I know it’s not Saturday morning. (And I know this is a lot of posts for one day, but I will be taking a hiatus from the Web all next week, and working long hours this week to clear the decks for that vacation. So it’s time to sweep away my backlog.)
But it was a Saturday morning when we met most of these characters in the flesh. And here they are flensed of that flesh. All in the interests of pseudoscience.
[Update: the link seems to have shifted. I have renewed the URL.]
Catching up on the implications of a two week old bit of science news. Nature reported that three new Neptune sized planets have been found circling the nearby star HD69830, 41 light years away.
This was gratifying news for three reasons. First, infrared studies had already disclosed the presence of an asteroid belt around the star. It was predicted that a pair of planets would be found, one on each side of the belt, acting as shepherds to keep the belts in place, much as the inner moons of Saturn shepherd the particles in its rings. So it was pleasant to see observation follow dynamical theory.
Second, detection of the planets was possible because of a big jump in the sensitivity of the Doppler technique for finding extrasolar planets, by observing the wobble they induce on the location of the parent star.
Third, at the new level of sensitivity, it still isn’t possible to find the holy grail of extrasolar planetary research: a rocky, earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance congenial to life. To do that, the sensitivity of the Doppler technique would have to be ratcheted up by another 90%.
But here’s the beauty part: most nearby stars are not sunlike. They are smaller: lighter in mass, and less bright. That makes a habitable planet easier to find on two counts. The habitable zone is closer in to the star, so that an earth-sized planet would tug harder at its sun. And the star is smaller, so that the same size tug would make it wobble further.
We’re getting close. The first planet around a different star worth a beamdown by Kirk’s crew should put in its appearance within the next three to five years.
How far Republicanism has sunk from the days of Goldwater. Among today’s GOP, Feingold’s attempt to censure the President’s lawbreaking constitutes extremism in the defense of liberty, to be decried and shouted down. But a mere call for investigation, a mere Mittyesque request that the President spell out just which of our liberties have been taken away, is enough to call down elephantine wrath.
A great many Republicans on the sidelines understand and are appalled at the damage being done to our system of government, from Bob Barr to the Cato Institute to John Dean to numerous former Reagan officials. Appreciation is due to them all for rising above partisanship in the name of patriotism. But among its elected officials, Barry’s party today stands firm for the principle that any defense of liberty is a vice.
Only one cheer, because this piece of apparent good news is destined to slide down the oubliette – and as likely as not designed to do so.
The Washington Post Sunday noted a bunch of really sweet requirements on the Executive voted in by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, thanks to a coalition of all Democrats with Republican “moderates” Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
All well and good. However, at the President’s direction, the House will kill all these provisions, as it has killed the first one before. This is purely a symbolic gesture on the part of Snowe and Hagel. Whenever they have an opportunity to take an action that will result in an actual effect, they join with Chairman Roberts in backing the President’s one-man rule to the hilt.
For example, they have consistently voted against any real investigation into the NSA’s domestic wiretapping; they have voted against any investigation into how the Administration used or misused the pre-war intelligence on Iraq; and they have both signed on to the DeWine legislation, which would retroactively legalize the NSA program, without ever learning what it actually consists of, and make it a felony for any member of Congress briefed on the program to make any comment on it in public, thus essentially criminalizing the act of oversight.
Where the President’s attacks on the Constitution, the rule of law, and the separation of powers are concerned, these two have reliably performed as MINOs: moderates in name only.
This blog noted a couple of weeks ago how National Security Letters might be used to launder illegal surveillance.
Well, here’s some good news that flew beneath my radar last week. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the rulings of two lower courts (one in NY, one in CT) that the National Security Letters provision of the USAPATRIOT Act is unconstitutional.
Wrote Judge Richard Cardamone:
“A ban on speech and a shroud of secrecy in perpetuity are antithetical to democratic concepts and do not fit comfortably with the fundamental rights guaranteed American citizens…. Unending secrecy of actions taken by government officials may also serve as a cover for possible official misconduct and/or incompetence.”
