Arithmetic on the Frontier
Rudyard Kipling

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe --
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And after -- ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares -- shoot straight who can --
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

One of my favorites

I am quite disappointed this year by the lack of complaints about football and America’s obsession with football.  The usually peak about this time.  They are remarkably thin this year.
Not that I agree, I love watching football, warts and all.  I loved playing even more. I agree that the game definitely needs to get safer. The head injury issue needs to get worked on and changes have to be made to the rules to lower injury rates.
Naw, that bit went through it’s 24 hour wash-rinse-repeat cycle during the last couple of months.  The hystericals seem to have shot their wad then and are quiet now.  That is too bad, I have really come to appreciate the over the top antics of the “Football as an American Evil” crowd.
Naw, gonna watch some football on Sunday, then the TV gets mothballed for the year

Oddness in the Galleries

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Now, this may show my lack of sophistication, but the recent noises made by the  Republican leadership in the House of Representatives seems to fly in the face of the constytooshun that they so love to defend.

Now, maybe I am splitting hairs, but I think that a budget bill has a lot to do with revenues as well as spending.  Many completely rational people try to make these two aspects come within spitting distance of each other.   Now the Republicans in the House are trying to score some strange political points by punting the spending bill over to the Senate.

Again, maybe my reading of the text of Article One, Section Seven is mistaken, but it says flat out that all bills defining how much money we can take in is the sole responsibility of the House.  The Senate can concur and/or propose amendments, but the heavy lifting has to be done by the house.

The Republican leadership has taken the position that taxes cannot be raised.  That means we are constrained to the amount of money we can take in.

There is an outdated "Solve the Deficit" game that is available at the New York Times.

You see, we pay too few taxes for what we expect from government.  Add to this the fact that there are too many people for too few jobs and you have a recipe for an ongoing problem balancing revenues and expenditures.  Throw in a couple of unnecessary wars, a shitpot of corruption, and interest on past debt not getting any smaller and what you have is a recipe for the cold times.

So, the Republican fucktards in the House of Representatives think that they can score some political points by blaming the Senate for not passing a budget.  The truth is, both parties have completely lost track with their responsibilities and have devolved into a fairly useless debating society.

Or, why the smog?

Beijing in 2003

I spent a ton of time over in China in the early 00's.  My passport has two add-on visa packs and a buttload of customs stamps from the Beijing airport.  I think that I have lived there for about a year all told.

So the recent "revelation" that China has an air pollution problem is almost comical to me.  Hell, up top  is a picture that I took out of my hotel window back in 2003.  This was taken on a not so clear day in November.  The buildings that you barely see in the background are less than a quarter mile away.

We, as a country. like sneering at China.  The current round of sneering comes at the expense of the pollution that a newly industrialized country is enduring.  We are so over that here in the US.  Well we should be, the jobs that currently employ Chinese used to be the jobs that caused smogs like this in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles in 1948

We have fresh air because the high-pollution heavy industry isn't located here in the US anymore.  So the smog in Beijing is there because of all the crap that we buy from them.  A major chunk of the pollution is the price China pays for selling us salad shooters.

Another big part is the huge differential between the rich and the poor in this erstwhile "Communist" country.  The rich live in houses that Martha Stewart would approve of.  The poor live in ramshackle, Soviet-era concrete blockhouses or ancient hutongs (though, by the time I left they had been tearing up the hutongs to make way for more skyscrapers) None of which were well heated.   This being said, the poor folk, which constitute around 85% of Chinese use little coal fired heaters burning pressed coal blocks that look like this:

So, the smog produced by actually having a manufacturing policy and wealth distribution that is bad, but might be more equitable than ours, we have pollution.  Stop sneering.

Axes to Grind

Lately I have been noting a certain amount of angst in the doomer blogosphere.  I have regular reads, but as a group they are starting to pall.  It is one thing to sit down and write about how fucked we are as a people/culture/economy, it is another thing altogether to begin sniping at the world for not having come around to your point of view yet.

