Obsidian Wings

Of Boilers And Other Things

by hilzoy

I have been thinking a lot about energy recently. For one thing, I made my monthly trip to the gas station the day before yesterday (aren't Priuses wonderful? Everyone should own one), and got to pay nearly $3/gallon for gas. More importantly, however, there's good news and bad news about my new house.

The bad news is that the boiler and the hot water heater need to be replaced. The boiler is an amazing object, which probably ought to be in a museum somewhere: it's a converted coal burner whose front has cement smeared all over it in an attempt to seal it up, and which is literally held together with baling wire. -- I really love it when I find something about which a cliché is literally true -- the only thing that made getting lice at all worthwhile was the chance to become a literal nitpicker -- and so part of me loves the baling wire. But not so much that I want to use this antiquated, delapidated relic to heat my home. The hot water heater is less urgent: it's past the normal life for hot water heaters, and may or may not be leaking exhaust gasses, depending on who you believe. But that, it seems to me, makes this a good time to replace it: now, before I am stuck without a shower or dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The good news is that the boiler and the hot water heater need replacing. For one thing, the fact that my property inspector tagged these things now means that I have been able to extract a lot of the cost of replacing them from the seller. More importantly, however, it means that I will get to act on my basic theory of environmental responsibility which involves doing two things. First, periodically sitting down to think about what environmentally responsible things I could be doing, but am not. Second, always, always take advantage of the opportunities presented by the need to replace major appliances; and don't bother to ask e.g. whether you can expect a new appliance to pay for itself in energy savings before you move; think of yourself instead as a sort of Johnny Appleseed, leaving a trail of efficient hot water heaters behind you.

I am not wholly consistent: if I were, I would not have been living in the country these last six years. Nor did I do well the last time I had to replace a hot water heater: that time, I really was stranded without the ability to take a shower, and the fact that the repair guy had a hot water heater in the back of his truck, while getting the really efficient kind I wanted would take days, made me falter. But I do try: hence the Prius, and so forth. Hence also the thought: yay, an excuse to replace the boiler and the hot water heater.

Still, it got me thinking, as did the recent run-up in oil prices. And I realized: I've never really written about this. I have no idea why not: it is, after all, something I care a lot about. Maybe it's in part because I don't know a lot of the details; I've never gotten into them, since on the one hand the broad outlines seem clear enough, and on the other we presently have an administration that flatly denies most of them; and so leaning the fine points doesn't seem as important as it would if we were presently debating different strategies for energy independence. Still, for what it's worth, I take the obvious outlines to be:

It's Sad That This Counts As Progress...

by hilzoy

From the BBC:

"One of the Roman Catholic Church's most distinguished cardinals has publicly backed the use of condoms among married couples to prevent Aids transmission.
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said that in couples where one had HIV/Aids, which could pass to the partner, the use of condoms was "a lesser evil".

The Vatican says condoms should never be used, even to stop Aids spreading from one married partner to another.

The Church teaches that abstinence is the best way to tackle disease."

I honestly don't understand the Church's disastrous teaching on contraception. I have asked some Catholics to explain it. Some seem to be under the misapprehension that people only use contraceptives outside of marriage, but since they are obviously misinformed, they need not detain us further. Some tell me that using contraception is a way of arrogating to oneself what should be God's power over conception, but this has always seemed to me to involve either an inflated view of the power of contraceptives or a lack of faith in the power of God. After all, if He created the entire universe, isn't He capable of making a hole in a condom? Besides, this is hard to square with the fact that the Church allows the rhythm method. (One lapsed Catholic I know asked his priest to explain this, and was told that the difference is that the rhythm method isn't always effective, and so leaves conception to some extent in God's hands. This is, I think, both impious in its view of God's powers and ludicrously wrong about all the actual contraceptive methods I'm familiar with, including abstinence (think of rape), other than having one's reproductive organs removed.)

Others have said that the purpose of sex is procreation, and contraception allows one to disregard that purpose. I would have more respect for this argument if it were applied to other appetites: if, for instance, the Church were just as firmly opposed to eating for some purpose other than nourishment, and banned the eating of non-nutritious foods like cotton candy on those grounds; or if it opposed shopping for things people don't need, and forbade its members to buy any luxuries; or if it opposed taking aimless walks or oversleeping. Oddly enough, though, this argument seems to be seriously applied only to sex. I have no idea why.

And a ban on contraceptives is such an obviously disastrous policy when applied to people who are trying not to pass on sexually transmitted diseases. Making an exception for HIV+ people alone would save a lot of lives. Apparently, the Church came close to making such an exception. From the BBC again:

"According to insistent reports, Cardinal Martini was a close runner-up in last year's papal election."

Close, but not close enough.

