely colored by the ruthless dishonesty that has been systematically utilized in its application. Mao is so odious and foul a person that we never get to a place where we can evaluate the economic system which characterizes his reign.

I feel like I'm bringing everyone to kindergarden with me, wallowing around here gape-jawed at the foundation stones of evil. Better, I think, to look at it as a trip back to First Principles. My most elementary moral sense is that we cannot find our way to a place of benefit and goodness by way of a calculated and systematic application of lies and cheating and spin in the way that characterizes Mao's governing style, his regime, indeed his core person. (Would his followers have agreed with any part of my assessment? Would they claim that my judgment of his character was skewed? Or would they have said the ends justified the means?) What kind of person hungrily and ruthlessly pursues sole dictatorial power over half a billion people? OK, the answer is ready enough: a sociopath. But though I honestly feel this, it takes us to an unsettling place. Mao's (and Stalin's and Hitler's and Mussolini's) skillful use of lies and half-truths, and his cynical manipulation of everyone else's good intentions--including those who purport to be his allies; these odious things seem to have made their way to greater or lesser degrees into our own standard political playbook. In practice, if not in theory, we accept as inevitable that politicians must lie to make their way in the world, and we accept that truths are kept from us and that the information we do get is spun and filtered. So is it just a difference of degree?

Mao's story raises all sorts of other ethical and moral questions concerning the structure that he put in place beneath him, and the people who governed in his name and carried out his will. I have to wonder how much, really, Mao's underlings believed the things for which they so gleefully killed people in these thousands and thousands (as I wonder how many people really believe in gods--not what they say, but what they really believe in their most private selves. But that's another post). I suppose people went along with Mao because it was in their best interest to follow the lead of the guy with the gun. But there were always more guns that could be brought to bear against him than what he could wield against everyone else. So does such monstrosity occur because we want to keep our own skin intact? Or can we be so self-centered that there is no limit to what we'll do to others in pursuit of a better life for ourselves? I mean, they can't ALL have been sociopaths, can they? It's the same question asked of German society in the wake of Hitler (to again bring the subject matter to a more comprehensible place).

This is all part of the Cold War and McCarthyism, a subject I recently revisited in George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck." From classes in high school and in college it was clear that the Red Scare was not simply an economic phenomenon. "Communism" was an engine to which was attached a weighty train of associations, and these associations swirled around the typical American mind until the contents were thoroughly mixed.

I have no soft spot for Karl Marx--I always felt that his thinking had its head in the sand about some of the base realities of human nature But I could never find my own way from what he proposed to what we opposed, at least not under a single heading. I suppose one might argue that what we opposed was Stalinism, or Leninism, and that when we said communism we really meant one of those other terms. This is all shaky ground for my swiss-cheese education. Still, Marx must wish for a better proponent of his ideas than the unconscionable monsters of Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

(As an aside, it seems that our formal opposition to communism is ongoing and still fierce. The paper a couple days ago had a little tidbit about the FBI off-handedly releasing more of its John Lennon files--as though everybody knew and accepted that there would be FBI files on all rock and roll phenomena. It seems someone approved the expenditure of government resources to track his association with "leftist" groups. And the slide from "leftist" associations to subversive activities, well, that just goes without saying. My first reaction is to question why, in a free society, it's government's business to keep tabs on anyone's politics? I mean, isn't that what freedom is? Isn't that what free speech is all about? And if one's political convictions are contrary to the group in power--or even to the very governing system itself--is it not a bedrock feature of our system that one is free to express and act on this? Wasn't our very country founded by people committed to this very principle of self-determination? But here's yet another post.)
___________________

1/1 Addendum

I talked above about initial impressions of this influential man about whom I knew next to nothing. I know a bit more now. And I realize that these above thoughts err in looking for some ideological underpinning to the phenomenon of Mao. The more I read, the more I think this misses the point entirely. His meaning lies not in his political ideology, and no evaluation of any larger school of politics to which he claims to belong gets one close to what he means. It isn't about communism. It's about catastrophic psychopathy.

70 million is not really a fathomable concept for us. But the book is full of individual accounts of the perversely inventive use of torture and the creative ways of killing people, episodes resulting in deaths in the hundreds or thousands. These numbers begin to be comprehensible, and give the slimmest handle to the extremity of Mao's brutality (though I might argue that even a thousand deaths by way of torture is still unfathomable unless we can think through each human act of suffering). It's just hard to get one's head around so vast an enterprise of cruelty and wanton infliction of suffering--indeed, maximum pain and suffering were the goals to which these people put their creative minds. This is monstrosity of the highest order. Mao simply killed with gleeful and satanic abandon anyone who stood in his way to any degree whatsoever. And many who didn't. He killed vast numbers of people just so that others might see it and live in fear. The brutality and cruelty is so extreme that one begins to understand where the concept of hell comes from. It's really hard not to wish infinite suffering on such a person, to desire to instruct them with the very things they have striven to inflict on others, things from which they were isolated with cool calculation. (Apparently Mao had secret escape passages installed in every residence from an early age, so that he could evade capture and, no doubt, the very treatment from his captors that he made his name inflicting on others.)