Judge Cardamone added that national security concerns “should be leavened with common sense so as not forever to trump the rights of the citizenry under the Constitution.”
In George Bush’s moral universe, the one transcendent value is personal loyalty to the President. Every member of the Administration who failed to grasp that, such as John DiIulio and Paul O’Neill, soon found himself exiled from the Administration.
Don’t you suppose that it must have dawned on Bush early on – perhaps around October 2001, when it became apparent that despite his express wish, intelligence would steadfastly decline to proclaim Iraq the engineer of 9/11 – that reality was not personally loyal to him?
What could be more natural, or more forthright, than his manly revulsion at this moral flaw? Clearly, reality had become an unprofitable servant. To remain uncorrupted by its taint, the President was compelled to exile it from the White House with the rest.
Another of my own pieces.
On Reading Emily
Death is a Motion in the mind
A stillness in the Nerve –
A jest — unchaperoned by smile –
A feast that scarce — will serveThat so replete with matter is –
One may miss the Gist
A sentence — understood til given
Hyphenated — twist
Zippy the Pinhead periodically goes into a trance, repeating a polysyllabic three-word mantra over and over. Once in a while I stumble across a phrase in my science reading with just the right hypnotic quality to send Zippy to Zen heaven. A couple of months back, just before I began this blog, it was “nonsense mediated decay”. I may have to post about that sometime, but for today’s lesson our mantra is “giant gutless tubeworms.”
From the moment hydrothermal vents were discovered — deep ocean trench communities of organisms which get their energy not from sunlight, but rather from geothermal temperature gradients where tectonic plates meet — these guys have been media stars. As the name indicates, they are gutless wonders. They start as free-swimming larva with normal digestive systems, but they soon settle down to a sedentary life. Taking Saint Paul’s advice to extremes, they then put away childish things, including the gut, the mouth and the anus, and set about the serious adult business of putting on mass. They can grow up to eight feet long.
They get all their nutrition from symbiotic bacteria. They don’t inherit the bugs from their parents; they harbor no colonies in their free-swimming youth. What’s new this week, as reported in Nature, is the way they take on their microscopic boarders, which dwell in a specialized organ called the trophosome.
It had been thought that when it attached to the vent floor, the larva simply swallowed some of the proper bacteria, which then, by some mechanism yet to be determined, defended themselves against being digested. Not so. It turns out they are still bacteria-free when their mouths close over. Instead, the bacteria invade through their skin, and migrate to a region which then differentiates into a trophosome. While this is going on, the cells of the skin and intervening muscle go through a massive die-off, just as if they were succumbing to a nasty infection. Once the colony is ensconced, the die-off stops. The process presents a lovely example of a relationship somewhere between infectious disease and comfortably established symbiosis.
No matter how weird the life style, some organism somewhere is living it.
Giant gutless tubeworms, giant gutless tubeworms, giant gutless tubeworms. Go ahead, try it. No one can say it just once.
Joe Galloway has spent 20 years as a war correspondent. The strutting, draft dodging popinjays now in charge, finding a chestful of toy soldiers at their disposal, joyfully plopped them into their pet Adventurama in Iraq, oblivious to the fact that those neatly maneuverable poppets were our sons and daughters. Unlike them, Galloway knows the officers, the grunts, and the face of war. He gets an earful, and then he writes what he hears.
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, in the person of Larry Dirita, never gets an earful, because they have made it clear to their underlings in uniform that they want to hear nothing, unless it is their own wise words bounced back to them. Galloway wrote down in an April 26 column what he heard from Lt. General Paul Van Riper about a war game gone bad, and Dirita took umbrage. The
Booman Tribune records the email traffic that went back and forth between the two. That alarming column is worth a post in its own right, but for now just read the letters, and savor the difference between a patriot who cares about the troops, and a Rumsfeld apparatchik who cares only about his boss’s reputation. He typifies the badministration’s matchless inability to tune its radio dials to the frequency we call “reality”.