Hand in the cookie-jar open thread

by Slartibartfast

I don't have much time or energy to post anything, but apparently we're shorter on fresh thread-space than we ought to be, so I kick this one off with...this, here:

A defense contractor seeking help from Rep. Katherine Harris for $10 million in federal money last year took her to one of Washington's most exclusive restaurants, where he paid for a meal that may have cost as much as $2,800 and offered to sponsor a campaign fundraiser for her.

This won't change the way I vote next election, not because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, knee-jerk Republican, but because I've regarded Harris as too stupid (politically, at least) to continue holding office.  The after-the-fact mis-maneuverings didn't help, either.  I've long since come out for Bill Nelson in any Nelson vs. Harris match.

Comment with your favorite too-stupid-to-breathe bit of political corruption, or just whatever.  Yeah, that's right: another stupid open thread.

Remember: It's The Left That's Angry...

by hilzoy

If we keep on repeating the phrase "the angry left, the angry left", maybe we won't notice things like this:

"On his radio show, Savage told listeners that "intelligent people, wealthy people ... are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, 'Oh, there's a billion of them.' " Savage continued: "I said, 'So, kill 100 million of them, then there'd be 900 million of them.' I mean ... would you rather us die than them?" Savage added: "Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you're going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later.""

The point of this is not to pull one nutcase out of some dark corner and proclaim: "Lo! It's conservatism!" Michael Savage is one of the most popular talk radio hosts in the US. His program is syndicated on 350 radio stations, reaching over eight million listeners. He's not, in other words, the right's answer to Ward Churchill: someone no one had ever heard of until liberals started inveighing against him. If 'mainstream conservatism' means 'popular with enough conservatives that you can't call him a member of a 'fringe' with a straight face', then he, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh are mainstream conservatives.

Just remember, though: it's liberals who have problems with anger these days.

Without Any Comment

by hilzoy

I have written earlier about the case of Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu al-Hakim, the two Uighurs who remain in prison in Guantanamo four and a half years after their capture by bounty hunters in Afghanistan, over a year after they were declared not to be enemy combatants by a military tribunal, and nearly four months after a district court held that their imprisonment was illegal, but that he had "no relief to offer." Today, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal on their behalf:

"The Supreme Court declined on Monday to consider whether a federal judge can free two Chinese Muslims who remain imprisoned unlawfully at Guantanamo Bay, despite being cleared as "enemy combatants."

The justices refused to review the judge's decision that a federal court cannot provide any relief to Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim, two members of the Uighur ethnic group held at Guantanamo while the United States searches for a country to take them.

Their attorneys urged the justices to decide whether a federal court has the power to craft a remedy for those who are indefinitely and unlawfully imprisoned at the U.S. military base in Cuba.

They took the unusual step of appealing directly to the high court after the ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson.

The two men, who were captured by Pakistani forces in Pakistan, have been detained since June 2002 at Guantanamo, where the United States holds about 490 terrorism suspects. In March last year, the U.S. military determined the two Uighurs should no longer be considered enemy combatants. (...)

Robertson ruled in December that the continued, indefinite detention of the Uighurs at Guantanamo is unlawful, but said he had no authority "to do what I believe justice requires" in ordering their release.

Robertson said he could not grant the Uighurs' request for asylum in the United States because the law gives that power solely to the president. The Bush administration has opposed bringing them to the United States.

Their lawyers urged the Supreme Court to intervene now and decide the case, without following the usual procedure of waiting for a ruling by a U.S. appeals court.

"The district court's decision once again renders Guantanamo Bay a place and a prison beyond law," they said. "Liberty can never be secure when the judicial branch declares its impotence." (...)

The high court rejected the appeal by the Uighurs without any comment or recorded dissent. The case could return to the high court after the appeals court decides it."

So these men, who have been unjustly deprived of years of their lives, whose families thought they were dead for over three years, whose children have been growing up without them, get to stay in Guantanamo while their appeals proceed; and neither they, nor their lawyers, nor those of us who would dearly love for there to be some explanation of how this state of affairs can be allowed to continue in a nation that supposedly respects the right of habeas corpus and lives under the rule of law, get so much as a single word to help us understand why.

Generals Speaking Out

by hilzoy

In my fruitless attempt to keep up with at least some of the major stories that have come out while I've been busy (and I am still busy), here are three thoughts on the generals who have called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, and the response to them.

[Update at end.]

Oh, Please.

by hilzoy

The Washington Post has published an annoying article on Mary Scott O'Connor:

"In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day. (...)

What's notable about this isn't only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the right that was angry and the left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the left has gone on the attack. And with Republicans in control of Washington, they have much more to be angry about."

And so on, and so forth, with lots of angry comments from Eschaton and My Left Wing sprinkled about.