There's a great line spoken by Colin Firth in Frank Pierson's Conspiracy, a 2001 TV movie about a Nazi conference held in Wannsee where the details of the so-called Final Solution were worked out. Firth plays a lawyer who is concerned about the legality of what is being proposed:

"Any legal code worthy of the name restricts the enforcers of the law as well as its subjects; there are some things you cannot do."

It's ironic that it's a Nazi speaking these words. And, as we all know, his views were not honored.

Inconvenient, Hell

We watched An Inconvenient Truth last night.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the information in the movie. Accepted as being exactly correct, I cannot see how the picture it paints is not absolutely dire. And his most basic premises--human population has exploded exponentially in the last hundred years or so; the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is directly linked to global temperature; the amount of carbon dioxide currently in our atmosphere, and the amounts being added by human sources, are unprecedented in any recorded history and are presently trending sharply upward; corroborating evidence that these things are contributing to a warming of the planet is amply at hand--these seem things which can't be credibly refuted. The consequences of global warming--as opposed to the argument that the planet is, in fact, getting warmer--seem only slightly less certain, but even then he puts together a pretty convincing summary of the effects of acidifying the oceans, of rising ocean levels, and of the effects on vegetation and other lower-tier life forms of these increasing temperatures.

The ten hottest years in recorded history have occurred within the past 14 years. And the recession of the glaciers (at least the dozen he showed before-and-after pictures of) and of the ice caps seem pretty tough facts to counter. He quickly dispatches with the argument that global temperatures are cyclical and that we're currently in a normal upward cycle by showing us exactly what the cycles have amounted to over the last 650,000 years and how completely out of the ballpark we are in our current conditions and our near-term projections. In my own lifetime, I have seen changes in, for example, the amount of snowfall we receive in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Growing up, we rode snowmobiles extensively, and now for the last decade, people have had to trailer their sleds further North to find snow. I used to need a four wheel drive truck to get around in winter; I would not have engaged the 4WD now for five or six consecutive winters, at least here in Appleton.

Whether all of this is responsible for, say, Katrina seems debatable; but when hurricane and typhoon and cyclone activity is looked at worldwide, it's hard not to see Katrina as something other than just another hurricane, as an outcome of measurable things--like increasing oceanic temperatures. In addition to record-setting high temperatures all around the world in the past handful of years, the number and severity of these tropical storms has risen everywhere, and they have begun threatening places previously thought immune to them. It just seems like quite a feat of denial is needed not to see all these elements converging toward a single conclusion.

Blowhards like Rush Limbaugh have long contended that global warming is some kind of hysterical liberal plot, and one can even find people who aren't bloated, self-hyping entertainers obsessed with the sound of their own voices who question the prevailing science. But their views are much harder to find (even if our current warped sense of journalistic "balance" implies that the topic has two equally competing sides, which seems far from the case), and personally I find their arguments less convincing than the case Al Gore is making--not least because his critics mostly concentrate on questioning his conclusions without putting forth a more convincing case for a different one.

The movie ends with a call to action, and an assurance that this problem can be tackled like many other difficult things have been tackled throughout human history, by awareness and by all of us pulling in the same direction. This may be, and in any case I think we must do what we can, but his presentation makes it seem as though we may already be far past the tipping point. We can have little short term effect on world population (and we may be able to effect very little long-term without the influence of certain opposed "moral" institutions), and the amount of fossil fuel being burned--a major contributor to this problem--cannot be curtailed simply. To bring about the kinds of changes he recommends--increasing the fuel efficiency of our cars and homes, for example--will take some time, and, I'm afraid, some more dire consequences felt by people, to bring about; and then the "healing" of the planet will take decades or longer. If, say, coral reefs and plankton are both negatively affected by the higher oceanic temperatures and by higher acidity levels in the water, these things begin to affect the whole food chain from the bottom up; and they'll take probably longer to repair than they took to break.