General Tommy Franks once famously said of another of Rumsfeld’s stable of prize cronies, Douglas Feith, that he was “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Feith turned out to be neck deep in passing state secrets to foreign powers. So now he has departed, one step ahead of the shoeshine and two steps away from the county line. As his replacement Dirita may be bucking for the title of FSG in the galactic sector He previously gained brief notoriety, as reported in a no longer web accessible LA Times story from July 18, 2003, at a point when the first flush of fubars was grandly unfolding in Baghdad:
Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely – to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.
“We’re going to get better over time,’ promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. “We’ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase’ distinct from combat,” he said. “The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum.”
“This is the future for the world we’re in at the moment,” he said. “We’ll get better as we do it more often.”
Ah, 2003, what sweet and innocent times those were! Back then, Bush’s golden horde believed they were going to sweep from little brown nation to little brown nation, from victory to victory, in another fresh bright clean war every year, just one banner waving vote magnet of a bloodfest after another.
How aft has the dulcet vision gang agley. Only now, after three painful years of delay, are they gearing up for their first followup, in Iran. And even that arrives less in the original spirit of triumphal advance than it does in the spirit of Bre’r Rabbit, fired up in rage at how fast his fist has got stuck in the tar, and hauling off to whack that offending lump of foreign matter with his other fist.
That they are strapping on their boots for the followup, that they are determined to stay in their bubble, having learned nothing from four years of mistakes, that they are ignoring the attempted protests of those small green plastic figurines they so enjoy directing, is clear from General Van Riper’s account. When his Red team, wargaming Iran, so easily defeated the Blue team invasion, Rumsfeld’s unreality bubble swiftly defended its perimeter. The Blue team just took a mulligan:
Van Riper resolved to strike first and unconventionally using fast patrol boats and converted pleasure boats fitted with ship-to-ship missiles as well as first generation shore-launched anti-ship cruise missiles. He packed small boats and small propeller aircraft with explosives for one mass wave of suicide attacks against the Blue fleet. Last, the general shut down all radio traffic and sent commands by motorcycle messengers, beyond the reach of the code-breakers.
At the appointed hour he sent hundreds of missiles screaming into the fleet, and dozens of kamikaze boats and planes plunging into the Navy ships in a simultaneous sneak attack that overwhelmed the Navy’s much-vaunted defenses based on its Aegis cruisers and their radar controlled Gatling guns.
When the figurative smoke cleared it was found that the Red Forces had sunk 16 Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier. Thousands of Marines and sailors were dead.
The referees stopped the game, which is normal when a victory is won so early. Van Riper assumed that the Blue Force would draw new, better plans and the free play war games would resume.
Instead he learned that the war game was now following a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory: He was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed and he was told his forces would not be allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.
The Pentagon has never explained. It classified Van Riper’s 21-page report criticizing the results and conduct of the rest of the exercise, along with the report of another DOD observer.
As a strategic military exercise, this can’t be taken seriously. As an exercise in telling Rumsfeld and/or Bush what they want to hear: that Iran will, like Iraq before it, be a slamdunk, a cakewalk, and an all around humdinger – in short, as an exercise in justifying a decision already taken for war – it is as serious as a heart attack.
There’s a semi-regular feature on Salon.com called “Ask the Pilot”, the columnist being a commercial airline pilot named Patrick Smith. His latest piece takes up 9/11 conspiracy theory questions that have been put to him, and lays a lot of red herrings to rest. Which he doesn’t take to mean that it’s necessarily red herrings all the way down.
This is good. It’s extremely unlikely that the official story on the events of that day is the whole truth. The more that foolish speculations recirculate through the rumor ether, the harder it will be for the signal emitted by reality (and yes, Virginia, there is a reality) to make it through the static. When knowledgeable folks with no love for the neocons peel away the wild conspiracy theories, the outlines of the real conspiracy, if any, are more likely to surface.