When I first read this article, I thought: what's the point of this? I have nothing against Mary Scott O'Connor, though the Daily Rant is not my style. But why this profile? Why go on and on about 'the Angry Left', as though there was nothing else out there -- or even as though the biggest liberal blogs have much of anything in common with this? (And no, I'm not counting their comments.) All became clear, however, when I read O'Connor's own account of how the story came to be:

"Finkel said he got my name from an email someone sent him, which led him to My Left Wing. He'd never been to a blog before (gasp! I thought EVERYBODY read the blogs!), and was intrigued not only by the medium but by my particular 'blog voice,' if you will.

And he wanted to write a piece about me. For the Style section, no doubt, I guessed.

Nope. Front page, baby.

Finkel pitched the story to his editors and got the okay, on the condition I promise not to write about it before it ran on the Post's website, which I did.
A week later, he was here in my living room. He sat on my couch and explained that he didn't yet know what he was going to write, didn't have in mind any angle. He did have a phrase weaving in and out of his mind: "The Angry Left." Apparently I am the Angry Left personified."

So: a reporter wants to write a story about blogs. He has never actually read a blog, but he had "a phrase weaving in and out of his mind: "The Angry Left."" Where did this phrase come from? We've already established that it couldn't have come from actually reading blogs. I think we can exclude omniscience, mind-reading, and divine revelation. What's left? All I can think of are: the reporter's preconceptions. He had this idea that there was an "angry left" out there, and he set out to find it.

Glenn Greenwald has already written about the bizarre idea that the left has anything like the venom of the right, at least in its more prominent representatives:

"The Right's best-selling author calls liberals traitors and urges that they be beaten with baseball bats and attacked with bombs. Its most popular radio talk show host -- with his 20 million daily followers -- has spent the last 20 years urging that liberals be deported and praising the kidnappings of his political opponents, while other favorites on Right-wing radio routinely call for the imprisonment of leading Democrats. Similarly, some of the Right's favorite commentators have urged that those who espouse liberalism be tried for sedition, or worse.

One favorite right-wing commentator has written two books - one devoted to showing that liberals are mentally ill, and the other defending the internment of innocent American citizens in prison camps. The Right's leading elected officials and pundits just in the last couple of years have repeatedly taken to threatening federal judges who issue opinions they dislike.

And how fondly I recall these sentiments from Sen. Jesse Helms during the Clinton years:

In an effort to dampen the furor over his Commander-in-Chief remarks, on November 22 Helms told a newspaper reporter from his home state of North Carolina that the President should be careful about visiting military bases in that state. "Mr. Clinton better watch out of he comes down here," Helms said. "He better have a bodyguard."

Can one even contemplate the reaction if a Democratic Senator today warned George Bush to avoid military bases becasue he would likely be physically attacked by a military that hated him? Granted, those threats against the President were merely from a leading Republican Senator, not from an anonymous commenter on a blog, but they do nonetheless demonstrate that the Right, including its most powerful figures, long ago relinquished any limits when it comes to rhetorical attacks. The only difficult part of compiling this list is deciding what the worst offenders are and which examples should be left out. And that is to say nothing of the daily doses of hatred and bile that spew forth from the Right blogosphere, which I have no doubt someone else will be compiling shortly -- again."

Besides that, though, what amazes me is the sheer laziness of this reporter, who chose to seek out confirmation of his own preconceptions rather than ask himself: are there any truly interesting stories about blogs out there? If so what are they?

I can think of a number. I think that a well-researched story on Josh Marshall's impact on the President's Social Security proposal would be fascinating, as would a similar story on Steve Clemons and the Bolton nomination, or for that matter Katherine and extraordinary rendition. Likewise, it would be interesting to ask about many local, small-scale bits of political activism have been conceived on blogs, and to what extent involvement with blogs actually fosters concrete political action. I'd love to read an article on political campaigns that have tried to integrate blogs into their strategy, and tried to figure out what difference, if any, this made. I think a serious comparison of liberal and conservative blogs would be fascinating. And I think there is a very interesting story to be told about the role of blogs in informing citizens about complicated issues, and the impact of having genuine experts communicating directly with people in a completely accessible medium.

These are just the stories I came up with off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many more that I'm not thinking of just now. But in order for reporters to find them, they would have to look past their own preconceptions, see what's actually out there, and do some real reporting. Apparently, that's too much to expect from one of America's leading newspapers.

Sheesh.

Random Radio Open Thread

by hilzoy

Busy busy busy. But NPR was very interesting today. On Fresh Air, Seymour Hersh was discussing his article on Iran. (Note: I do intend to write about this at some point, but reading it reduced me to speechlessness.) Two points seemed interesting to me. First, he said that he has heard that one of the reasons why the White House has been lobbying so hard against Ibrahim Jaafari becoming prime minister of Iraq is that were he to become prime minister, he would ask US troops to leave. That's interesting. Another interesting thing about this remark: Hersh made it in response to Terri Gross' asking what role Iraq was playing in the administration's thinking. She seemed to me to be expecting an answer like: it hasn't gone very well, admittedly, but here's why they think Iran might be different. Instead, Hersh said this, and added that he could see why they might imagine that in the summer, trying to explain to the American people why, after all those dead troops and all that money, we were being asked to leave, they might regard Iraq as politically attractive. It was about the last answer to Gross' question that I expected.

