Needlenose

I can’t believe the unmitigated gall of Paul Bremer to suggest that the U.S. should continue to occupy Iraq until it becomes democratic.  WTF?  Seriously, dude, weren’t you the one who fucking disbanded the Iraqi army, releasing 200K well-trained, angry Sunni soldiers into a jobless economy with ready access to Saddam’s old weapon caches?

This line from the linked article made me chuckle:

“The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers…”

Yeah, well I regarded it as a spectacularly dumbass idea the moment Bremer made in in May 2003.  Also, in case you’ve forgotten, Bremer was the dumbass who kept telling us that things were turning a corner in Iraq, and stability was always “just 6 months away.”  Well asshole, it’s now 2010, and the Sunnis are going all “Hurt Locker” on Shi’ite ass, and the corner sure as hell isn’t in sight.

Frankly, I was surprised to hear from Bremer at all – it’s hard to believe he is really either that stupid or delusional.  My guess is this is just the first of a series of salvos from the reactionaries trying to blame the Democrats for the inevitable failure of Shrubya’s Iraqi Fiasco, just like the wrong-wing blow-hards already do about Vietnam (“we won every battle…if only we had nuked Hanoi…blah blah blah”).

Good office relationships start with breast milk

In perhaps the (unintentionally) funniest bit of silliness out of Islam since Ayatollah Sistani’s FAQ, check out the latest fatwa from Saudi Clerics promoting “adult breast-feeding to establish “maternal relations” and preclude the possibility of sexual contact” to allow men and women who work together to do so without a male relative chaperon.

*Update 7/20/10* In an unrelated Fatwa, it’s okay to drink coffee made from beans pooped out by a civet cat, provided they are first washed.  Seriously.  I couldn’t make something like that up!

Let there be life!

Science scores another milestone with J. Craig Venter Institute’s first critter with ‘synthetic’ DNA.  When we last left our hero, Venter had scored two much ballyhooed accomplishments.  First, he transfered the complete genetic material from one bacterium to another, effectively transforming the recipient cell into the species of the donor.  He also managed to completely synthesize the genome of an existing bacterium.

In this latest milestone, he took the synthetic genome and implanted it into another bacterium (whose genetic material had been removed), and voila – he ended up with a living bacterium of the donor species whose genome had been synthesized.

As with any significant new development of this magnitude, all the usual bloviators are out there, from boosters claiming how this will create a cure for British Petroleum, to skeptical peers saying that this is really nothing new, from doom-sayers warning that this will be used by so-called bio-terrorists, to self-appointed ‘moralists’ who claim that only God can create life.

It’s that last bit that I find so fascinating.  Think of the Herculean nearly two centuries-long attack on Evolution by Troglodytic Creationists – just to justify some cockamamie back-of-the napkin calculations of the world’s age made by some drunken Anglican Minister back in the day!

The Creationists (and their misshapen offspring, the Intelligent Designer crowd) have created torturous arguments against gradual speciation driven by natural selection.  My first thought, upon hearing of the Venter achievement, was that this would really blow their minds.  If humans can completely synthesize an existing genome, and implant that into a bacterial cell ‘shell’ to create a synthetic clone, it will be fairly trivial for us to design and synthesize a completely novel genome – carrying out an act that, according to the countless dress-wearing, bearded hierarchs of fundamentalist orthodoxy – can only be done by God.

You might argue that since Venter used the de-genomed cell body of the recipient bacteria to host his creation, rather than creating a cell body ‘from scratch,’ that we haven’t fully succeeded in creating life.  And indeed, it may be some time before scientists can ‘synthesize’ a usable cell body.  However I won’t be surprised on the day when Venter or some similar pioneer does just that – and it will be impossible to argue that humans can not only create a novel species, but in fact can quicken organic matter.

But at the end of the day I don’t think the Troglodytes will have any trouble dealing with this or future events.  In fact, I’m guessing that this will just add fuel to the fire of their crazy reasoning – if a person can design and create a living creature from scratch, surely (they will argue) that is evidence that God did so for every living creature.

In the article Designing Minds, Edward Wasserman  has an interesting argument about the whole Creationist concept of the God as Watchmaker.  He takes a close look at very human inventions, from complex tools to various behaviors such as how a high jumper does a Fosbury Flop or a modern jockey does the monkey crouch, and points out that most human ‘inventions’ really come about through an evolutionary process and not whole cloth from the genius of the lone ‘Edison’ toiling in the lab.

I would imagine that artificial life will most likely ‘evolve’ in the context of the marketplace, with critters that provide wonderous humanity-benefiting boons getting tossed in the crapper, while critters providing solid commercial attributes rising to the top to reproduce in their quintillions to produce  money-making pharmecuticals, junk-food additives and other things that will separate the consumer from his/her Euro or Yuan.

And in the meantime, the Trogs will continue to joust at evolution curriculums and abortion doctors and give Big Pharma a pass at Being God.

Whale blubber sashimi is a dish best served cold

It’s being spun as a compromise, but the latest effort to ‘cap’ the annual whale kill on the part of the rogue whaling nations of Japan, Norway and Iceland really comes down to providing an international framework to legitimize the commercial blubber sashimi trade.

I’m with Patrick R. Ramage, global whale program director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare:

“From our point of view, it’s a whaler’s wish list.  It would overturn the ’86 moratorium, eviscerate the South Ocean Whale Sanctuary, subordinate science and I.W.C. precedent to reward countries that have refused to comply by allocating quotas to those three countries.”

Amen, brother, say “No!” to appeasement as did Australia , Tokelau, New Zealand, Fiji and many other Pacific nations.