CKM, Dave Cohen, Mish Shedlock, the menagerie over at Zerohedge, and any number of of the "world is falling down folks" have been getting downright snotty about the state of the human race in regards to the way that it does not meet up with their white-middle class sensibilities.

One of the uncomfortable things about hanging out in the same arena as doomie-types is their anger when Armageddon doesn't show up in a timely manner.  They also have a moralistic streak a mile wide, usually deeply rooted in their middle American upbringing (the culture which is the most responsible for the problems we are facing).

Dave inveighs against the internet and is nasty just about everything.  Good luck to anyone who leaves a comment on that blog.  CKM has been getting all snippety lately and pissy about social security and how the everything is a plot to keep old folks from taking out more than they put in and not being thanked for their efforts.  Zerohedge is becoming a loony bin for every commie-plot-exposing brownshirt out there.  Mish is just a fucker who can't understand why the little people won't work for $5.00/hr.

What all these guys seem to channel is the angst of failed, aging white folk.  The world that they thought was their oyster is being exposed as the world it has always been:  Semi-Hobbesian and uncaring about one's perceived perquisites.

The world is a great place, it just doesn't see any need to follow the social media requirements of doofuses.

Obviously I am redoing my blogroll.

I love this kind of stuff

Bill Moyers does take the time to go after things.  You might not agree with his politics, but he does do his homework well.

Meddling

 You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. 

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel. 

Good Music

I do enjoy other folks sharing music that they have found.  Some folks have even gone so far as to make the action a routine part of their blogging habit.  I am not at all sure about the practice, I find that the more that a person tries to be a doomer,right-wing, semi-survivalist, the bansksters are evil, the world is going to shit Jeremiah, the less that music appear to be one's forte.

That being said, and with the caveat that I have tried to perform this very act in the past, here I go with my music recommendations.  I am not trying to set down a decent soundtrack for Der Untergang des Abendlandes.  That is not a task that many are up to.

Instead, I am trying to only use this somewhat-less-than-bully pulpit to let you know about new stuff that I like on the rare occasions that occurs.

Try this guy, his name is Samuel Yirga,  it is definitely worth listening.

A Different Sort of Metal

I really like watching Max Keiser.  The doofus really makes me laugh and think.  Outside of Jon Stewart, I can't think of a comedian who has a better grasp on world and national affairs.

The nature of the gold and silver markets and the frozen wealth that they represent are a mystery.  The idea that a peice of metal represents the labor and flow of the economy and that one can capture the richness that the world offers is an odd one.

But ever since the Athenians started stamping out their owls, such has been the nature of the world.  The world also has any number of object lessons as to the overall usefulness of the metal as a symbol.   Midas maintains his name through the millenia.  Crassus really did get was was coming to him.

The gold that is being transported around is not there to assist in the betterment of the people who theoretically own it (read here, the American People, the German People, etc, etc, etc), but rather, to make sure that a moneyed elite maintain their grip on the levers of power.

The gold that is locked (or not, depending on your opinion about the tungsten rumors) up in the vaults in London and New York do not mean anything to the likes of you and I, it is ante in a bigger game that you and I cannot play.   It really is part of the arsenal of the game of thrones.

MetalHeads

Following on my prior post, I want to spend some time on the idea of the technologies used in cleaning up the toxic messes left by industry and us consumers.

Metals are nasty things, there are some soils out there that are scary contaminated with lead or arsenic from lazy and/or primitive manufacturing technologies.  But, as in the last posting, the use of these technologies is sadly absent.  I really find the article written for the New York Times back in 1992 to be sadly instructive.  While the technology is there, it just hasn't been deployed at the level needed to fix the problems.  Again, I would posit that the effect that the work has on a corporation's bottom line is much more important than the effect the technology has on the soil.

But what I find most interesting is the little blurb written innocuously at the bottom of this 2005 report by the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

In 2000, a patent was filed by the University of Maryland on the use of alpine pennycress for the phytoextraction of cadmium from soil, and a patent has been granted in Australia. No other similar technologies currently exist for remediation of cadmium contaminated soils using plants.