As I say, we have no choice but to do what we can do, but one wonders if a wholesale retooling of human civilization is not required (and, assuming it is even possible, if it would succeed in saving us from what is in store). The numbers of people who stand to suffer and die from the worst-case extrapolation from his data make Katrina seem like a walk in the rain. Roger Ebert said that after seeing the movie he found himself turning off all the lights in his house. I find myself doing the same thing, but without the optimism that I'm doing anything real to ward off armageddon. It's a useless symbolic act, something nowhere near as inconvenient at what may be in store for all of us.

Grades:

As a compelling entertainment: B+
As a message transmission: A-
As a feel-good flick: F-

Maybe Whittington Made a Pass at Cheney

Public Radio yesterday covered the story of the conservative fight in New Jersey to pass a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I've taken my swipe at this subject before, but like a cat that won't stay run over the topic keeps getting up again, and my irritation and contempt follow accordingly.

I fail to understand how opposition to homosexuality comes to lodge itself in a person's mind, especially as an activist cause. An opposition to, say, socialism is a stance I can at least grasp: one might argue that it removes incentives for productivity and creativity, promotes sloth, etc. Opposition to abortion I can see in concept, if not the insistence that no one else see the issue differently.

But being gay? I just don't get the motivation for such foaming-at-the-mouth opposition. What are they afraid of exactly? That our acceptance will cause more people to become gay? That's an absurd idea to anyone with even minimal science education about sexual behavior; but even if we grant it, what then? Will it deplete our population? Is it a fear that decriminalized propositions might cause straight folks to falter and... sample the dark side? Is it just that one or another bible prohibits it (presumably from a five-thousand-years-ago perspective where procreation was needed to keep the church's coffers full in perpetuity) and to allow it now is to invoke this or that god's wrath? Or are the church elders agitating so that their whole house of cards does not come down in the mighty wind?

Well, what rationale is given? Here, from NPR's story, is Victoria Cobb, executive director of the Family Foundation of Virginia: "This is about so much more than two individuals who might love each other but don't happen to be a man and a woman. This is about redefining an institution that has been a bedrock of society for all of history." As though there were no families until her church invented church marriage! As though civilization is teetering on the edge of dissolution without her efforts. What does "redefining an institution" even mean? Sorry, but that's just appallingly ignorant.

Cobb claims her real goal is (you knew it was coming)... protecting children. "We know from social research that traditional family structure is the best place that children can possibly be raised." Social research! I'd love to hear her definition of research. I'm suspicious she hasn't even the dimmest grasp of the scientific method or, for that matter, of what is or isn't the "bedrock of society for all of history." What other child-rearing structures did she look into? How thoroughly has she combed the data about children raised with two loving same-sex parents? Did she look at single-parent households and weed out other factors like economics? Did she look at children raised in poor heterosexual households where there is little education? Her citation of "research" smacks of the kind of pseudo-science these groups always apply, in pursuit of promoting, in the nauseating and meaningless cotton-candy phrase, "family values."

But back to the larger question. How does allowing gays to marry alter in any way our own heterosexual marriages? What is the nature of the degradation feared? What will be different for us? How is a kiss from my wife changed because two married men are kissing next to me? Why devote untold hours to ban others from being able to do what you yourself do not want to do? Where is the honor in preventing others from making their decisions?

I will venture this opinion again: there is nothing in the world less in need of protection than male / female pair bonding. To believe there is a threat here requires throwing out billions of years of animal procreation (but hey, the earth after all is only 6,000 years old). Capital-M Marriage is a religious institution. And if one's particular Jesus tells one thru the Secret Mind Meld that the church ought not sanction same sex marriage, well and good: make sure the church doesn't perform the ceremony. But what began as church marriage has evolved into a legal institution that has nothing to do with religion--why else are we fighting it as a legal battle?--and as such we must ensure that no governmental entity is pushing any religious agenda (not that gay marriage opponents sympathize with this tenet of the Constitution). Homosexuality is a fact of life, in our species and all other sexual species; it was not invented in recent times, and it will not go away with a big enough hammer.

We seem much more likely to do damage by allowing people with no functional education to vote.

I know a lot of gay people. I know a lot of Christians who are not trying to hurt gay people. I even know a few gay Christians (which strikes me as laying with the lions). Anyway, I have seen absolutely no grounding for thinking that gay people are any less functional or less moral or less decent or less steadfast in relationships or less sexually normal than any of the heterosexuals I know. Sexual orientation just doesn't seem to be a marker for any meaningful thing if we're not already armed with a bunch of preconceptions. How many gay people does Victoria Cobb know? How many are her close friends? Would she refuse to befriend someone who was gay? Because they were gay? Why would we tolerate this or listen to such a person?

