Remora

WP does the "on the one hand, on the other hand" kinda story (the tergiversations of moderation, as the late Barry Goldwater might have said) about the proposed drilling of the Arctic Refuge. The environmentalists and the Oil Reich, the message is, are both pulling fast ones. Under the headline, Some Facts Clear In the War of Spin Over Arctic Refuge,

Michael Grunwald plays the honest referee, whistle a-blowin'. But the article turns out to be spin for that most dangerous of media vices -- Middle-ism. The media loves to think the truth is in the middle. Sometimes, as with donuts, this is a big mistake -- since the middle is approximately nothing. A big zip. And the more you stand for the big zip, the further from reality you are.

Here's the truth. It is simple. The Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, has spent her whole life working to moderate, or decimate, environmental laws and regulations. She has never shown any park management skills. She has never demonstrated even an aesthetic appreciation for Nature. The spirit of the Interior department is foreign to her. There was no strong opposition to her because the Clinton era had a fatal, relaxing effect upon Democratic spine. Since she was appointed, she has dedicated her time to shilling for the Oil Reich. This is what you get when you have a man who was was appointed to his post - GWB, the Supreme Court President -- appointing career environmental hoodlums to environmentally sensitive posts. But this isn't the way the WP frames the issue:

"Ultimately, most Americans don't know the details of this intricate debate; they've just seen a few pretty pictures of the refuge. And even those pictures, as Klee suggested last spring, can be misleading. They often show ANWR's majestic Brooks Range, which will be preserved as wilderness regardless of the Senate's decision. They often show the refuge in springtime, when the landscape is lush but drilling would be forbidden.

So last Wednesday, Norton mailed the nation's network and cable news anchors a videotape � supplied by Arctic Power, a pro-drilling lobbying group in Alaska � showing the coastal plain in wintertime, with no polar bears or caribou running around.It looks white. It looks blustery. It looks flat.It looks kind of ugly."

One gets the feeling that "most Americans" doesn't include the ever sly Michael Grunwald. So why is it that we aren't treated to his personal experience of the Alaska coast? Well, for a reporter who is slicing and dicing the spin baloney, nothing in the piece indicates that his own two eyes have been laid, like in temps vecu, upon the controversial shores. His piece rightly accords to the greens a correct estimate of the amount of oil to be gotten from the Refuge -- not the 10.3 billion barrels estimated by the Oil R.'s minions, but 3.6 -- and points out that that is 60 billion dollars worth of oil. So what? The enviro point is that 3.6 billion gallons aren't going to make the U.S. energy independent, the justification for drilling in the Arctic Refuge -- and on that point there's no spin. The "facts' are clear. Grunwald doesn't go for the point, doing a little spin himself about the modern, efficient oil biz, not at all like that clunky infrastructure at Prudhoe Bay. And then there comes this wee kicker:

"Still, there will be impacts. Oil infrastructure damages tundra and vegetation even when it doesn't spill; and at Prudhoe Bay, there has been an average of a spill a day, mostly small, but totaling 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials since 1995. In the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge near Anchorage, the Fish and Wildlife Service is studying whether 350 toxic spills from oil fields have contributed to an abnormal number of deformed frogs."

Limited Inc likes the diminuendo at the end of the graf. The deformed frogs. Because here we have another issue entirely, we have another eco-system entirely, and the Enviro point is about the entire system. So Grunwald's graf is itself spinning for the Middle, until it spins right over the facts that are clear in the case. Instead of asking the obvious question: where does that 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials in 6 years go?

Michael Grunwald won a prize last year from a conservation outfit. Maybe his rather misleading spin article (his point about the environmentalists boil down to, they are telling the truth, but they are interpreting the truth environmentally -- that's spin?) is D.C. payback.

Remora

"The soul, being eternal, after death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about old age is that the soul's memory of the other world grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body, until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to higher things."