So, now you begin to see the problem in a bigger picture.  The University of Maryland own the rights to one's use of Pennycress to clean up cadmium.  And if you think for a minute that the University of Maryland isn't dialed into the corporate structure of Dow and the likes, I have a bridge for you.

So, the first obstacle to this is the reluctance of corporations to clean up after themselves, the second obstacle is that the current structure of power will make sure that one pays for the privilege of cleaning up the mess.  That is going to make it tough, but it is surmountable.

My biggest concern is the issue of extracting the metals and returning a safe plant residue into the ecosystem.  A great deal of the time, the sites being cleaned up are slag heaps.  Residue from a prior attempt to glean the metals from a different source.  If the metals are to be removed from the soil, they have to be safely taken from the plant matter prior to recycling the biomass back into the process.

I have run into a dead end trying to find a process that will do this.  Maybe someone is out there who can help.  My only clue is this little graph in an article from China discussing the washing of soils to reduce cadmium and phenanthrene.  I am thinking that this will be the way to process the contaminated plants for return to the system (ain't chelation grand).

Taken from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749108003254

CH3XXX

Try going over to the Archdruid and read his post on what he sees as the necessary technologies for the future.  Now as usual he writes well and his points are well taken.  But in a rare moment of conflict, I find myself in disagreement with the laundry list of technologies that he espouses.

His first wish is bioremediation.   All well and good, but it is a complete technology.  Whe really do know what we need to know.  I was the chief chemist for a bioremediation firm back in the early 90's.  We did fine work are were easily able to clean up sites contaminated with organics.  All this technology takes is time.  Even the most refractory sites can be cleaned of organics by just treating them like a big garden and plowing and fertilizing the hell out of them.  Hell, we even proved that you can get rid of organics in groundwater by injecting nutrients and amino acids into the aquifer.  All the bugs need is some thing to go with the contaminants and they will be happy to suck the stuff up.

But this is necessarily a slow process, for what you are doing is creating a system of controlled evolution that forces the bugs to eat the nasties that you have put there.  The Archdruid seems to think that the technology isn't there or there isn't a complete set of tools to do the job.  The truth is, we have everything we need to fix the organic contamination process.

No, the issue with cleaning up sites contaminated with organics is there, what is not available is the ability to make the people who made the mess clean up after themselves.  Folks who are willing to fuck up the planet are notorious for being unwilling to reverse the damage.

Nope, I think that, when the time comes, and the fossil-fuel industries start grinding down and the world begins to change, the organics will be comfortably accelerated in the cases where it is useful and will self-clean over the course of a couple of centuries in the cases where it isn't.

Now, this little post only applies to organics contamination.  Metals or radioactive contamination is another deal altogether.  I will work on a post to address the problems there.

A Man of Parts

"Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

OK.  Those of you who have read this screed for a while are aware of my unabashed distaste for the "sport" of cycling.  So you may find it odd that I am weighing in on the recent "revelations" that Lance Armstrong doped during his run being the king shit of the bicycle world.

I really can't say as I care any more than I cared about Paul Hornung or Pete Rose's gambling.  I care about the steroid abuse in baseball an equivalent amount.  Adderall use in the NFL interests me equally.

That is to say, not at all.

"I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart."

 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Professional athletes are one of the oddest parts of our culture.  Sports is of such a trivial importance to our society, yet the mass media uses the National Enquirer culture to force feed the foibles of a bunch of pandered children as part of the appeal of the game.

Lance Armstrong did some pretty amazing things, even taking into consideration his notable inattention to the rules of the game.   The sport of bicycling is known as a cess-pit of rule bending, skating the line, and absolute cheating.  I really can't think of a dirtier sport.  I have heard that the agency that runs the Tour de France is having difficulty locating a participant who is not under investigation to award the prizes vacated by Mr. Armstrong.