Hey I volunteer to waterboard these terrorists!  Somehow I doubt they’ll get sent to Gitmo though

Carter has built countless homes and negotiated numerous ceasefires after his Presidential term.  Clinton has negotiated the release of innocent hostages and worked to help the victims of natural disasters.

Shrubya doesn’t roll that way. Watch as Shrubya wipes his hand on Bill Clinton’s shirt after shaking the hand of a Haitian:

Poor reactionary conspiracy nuts – now the UN-dispatched, feminazi-filled black helicopters sent to spy on their militias in anticipation of One-World Government will be equipped with nearly silent rotary blades – so they can’t hear ‘em coming!

I can just hear World Overlord Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki cackling in glee!

Tip of the ‘Nose to Game Buddy!

Enjoying the Shrubya taxcuts the Democravens won't rescind

The Class War is over.  We lost.  These guys won.

I was naturally suspicious a few years back when Rupert Murdoch decided to build a McMansion in Beijing, but now I’m certain there is something evil afoot there – the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman just used the term ‘fair and balanced’ in a discussion regarding the U.S.’s concerns that China is deliberately undervaluing the yuan in order to maintain the flow of under priced goods to the U.S.  It’s pretty clear from the context that he means it exactly in the ‘Fox’ sense – whatever we want or believe is “fair and balanced, so screw you!”

My previous post about alternative energy technology being manufactured in China attracted a fair bit of discussion.  Beyond the snark, the U.S. does indeed have legitimate concerns about how China conducts its business.

The yuan needs to float freely against the dollar and the euro – like a real currency.  Right now they have a built in mechanism to ‘not be undersold’ by U.S. goods.

Why is the U.N. still giving them development aid?  If they can afford to loan us trillions of dollars, then can afford to lift themselves out of poverty.

We need to enforce environmental concerns with excise taxes.  Chinese pollution doesn’t just stay in China – their crap comes wafting in the air and affects everyone.  They don’t want to commit to emissions caps?  Well estimate their emissions, put a price on them, and attach the price to their cheap goods.  They won’t come to the table unless we force them to come to the table.

I could go on in the same vein about labor concerns, sustainable sourcing of resources, etc.  Right now China is acting like the ‘bad boy’ of the planet, and will continue to do so if there are no consequences.

Imagine this WWII headline:

“Japanese attempt to fire a bullet at American forces. Republicans demand Roosevelt’s resignation”.

Now you’ve got a picture of the basic lack of seriousness and rationality associated with the right-wing claims, and the media’s stenography, about the Lap Bomber incident.  The basic premise of the Cheneyites argument is that, while we are engaged in a worldwide war against an implacable and omnipresent foe,  if one enemy footsoldier attempts one act of war anyplace in the world, it signifies that everyone in the administration has failed in their duty and must resign.  Predictably, rather than pointing out that, when at war, enemies fight back and casualties can occur, the media swallows whole the moronic paradigm of risk-free, casualty-free global war as presented by Cheney and Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra.

The Republican strategy for exploiting politically the failed bombing attempt is conveniently outlined in Murdoch’s house organ for the right, the Wall Street Journal.  While Rep. Hoekstra, in a direct mail appeal, calls the Obama administration and Democrats “weak-kneed liberals”, and Cheney clangs his familiar gong of inexperience and mushiness, the best Axelrod can come up with is to call it “unbecoming” of Republicans to exploit national security politically.  WSJ notes that the White House has leaked to bloggers the fact that the Yemeni Al Queda leaders are former Guantanamo inmates released by Bush, and has also publicized some high-profile arrests, like the David Headley case.  The thing that no-one dares do is question the basic premise that the US can be engaged in multiple shooting wars in the Middle East, while also using unmanned drones to target suspects in multiple countries  where we are not officially at war (unfortunately slaughtering a few wedding parties in the bargain), without any cost or interruption to the daily security of Americans at home. 

As illustrated by my fictitous headline, if Republicans really believed their rhetoric of war, it would be obvious that wars presume enemies, and enemies fight back.  Wouldn’t it be refreshing if some intrepid journalist pointed out the fact that, in war, especially guerilla wars with no borders and no defined state actors, civilians are at risk, and that that is the price of “superpower” status and world policeman actions?

So can Obama and Democrats use this line of argument to bolster their case? Unfortunately, the answer is clear.  Unlike the British, who, while thoroughly despicable in their conduct of colonial empire, at least kept the stiff upper lip when the inevitable casualties ensued, the American public, body politic and media is so fundamentally immature that the idea of war without sacrifice (except some poor anonomous farmboys and homeboys whose official portraits scroll by on the evening news) is accepted as the norm, and any hostile act shakes our republic to the core. Any politician who notes that empire has cost, that enemies have resources, and that hypocrisy and abandonment of our core principles, as demonstrated by our support of Israeli exceptionalism and torture for convenience, has a price, would be committing political suicide for stating what any mature advisor would consider obvious. 

Would it have been a tragedy if that plane had been blasted from the sky?  Obviously, as it is a tragedy that the Taliban has murdered an entire CIA station in Afghanistan.  The greater tragedy is the fact that the solidarity in face of war that lead to the defeat of a far more dangerous and implacable foe in WWII has been abandoned by the Babbitts of the Republican right in their desperation to reclaim the right to undo our republic from within, as they have successfully done during every Repug administration in recent history.  And the foundational catastrophe of our age is that the press, in its laziness and frivolity, accepts every shoddy premise put forth by the know-nothing caucus as if it’s a serious critique, without once noting that a lie is a lie, or that a failed party with blood on its hands from 9/11 to Iraq to Abu Ghraib to Palestine to the dismantling of our moral legitimacy and economic stability has little right to give lessons in war policy.