This is from one of Plutarch's letters. We're thinking about Plutarch this morning. The consolatory vision expressed in that letter casts a different light on biography as a genre. If one soul can exist, serially, in a number of bodies, life's accidents among the troubles of this world becomes representative of something behind the life, some one prolonged thing. The biographical seismograph charts, within its variations and seeming contingencies, the wanderings of a spirit for whom variations and contingencies are distinctly secondary, through a comic throng of masks. By producing parallel lives of the Greeks and the Romans, Plutarch is looking for hints, cries and whispers, the secret joke, the code of that rare stuff, that metaphysical Puck, the Great One and Oneness, in its two main falls into history.

Well, Limited Inc is not the Platonist Plutarch was. However, we do like the idea that lives give us points of orientation for the spirit of the age. We were reminded of this today when reading an interview with Dr. Callum Roberts in the NYT (No, really, incredulous reader, we were. Plutarch is always on our mind, just like Georgia's on Ray Charles' mind. We don't know why).

Roberts is a marine biologist who has become, as he says, the kind of scientist that didn't exist when he was a young man: a conservation biologist. As such, he works to conserve fish and the environment of fish. Well, that's hard work, especially given the attitude of fish em all and let God sort em out that prevailed in the 90s. He makes that point in the interview:

"The history of the problem is this: in the 1970's and 1980's as shallow- water fish got into trouble from overexploitation, the fishing industry worldwide began looking to the deep sea as virgin territory to work. By going to sea mounts (undersea elevations) and canyons that had never been trawled before, people were able to take huge catches � thousands of pounds in only a few minutes.Then, in the 1990's, after the cold war ended, military technology developed for underwater spying and sea floor imaging became available for civilian use. Thanks to multibeam sonars, sea floor mapping, and positioning systems, fishermen could suddenly exploit deep underwater terrains that previously had been unknown."

Robert has helped create fish sanctuaries, and has recently made the claim that virtue is not only its own reward, but rewards unworthy others, as far as fish are concerned:


"The research [Robert's research] into this controversial area is published in the journal Science (today, 30 November 2001), and examines the evidence that marine reserves, in which fish species are conserved, improve fish stocks in neighbouring areas. The research, centred on marine reserves in St Lucia and Florida, suggests not only that more fish appear in reserves following protection, but that they are also larger. They produce more offspring than exploited populations, and those offspring are exported to fishing grounds by ocean currents. There is also a spillover of adult fish migrating from the reserves as protected stocks build.
"

Robert's interview in the NYT won't change the minds of many regarding the cuter qualities of fish -- he seems to find the critters adorable -- since to experience fish as Robert experiences fish, you have to don your wetsuit and dive miles and miles from shore.

Our parallel to Roberts is an oily pseudo-conservationist, one Thor Lassen. Mr. Lassen has become the Whole Food's favorite conservationist, because Mr. Lassen's group eases Whole Food's conscience about shrimp, salmon, and the dripping edibles that Whole Food would like to purvey to your upper middle class consumer. Mr. Lassen is the alpha and omega of an organization called Ocean Trust. According to an admiring portrait of the man in Sea Food Business, Ocean Trust arose from some loose change flung at Lassen by the seafood companies:

"Ocean Trust�s annual budget in 1999 was $253,000, raised through donations from seafood companies, grants and marketing partnerships. In the day-to-day work of running a business, it�s difficult to keep on top of scientific reports about where the problems are and what should be done about them. That�s what Lassen does. "

Before becoming a conservationist as a result of such munificence, Lassen was a lobbyist. Lassen's character became, briefly, the focus of a fire fight between Whole Foods and Earth Island Institute in 1999. That year, the CEO of Whole Foods talked down EII because he claimed that Earth Island Instititute was guilty of negativism regarding shrimp. Yes, the folks at EII had the gall to consider boycotting shrimp harvests that endangered the habitats of the Sea Turtle in the Caribbean. So Whole Foods shopped around for a more compliant conservation group that would label its shrimp eco-friendly. Here's a rather hostile portrait of the Lassen, Whole Food's eventual choice for eco-friendly arbiteur, from Earth Island Journal:

"NFI [National Fisheries Institute] also founded Ocean Trust, a faux-green group run by Thor Lassen, a former NFI lobbyist. The group's stated mission is to "enhance the productivity of the marine environment as a source of food." Its biggest donor is the Long John Silver's seafood chain.Most frontline environmental workers have never worked with Ocean Trust, yet the group representing itself as having expertise in sea turtle conservation. Ocean Trust distributes expensive educational materials and videos that shift blame for sea turtle deaths away from the shrimp industry (although the US National Academy of Sciences identifies the industry is the primary human-related cause of these deaths). Ocean Trust's website links directly to NFI's web page and many NFI press releases quote Lassen.Ocean Trust is focusing on US/Mexican efforts to save the critically endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle in the Gulf of Mexico near Rancho Nuevo. Based on a very recent infusion of aid - a minute fraction of industry profits - the seafood industry is taking credit for more than 30 years of conservation work."

Ocean Trust's website is a "rich and strange" product of the sea. Its banners proclaim a happy green message about protecting the Sea Turtle, but it wastes no time getting to the main subject: nasty enviro exaggeration about the world state of fisheries. To make its points, it employs the pitiful jargon of the industry, along with industry statistics. Lassen's prose brings back the Vietnam era, in which the Military in Saigon was always proclaiming victory through better body counts. Here's the man on Sea floor damage:

"Much of the recent reports from environmental groups have focused on the impacts of fishing on the environment. The continued productivity productivity of sea clams and scallops harvested with dredges and shrimp, flatfish and other bottom species caught with trawls casts legitimate concern of the highly inflamed claims of ocean floor damage from fishing. We are just starting to learn whether gear has harmful or beneficial impacts like nutrient resuspension."

Ah, we are just starting to learn about the wonderful effects of littering the ocean with those one hundred yard trawler nets! Nutrient resuspension is a term that would turn one of Georgie Porgie Bush's speechwriter's green with envy. Redescribing litter in this way has a poetry, a fairy tale charm, all its own.

This is starting out to be Lassen's decade. Surely it is time to launch the phrase, compassionate environmentalist, meaning compassion should extend to fishery companies and their many employees. Surely we are going to hear that phrase echo from the Bush Administration. Nutrient resuspension will follow, soon after.

Life and rhetoric, folks. That's what we are all about.

Remora
The Colombia business.

Colombia seems especially cursed by fantasy. The Spanish, the English, all its earlier explorers and ravishers, were pressed forward by a crazy vision of El Dorado -- that story came from reports of Indians in Colombia. El Dorado is not defunct. It has simply changed to something you smoke or put up your nose -- our fantasy, their product, and our fantasy of protecting ourself against their product. There are many logics to the drug war, but they are all oddly divorced from the ostensible purpose of it. For thirty years the US has fought against the statistical norm of drug use within a population able to afford its tastes, and every year (surprise!) it loses. However, in war, loss is sometimes gain. The structure that fights the war, now, exerts a considerable economic pull, from the prison industry out there in the hinterlands, employing former dairy farmers, to the exciting world of rent-a-cops.

The war in Colombia is multi-purpose, and the politics of left and right have long ago been hollowed out by bloodlust, revenge, power plays, and fantasies more reminiscent of the night-battles recorded by Italian historian Ginzberg than anything else in modern politics. Ginzberg's book shows how the inquisition took a group of Friulian peasants who thought of themselves as supernatural witch fighters, appointed to leave their sleeping bodies and engage in battles with evil spirits during certain ritually significant times, and slowly cast them in the role of supporters of the devil, until they actually changed the self image of these people - the benandati.

The night battles in Colombia have undergone a similar dialectical alchemy. Every drug-dealer eventually becomes a populist, and every policeman eventually becomes a drug dealer. The government acts like pirates, and the pirates act like the government. This has long ceased to be a country, and become Walpurgisnacht.

So here's a sad piece in the LA Times about it:


"Soldiers and military police were already a part of life here. They inspected bags and purses at bus stations, stood guard at bridges and overpasses and patrolled street corners. Violence, too, was a fact of life. One night late last fall, I arrived at a party where the guests were abuzz. Just before my arrival, the building's night watchman had rushed into the apartment of the party's hostess and started shooting from her window at a suspicious looking man who had just stolen a gun from him. The guests dropped to the floor until the shooting ended, then resumed their conversations. But until last week, the danger and the military presence were part of the background. The culture had learned to live with a constant, low-level hum of violence. Now the volume of the conflict is once again a piercing cry.