Some Photos

More of The World At War. The producers have on several occasions played a jaunty song of the times, usually a woman singing, under a pastiche of still photos and video, often of quite terrible or devastating scenes. The effect is nostalgic and heartbreaking.



After the failure of the Germans at Stalingrad--twice--there was a sick sense of fatalism that passed through the population about how their government had overreached and a devastating defeat was now inevitable, a defeat where just a few short months before a glorious victory had been ensured. The footage shows a beaten population in the still-functioning cinemas in 1943 and 1944, trying to get some little bit of escapism before the axe finally fell. The camera pans over dirty, exhausted faces struggling to lose themselves in the fantasy on the screen--dirty children and elderly people in threadbare clothes and maimed soldiers trying to mend. Such a comedown from the euphoria that swept the country after the fall of France in 1940, from the sense of exultation that the "wrongs" (as they were seen) of Versailles were revenged, from the days when Hitler had proven to a downtrodden people that they really were something above other nations.



Such a story. And the more fascinating and moving because (the convictions of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad notwithstanding) it actually happened. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

P.S. In searching for a good picture of Stalingrad for this little post I came across this site, which provided these photos and has many others, if you're interested in this sort of thing.

I'll Wake Y'all Up At The End.

A few observations / ruminations as a follow-on to my last post (since there was hardly enough bandwith on the whole Web to accommodate the traffic on that one...) after watching a bit more of the WW2 documentary.

When I was in college, I had a professor who had a friend and colleague who had fought in Europe during this war. Over the years these two professors had had many discussions, he told me, about the difficulties of a soldier's return to civilian life, about how someone who has experienced the front lines of war follows the time spent on this heightened plane. His friend had told him that after leading such an essential existence--an existence where decisions were life and death matters and where one's day was filled with survival and sustenance and basic needs--it seemed foolish and artificial to have to return to a world of books and words and comfort and nuance. His friend rather regretted the loss of this period of his life, and said that forever afterward nothing ever quite measured up.

This was not a sentiment I had in the least expected. How could being a soldier who survives war be a mixed blessing? One can argue that it would be better never to have had to put one's self directly in harm's way, and surely the experience of seeing death and destruction close at hand, and the attendant stress and fear for one's own life and limb, can not be thought pleasant in any way. And yet I can see that there is something compelling in having been involved in a great thrust of history, of playing a part in things that matter if anything matters. One's life would change and could not be changed back again. My brother, who spent a year in Iraq and who is about to return for another tour, has spoken a bit in this same vein. He told me he's actually looking forward to his return, in a perverse sort of way. It's not a desire to expose one's self to danger; but in spite of the peril the world is reduced to something much clearer and more manageable: keep yourself and your soldiers safe, look after basic needs, get the job at hand done. The devil may indeed be in the details, but those can be someone else's concern, at least some of them can.

The story of war is the story of people at war. I think this documentary succeeds so well because the time is devoted alternately to an explanation of large-scale events and then to the words of individuals who played their part. And while the front line is an obvious place to look for a story, it wasn't just the soldiers, of course. A country's whole population was mobilized toward the war effort, and there were many jobs in many industries which were directly affected. Virtually everyone felt the effects to some degree, from food rationing and blackouts to bombed cities where life was expected to go on.

Today's episode was about u-boats in the Atlantic. Early in the war, before America was overtly involved, the Germans devised the strategy of traveling the u-boats in "wolf packs" and attacking convoys of shipping at night in a coordinated and devastating fashion. (The term "wolf pack" is wonderfully apt and brutally terrifying.) The terror involved, and the barbarity of this kind of warfare (as though there are kinder & gentler ways to sink a manned ship) are numbing to contemplate. I have a fear of death in this particular way that borders upon phobia. I used to have a recurring vision of going below on a boat and seeing water rising where water is not supposed to be. Even the thought of seeing things under water that aren't supposed to be there gives me a little panicky feeling (I could not, for example, go scuba diving and look at a car under water with a mask. Or even look at that same car from above in a boat). So imagine this setting, with merchant ships trying to ply the waters between America and England in 1940-41. Even the largest ship is a tiny, tiny thing in the middle of the night in the center of a great ocean. And on just the other side of that thin hull is a bottomless abyss. Is a torpedo about to strike now? Or now? Like Chinese water torture, it would breed insanity.

This use of these u-boats--as opposed to the more common practice of the time of patrolling shorelines and harbors--to hamper England's attempts to keep herself supplied with war materiel and life's necessities is ingenious and innovative. Looked at as a war tactic this calculated strategy of brutality may have been effective, and maybe that's all that counts in war, but it casts the Germans in an especially evil and aggressive light (a light which they were to share with others, to be sure).