You see, even with the doping, Lance has to be up there with one of the great ones of the sport.  If a cheater beats all of the rest of the cheaters, then, by definition, he is the best in the sport.

But Lance is a different critter.  I have never been a big fan of our adulation of the "cancer survivor", as if scrambling not to die somehow puts you above the herd.  So his "beating" cancer doesn't really hold any special pull for me.

So he went out and created a PR firm to harvest guilt-gelt harvesting machine.  It did great work for the business model that he isolated;  The perpetual motion money making machine that is the search for the cure for cancer.

Leigh Cowart over at NSFW banged the description of cancer right down on it head. (please splurge the subscription fee so that these folks can keep going, this is a great news service)

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There’s no cure for cancer. There could never be, and will never be a cure for cancer. See, cancer isn’t a thing. It’s not a fightable foe, like a bacterial infection or George Foreman. It’s not an simple environmental agent that you can remove from your surroundings like Agent Orange or Aunt Tilda. The reason you cannot cure cancer is because cancer isn’t one disease. Or a hundred diseases. Or a thousand diseases. 

Cancer is millions of diseases. Cancer can become other diseases within the same cancer patient. Cancer is the varied and seemingly innumerable ways in which the abnormal cells in the human body can exhibit uncontrolled growth. And it’s changing all the time.

 So Little Lancie, a serial cheater, scrambles like hell to get rid of testicular cancer (an act which I hold in no contempt, seems like a damn fine idea), and sets himself up as a demigod for the masses and scrapes in buttloads of money for cancer research and his own lifestyle.  Sounds like quite the deal.

But now the Oprah crowd and its hangers on are finding out that Lance was an asshole during his run at greatness.   Wow, who would have thought it.

But our umbrage and outrage about Mr. Armstrong's behavior strike me as kind of disingenuous.  Maybe it is the contempt which I hold the world view that Ms Winfrey espouses, but more than that I think that it is our desire as a culture to have the folks who are willing to do anything to achieve the transient greatness of this life be "just ordinary Joes",  to be just like us.

Ms. Winfrey is the sounding board for the folks who have shoveled aside everything for the pursuit of fame.  It is a closely scripted, tightly controlled facade where the rich and powerful can pretend that they are "plain folk" for the edification of the masses and the increase in bottom lines of self-serving elites.

No, we can't blame the folks like Armstrong for their single minded drive.  They are different than us.  They will cheat to get what they want, because what they want is beyond the reach of the "ordinary Joe" we so wish them to be.

The blame lies with us, the noble unwashed masses who desire more than anything to retain the thought that we are just as good as the single minded automatons that have sacrificed everything to achieve their goal.  When we find out that such as these are different than us, have differing motivations, different interpretations of the rules, it ruins our fantasy that excellence is a path that we could have chosen, but one we just didn't tread.

The Barn Door

Consider for a moment the following website:

http://defensedistributed.com/

I am always surprised and saddened by the lack of sophistication on both sides in the "Gun Debate".

It is kind of scary.

Gun control is an extraordinarily difficult subject, it is resistant to any attempt to simplify the issue and the noisiest folks in the debates are usually those with the least to contribute.  Somehow gun control has become a touchstone, an article of faith in the holy war between the defenders guns and those who wish to see them gone.

Pandora's box is open.  The guns that are out there can't be called back.  I am not interested in a civil war, so the thought that the government will go out and confiscate firearms is not one that I will ever support.  But the truth of the matter is that there are too many guns out there.

I think that the folks who have guns aren't going to be giving them up without a struggle.  I don't think that the problem of guns in the hands of criminals will suddenly disappear with the passage of a few laws.  Crazy folks will still get access to guns that they shouldn't have.

The folks that think that passing a couple of laws and implementing some executive orders will solve the problem are deluded.  Folks that think free and simple access to guns will solve the problem are deluded.

The horses are running away, closing the barn door may seem foolish, but there might be a horse or two left in there, we might want to keep them there.