As I sat and watched the tanks and then the truckloads of soldiers pass on the street below early on the morning of Feb. 21, I thought of my father. Fifty years earlier he watched as the very street I was looking at became a battleground. The violence that time around flared up after a charismatic political leader was killed outside his office in downtown Bogota. His murder plunged the country into a bloody war between conservatives and liberals that later became known simply as La Violencia. Some 200,000 died and many of those who remained behind became actors in the wars to come."

Limited Inc's first sympathies are with rebels. But we can apply to the rebels of Colombia a phrase used by da Silva and Gall in an essay on police abuse in Brazil: the rebels suffer from perverse incentives.

"We define perverse incentives as the devices of law and custom rewarding behavior that undermines the stated purpose of institutions. Perverse incentives divert resources and motivation from local police responsibilities for preventing crime into bloated bureaucracies and swollen units of shock troops inflicting unnecessary civilian casualties."

The institutionalization of rebellion in Colombia has turned the liberating impulse into a territorial one. Territory is now defined by terror -- one side or the other wins by terrorizing a significant section of the population.

Point is: down, down, down we go. This is not a country to which we should dispatch a billion dollars in military "aid" without, uh, thinking about it. But of course the U.S. has never allowed the irrationality and sheer cruelty of its programs to impede their implementation in the South.

Remora

We've all seen thieves, in movies, confer, engage, succeed, and then ironically flame out. The Thomas Crown Affair. Sexy Beast.To Catch a Thief. Rikki. We've all seen the movie in which the older, experienced thief engineers the heist of a lifetime, the impossible steal. The maximum flash plan, the camera at his glamorous or weary heel, here he is, coordinating his greedy but colorful crew, their various prison nourished talents. We all know that the heist itself will form around moments of near discovery, the cop who knocks on the door, the non-descript, whistling museum guard making an unexpected round. From Hollywood bandits lets segue to Hollywood banditry, because we can see the movie leap off the screen this week in Washington D.C. The script calls for boosting the commons, as unguarded as any lamely secured art treasure. Like Egyptian grave robbers in the hungrier dynasties, these thieves of the common have already made their depredations into a growth industry, and emptied out many of our monuments. Unlike Egyptian grave robbers, though, the dynamic is just the opposite: take living treasure and steal it for the tomb. The vaults of the record industries, the film industries, the publishing industries. Target is the copy right law. Like all intellectual property laws, copy right law was originally set up to guarantee a monopoly for that length of time necessary to allow the creator of an object -- originally the creator of a book -- to benefit from it. It was not a grant of property. And nothing was to be construed, from copy right, that impeded the fair use of the book for, say, parody. The age of reasonable use is over. Right now, a tedious committee hearing, lead by the Senator from Disney, Ernest Hollings, is showcasing Hollywood's scavenger hunt for spoils from the Net. Here's the NYT story about the latest Mission Impossible: Stealing your brain:

"Senator Ernest F. Hollings, the South Carolina Democrat who is the committee's chairman, called the hearing because of concerns in Congress about the slow adoption of digital television and broadband Internet connections. One reason that has often been cited for the faltering technology is the lack of mainstream entertainment to be found on it.

But until strong anti-piracy measures are in place, Mr. Eisner and others in his business have argued, the movie industry has little incentive to release its library of films in digital form.

In ongoing discussions with the technology and consumer electronics industry, the Hollywood studios have been promoting a project that would embed a "flag," or watermark in every piece of digital video content."

Computers, digital video recorders and other devices would then be designed to play the material only if they detected the presence of the markers."

And what does the ever pliant Hollings propose?