And so it is with some elation that we see the events begin to turn in '42 and onward. American involvement in the war became overt after Pearl Harbor, and the technology and resources we brought to bear for our friends in England seem to me to represent OUR finest hour in modern times. Suddenly there was a doubling and redoubling of military escort ships for merchant convoys, and a flood of new American aircraft were used to hunt down the u-boats. Thus the hunters became the hunted, and one can feel in the pit of one's stomach the knotted sickness that the u-boat crews must have felt at suddenly finding themselves in grave peril when they had previously been smugly wreaking the havoc. This reversal of Germany's fortunes happened on all fronts of the war, of course, and it's one of the things that makes the story so compelling. Hitler's victories in the early days of the war were almost unprecedented in history: he did more with less, and captured more people and territory in a shorter span of time than was thought possible. Thus, the turn-around was unexpected, a reversal of fortune's strong directional arrow.

This war was not without its controversies, but the justice of our aims was never questioned. We acted in defense, first of our friends, and then of ourselves, and there is the innocence of a big, good-natured oaf about our actions. By contrast, the world seems much more complicated now, and our machinations leave us with a residue on our hands.

I guess that's partly where a fascination and celebration of such a brutal time as WW2 comes from.

Battle of the Sexes?

A present for myself: the DVD collection "The World At War," a mid-70s documentary of the events of the Second World War. On 11 separate discs, it includes the 26 hours of the original documentary, plus as many hours of extras, and it constitutes the definitive video documentary of this event in history.

My wife has basically declared that she would sooner (to quote a Robert DeNiro flick) have her appendix removed with a grapefruit spoon than to have to watch any part of this series. Chock full of original film footage (all of which is, naturally, in black and white), adorned with painfully minor-key theme music, and dealing with human-wrought death and destruction on a most massive scale, there is virtually nothing here for her tastes.

I wonder at this.

History. The very word served as a kind of sleep aid for me during high school. It now baffles me that history is so often presented in this sleep-inducing way, when it seems like it OUGHT to be fascinating; it's such a window into humanity. A novel is all very entertaining, and the brilliant ones do indeed shine a light on things normally hidden; but history is at its fundament simply what is, what has been. The interpretation of it is another matter, but to trace the footsteps of our species is to inspect the most basic building blocks of the collective human psyche. But it seems so gender-biased that the boy likes war history and the girl does not! Still, there it is.

A year out of high school I decided on a lark to read William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" from my parents' bookshelves (I still wonder at how it got there, since neither of my parents seem probable readers of this type of book). This was the first thousand-plus page book I had even considered reading, and it didn't escape me that if I were assigned this very book for a class I would have followed my usual practice of attempting to pass said class without doing any of the required readings or homeworks. But no one was coercing me, and it seemed like a grand adventure.

And boy, was it. Is it. I'm not a war buff per se, and many of the details about military strategy and troop movements and so on threaten to anesthetize me anew. But looked at in a wide shot, war is the most fascinating of subjects. The political maneuvering and diplomatic triumphs and breakdowns leading up to hostilities; the upheaval of national mobilization; the utter drama of invasion and conquest; heroism and frailty. It's every good and bad thing in us amplified to a grotesque degree: Humanity for Dummies. And the video version is like Humanity for Dummies for Dummies. Perfect!

I'm about a fifth of the way thru it so far. The stock footage is mesmerizing. I have a near-obsession with black & white photography, and also with the period of the '20s & '30s generally, and so much of this documentary plays to those interests. It was the instability following the First World War that enabled the Nazis to come to power, and the tumultuous conditions--riots in the streets and devastating poverty and rapid governmental turnovers--make for compelling pictures. While I have not one shred of agreement with any part of the guiding Nazi philosophy (the idea that any meaningful measure of a person's capability or the value of their contribution to humanity can be gleaned from their race seems disproven as soundly as we can know anything) I find the marches and rallies magnetically fascinating, maybe a bit like being unable to tear one's eyes away from crime video or graphic footage of plastic surgery. The Nazis were most adroit in their use of symbols and ritual, and as a 16-year-old I would have been sucked in as surely as virtually every German lad was. I lay awake many hours pondering this unsettling realization.

I'm glad that someone bothered to toil over an epic video production that 51% of the population of my house, anyway, has no interest in watching! The lessons, however painful, are vital and warrant an occasional re-learning, especially if that re-education can prevent a recurrence of the horror. Now if only there were as good a documentary about Vietnam that we could have sent to certain influential people a couple years back...