At the end of the interview, she asked him whether he had any concluding thoughts. It seemed like a throwaway question, but Hersh said: yes. At no point in the hundreds of conversations I had about this did anyone suggest that we had made any official estimates of the Iranian civilian casualties that would result from a bombing campaign, and that he thought that was dreadful. I agree.

It was a very interesting interview with one of the best reporters currently working, and well worth listening to.

Earlier in the morning, I heard Gen. Anthony Zinni on the Dianne Rehm show. He described one occasion, in the 90s, when he was opposed to the Iraq Liberation Act and the support of Ahmed Chalabi, and William Cohen, who was then Secretary of Defense, and who disagreed with him, nonetheless brought him personally to meet with various Congressional leaders on the grounds that they ought to hear what Zinni had to say. I thought: yes, that's exactly what people who were concerned with the good of the country, as opposed to winning at any cost, would do: they would bring people who disagreed with them, but whose views they respected, to meet with decision-makers, in order to be sure that they heard both sides of the story. It's also what anyone who respected Congress as an equal branch of government would do.

I sometimes worry that we will get used to the levels of mendacity that we've seen from this administration: that we will stop remembering that it is not normal for administrations to lie to Congress on a regular basis, to suppress all dissenting points of view, or to try to game the system so that their preferred outcome prevails. Some of this, I imagine, always happens; but I think we should never forget that it has not always been the norm, and we should never, ever get used to it.

Final, utterly unrelated note: does anyone here know anything about radon? Specifically, if the EPA standard is 4, and one's reading is 4.1, and it was very stormy, and barometric pressure drives up radon readings, should one worry?

Otherwise, open thread.

That Fifth Dentist

by Slartibartfast

(UPDATED, through the magic of the Internets)

I normally wouldn't think of posting this, given that it was sort of a personal pi-radians shift in perspective about the whole WaPo semi-kerfluffle regarding purported mobile weapons labs, but rilkefan has made the suggestion, and I'm all about service.

To all-too-briefly summarize, this has been cast as administration embroidery by WaPo and by one group of experts vs two others by Confederate Yankee and Captain's Quarters.  No, I haven't bothered to read either of the latter in detail yet; just the ensuing discussion regarding what they have to say about the whole thing.  There's also some discussion of this over at Protein Wisdom, where I've posted my one and only comment in this regard outside of the local neighborhood.

So, my question: what sort of experts were in the other two groups that thought that these were (or might be) mobile bioweapons laboratories?  II'd assume that to be considered an expert, one would have to be familiar with bioweapons manufacture and culturing of biologicals, which in turn would imply some sort of passing familiarity with the equipment necessary to do those things.  Why do I ask?  Well, because of the Duelfer Report account (suggested by frequent commentor Urinated States of America) that mentions nearly a dozen major deficiencies (page 81, Table 1) in the equipment in the more intact of the trailers that pretty much rule out utility for bioweapons manufacture.  Those are just the major ones, mind.

Given that, one wonders: just what was it about either of these trailers that said "mobile bioweapons lab", besides the mobile part?  Or, more to the point, what about the trailers didn't say "couldn't possibly be a mobile bioweapons lab", other than the mobility point?  To paraphrase myself: the two teams of experts who thought there was something WMD-related here ought to have Table 1, Page 81 tatooed on their collective foreheads.

Update: Protein Wisdom has a new post up regarding timeline which merits pondering and discussion, but the timeline hasn't much to do with this post.  This post is more of a what-were-they-thinking kind of thing.

Straight Talk

by hilzoy

Remember back in 2000, when Republicans earnestly assured us that if we elected George W. Bush, we wouldn't have to put up with slippery statements like "that depends what the meaning of 'is' is"? That was before we found out that when the President assured us that no one in his administration was leaking classified information, leaks at his direction didn't count since he could declassify anything at will; that when he assured us that he would only employ surveillance methods in accordance with the laws and the Constitution, he was interpreting the laws and the Constitution to say that the President can do more or less whatever he wants during what he decides is a time of war; and all the other delightful locutions we've come to know and love.

Tomorrow's Washington Post contains one more tale of straight talk from the Bush administration:

"On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remains classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. (...)

The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.

By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.

"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs." (...)

The group's report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.

"It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket," said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group."

Yep. George W. Bush: he says what he means, and he means what he says. No slippery verbal tricks from him. Ha ha ha.