"The senators on the committee appeared quite receptive to that idea. Senator Hollings has circulated a draft of a proposed bill that would require computer and device makers to install anti-copying technology designated by the government if the companies cannot arrive at a standard on their own. "

Is this incredible or what? Yes, in a time when the Heimat is threatened by who knows who, we have to start getting pre-emptive -- so we pre-empt the crime before it happens. Only kidding! They aren't going to be locking Enron execs and politicians in jail before they're caught doing something -- the more's the pity. No, we have to pre-empt anything that threatens Disney Uber Alles. This is the kind of legislation that is cake to Hollings sponsors. Imagine the outcry if this venal crime against the intellect were translated into another venue. Imagine the Guv proposing to put little devises in your car to keep you from speeding. Cardiac arrest would spread from Detroit outward, and we'd see that legislation whisked away in a heartbeat. Hollywood, ah, that is a different story. If Hollywood had had its say, there would be no VCR in your home entertainment center, citoyen. Its usurpation of your rights is in line with its usual greedy mindset. But this time, the environment is much worse.

Limited Inc interviewed Larry Lessig last week. The story is in the Chronicle http://www.auschron.com/. Lessig's last book, The Future of Ideas, should be read by anybody who cares about the Net. In it, Lessig talks about the innovation commons. Let me quote from the Chronicle:

"AC: There's a phrase, "tragedy of the commons," which you discuss in Freedom of Ideas. Could you explain that?

LL: The idea is that if some resource is left open to the public, individuals will maximize their use of it until it is used up. So we have to control our access to it. This isn't true, however, of all commons. Take the English language. Because you speak it doesn't mean you take those words from somebody else. The Internet is an "innovation commons." Everyone is free to modify and adapt things on the Net, and anybody can get access to those innovations, because there isn't a limit to growth. "

Lessig claims (in Future of Ideas -- read that book!), and Limited Inc gives this claim a lot of credit, that the division between the State and Private Enterprise mistakenly categorizes a whole division of network goods, like bandwidth and code. I'd probably add genes and tissues. These goods are open source goods -- they can be exploited by all, modified by all, passively received by all, because it is in the nature of such goods to be indefinitely available.

But these goods are being contractualized, citoyens! even as we sleep. Sleep is easy, given the maunderings of such as Hollings, but sleep is dangerous. Remember the fuss, last year, about embryo stem cell research? The fuss was about whether the government would fund it. The fuss should have been about who owns it -- for, amazingly, stem cell "lines" have been patented. A story in Darwin magazine last summer correctly points out how crazy our bloated patent system has gotten:

"...the University of Wisconsin, which was awarded the patent on the human embryonic stem cell this past March, now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of having more power than it can handle�or at least handle gracefully.

The human stem cell patent is a hot potato, because while the science described within offers hope, the patent itself grants the power to quash that hope. It doesn�t help matters that the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), an independent not-for-profit corporation that manages patents for the university, has already granted many stem cell rights to Geron, a California biotech company that helped to fund the research. Today, anyone hoping to use the cells for research in this country may also have to come to terms not only with the university, but also with Geron, a for-profit player with a keen incentive to discourage competition."

Limited Inc's faithful readers will remember that back in August, when we started this insane enterprise, we began by attacking the idea that the right/left divide is defined by an attitude towards the state. No, we said, it is defined by an attitude towards contract -- a much different thing. So that the right wants the state to remove itself from, say, allocating resources, but intrude itself into enforcing private monopoly power. When the sphere of everyday life is invaded by state power on behalf of the state, freedom necessarily dwindles to zero. But the same is true when the sphere of everyday life becomes completely contractualized. Private power than uses the state to abridge freedom, heading us to that same zero horizon. Time to wake up, and hang a few patent officials from the streetlamps.

Remora

A group at MIT has come up with a little robot reporter. It is based on the design of one of those nifty machines NASA uses to explore Mars, the kind they always used to diagram in the National Geographics of my youth, except that this little baby has more RAM. And since there is, reportedly, intelligent life on Earth, communication between the robot and its base will be quicker:


"One example of how designing for Intraplanetary exploration is significantly simpler than Interplanetary systems is that information travels much faster from one side of the Earth to another than it does between planets. It can take minutes for radio information to travel from Mars to Earth, which is too long if the message is "I'm rolling towards the edge of a cliff!" Lag time in our system is expected to be less than 1000 milliseconds. Likewise, lifting a payload into orbit is incredibly expensive, and serves as perhaps the largest single constraint in the design of space bound vehicles. For instance, the original Space Shuttle had only 36K words of fixed memory, and 2K words of erasable memory! Our system can use a conventional laptop with many gigabytes of storage, able to handle digital video and audio recording, as well as the control and communications programs."

Whoever invented this thing certainly knows how journalism works. How many journalists have silently cried out, "I'm rolling towards the edge of a cliff!" as they skewed their perspective to that freedom friendly, free enterprise friendly, America friendly ideology of the base, aka Megagiant media corporation, for which they work as gravediggers of the truth, merely in order to enjoy the fruits of the earth on a credit card. For instance, take the whole of the Fox News staff. If only someone out there could recieve their little distressed frequencies! But alas, non-robotic reporters, like lemmings, roll off the edges of cliffs with regularity, and have to live with their shameful prosperity in sorrow and ulcers. Perhaps MIT can do something about that, next.

Remora

The mentally unstable bovine has rather slipped from the popular consciousness, now that we have real diseases, like anthrax, to worry about. So was it all simply fun and games, the hecatombs of beef? Shall we crank up the Peggy Lee? Is that all there is?


In Salon, there's a report on a report by the GAO, which says, inevitably, that :

"Mad cow disease could slip into the country and infect cattle herds because of weaknesses in import controls and lax enforcement of animal feed rules, congressional investigators warned Tuesday."

This report is a little screwy. The search for BSE in this country has been, shall we say, lackadaisical. In fact, cows that are down aren't routinely inspected for BSE. We know that American minks and deer have a BSE like disease, and that it is becoming endemic. Nodowners is a good site to start with if you want to get a jump on the next plague. They have a report on down cattle and the incidence of other animal spongiform encephalopathies.

They also have a report about the downed cattle bill:

"UPDATE! For the first time since the Humane Slaughter Act was enacted in the 1950's, farm animal protection legislation has passed both the United States House or Representatives and the United States Senate. This legislation, which prohibits the marketing and dragging of downed animals at stockyards and requires these incapacitated animals to be humanely euthanized, has now been included in both the House and Senate Farm Bills.The Senate Farm Bill was passed on February 13th, 2002 and includes a downed animal provision that was championed by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI). This provision is nearly identical to the downed animal legislation which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 5th, 2001 as part of the House Farm Bill. In the House, the downed animal measure was championed by Representatives Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Amo Houghton (R-NY) in a floor amendment."

So don't say that the house and senate has never done anything for ya. All it took them was four crucial years, since the first reports of BSE in Britain.

Remora

As blood is to the mosquito, the vampire bat, the tick, the tse-tse fly, so is idiocy to Limited Inc. Naturally - yes, obviously, like your most predictable carpers, with the kind of grim satisfaction at all our most cherished, worst prejudices being realized exhibited by some harridan in a suburban subdivision, watching hubby come home from a drunk - we recommend that our readers go to the NYT article reporting the testimony of stockmarket analysts to the US Senate's investigation of Enron. The grafs that put us into a delirium of bloodlust are these:

"Eleven of 16 analysts who followed Enron were still rating it as a ``buy'' or ``strong buy'' as late as Nov. 8, two weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had opened an inquiry into the company's accounting.

"``I did not own Enron stock,'' testified Anatol Feygin, a senior analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. ``I have complete freedom with respect to the recommendations that I make concerning any (stock) and my compensation is not tied to the recommendations that I make. ... I have never received any compensation in any form from any company that I analyze, including Enron.''

The analysts defense is that they are the stupidest people on earth. Because even slightly less stupid people, say some touched boy in a tribe that haven't developed a complete base ten counting system, can tell that an enterprise that goes from 90 to 2, whether the decline is measured in goats and chickens or dollars, is a losing enterprise. But Anatol Feygin, apparently, needs more information to make that kind of decision. Feygin is a veritable scientist.

Ah, but Limited Inc is just being cynical. Surely there is a reason, some reason, that we just don't understand, which justifies the Feygins of the world receiving compensations a thousand fold over your average MacDonald's burger flipper. There must be a class that explains this in some economics department. We don't understand economics, is what it is.