The New Yorker has a gigantic piece up on Paul Watson, the former Greenpeace cofounder who is now the generalissimo of the Sea Shepherds. Watson is possibly the last of the fully mobilized alpha-male environmentalists that roamed the heroic early age of the green action movement. His ego spreads out across the sea, like a living shield for the dieing oceans. Say what you want about him and his mythic vigilantism, ramming a decrepit Norwegian trawler with a jagged cutting boom welded on the side into an active whaling ship denormalizes the situation for everybody. And I think we need a lot of that. It’s not real clear that many people have actually gotten hurt by his actions (although some certainly could have, and apparently some have come awfully close). Anything that slows up the sterilization of the oceans, which may be heading towards an unrecoverable threshold, or at it, or just possibly past it, is a good way to spend a life.

Neptune’s Navy, Paul Watson’s wild crusade to save the oceans

I also thought this was an interesting point:

It was not until the mid-nineties that fisheries scientists turned their attention to the spiral of exploitation and attempted to gauge its consequences. They discovered that their discipline had been measuring biodiversity with a very narrow lens: looking, for instance, at habitats only in a particular region of the ocean, or at the rise or decline of a particular species, and usually with respect to benchmarks that had been set just decades earlier. No one had tried to determine what the full spectrum of life in the ocean looked like a hundred years or five hundred years in the past. “We forgot the wonder and splendor of a virgin nature,” Watson wrote recently. “We revise history and make it fit into our present perceptions.” In 1995, the process of forgetting was given a name—“shifting baseline syndrome”—by Daniel Pauly, a scientist at the University of British Columbia. “Essentially, this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes,” Pauly argued in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. He concluded, “The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species.”

From After Years of Effort, Mandatory NIH Public Access Policy Passes Congress, Library Journal Academic Newswire

Despite heavy lobbying from publishers against the public access provision, as well as White House opposition and the threat of two last-second amendments to gut it, the legislative battle culminated yesterday with overwhelming approval of the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill (75-19)….The bill must now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar public access provision. Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet this fall. The final, consolidated bill will then have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President, where it is expected to be vetoed.

Yep, the ultra-efficient two party system. During a best-case scenario of one party holding both chambers. Getting things done efficiently. Proportional representation, now that would be crazy.

How is it possible that the US terrorist watch-list has 750 000 people on it, and adds another 500 every day? Are there really 750 000 terrorists cruising around the country?

Well, I suppose if one of the most proven-not-to-be-a-terrorist people in the world still qualifies for the no-fly list based on the State Department’s careful consideration of his case, then, yep, we are all terrorists and none of us should be on planes.

Colbert Consulted Parties Before Announcing Run — New York Times

“There is nothing in our filing that would prohibit him from running on both ballots, if he chose to pay the filing fees,” he said.

And what is that fee? It is $35,000, Mr. Dawson said.

“The great thing about America,” Mr. Dawson said, “is, if you can meet the constitutional requirements to run for president of the United States, you can do so.”

First constitutional requirement: being rich enough that $35 000 dollars isn’t worth acknowledging as a barrier.

Naomi Klein has a piece in The Nation, Greenspan and the Myth of the True Believer, where she ruminates on the question of intent: do free-market capitalists really believe that laissez faire discipline sets the conditions for the best possible society through general uplift in wealth, or do they just say that because it’s a convenient cover for their minority cash and power grab? Her more or less tentative answer is: convenient cover.

Yet ideological contradictions are only relevant if Greenspan really is a true believer. I’m not convinced. Greenspan writes that as a student he had no interest in big ideas. Unlike his classmates who were in the thrall of Keynesianism with its promise of building a better world, Greenspan was simply good at math. He started doing research for powerful corporations; it was profitable, but Greenspan made no claims to a higher social contribution.

I figure it doesn’t much matter whether the radical capitalists believe their public rhetoric or not. The effect is inevitably the same, for better or worse. I’ve met some who really do seem to believe that they’re inducing positive transformation by cutting the string on the kite of society and letting the warm winds of market emergence carry it to better places. Others seem to think non-interference in market effects is a kind of moral imperative, and actively working to shape outcomes is a sort of flinching cowardice. Either way or any other way, real-world outcomes make it look like unfettered capitalism is dangerous and must be stopped. Apart from some recalibration of tactics, we should probably do that regardless.

No seriously, I’m not. So why do I look to libertarian political ‘tudes whenever I need to feel like there are real people with real ideas out there? Various reasons, but here’s a minor superficial one:

Everybody saw the Washington Post poll giving Hillary Clinton a 33-point primary lead. Drudge led with it for about 12 hours. The voice-of-God spin came from Clinton backer Rep. Tom Petri (D-Wisc.): “It’s all over but the voting.” That’s a nice way of putting it as voting is a sort of integral part of the primary process.

God bless Reason magazine. Oh no wait, don’t.

A friend of mine was contracted by an anarchist bookstore to make some posters (yes, I have interesting friends and I’m proud of it). He came up with lots of great stuff but my favourite mostly just said “somewhere along the line we forgot that we made all of this stuff up.”

I think he’s right, and that’s why horse-race political coverage is depressing to me:

Painting the Suburbs Blue, Ed Dionne Jr., Washington Post

If you buy into the pan-universal cue break theory, then fine, all of existence is an ordered series of inevitable predeterminate cause-and-effect events, and all we have is the utterly convincing illusion that we have meaningful choice over ourselves and influence on the world around us. I don’t know many folk who take that perspective, but I sure seem to know some who think that politics and business are inevitable end-of-history monoliths that just are that way, and having opinions about how they should or could be is tragic naivety. But here’s the thing: we make all this stuff up. Not individually, and not always intentionally, so we can’t just decide how the world should be and it will become that. But we do have influence, we can participate in the ebb-and-flow that collectively emerges our social scenarios. Democrats aren’t winning in the former red states because of a wobbly orbit in the universe which can be observed and extrapolated out to predict the rest of the future, they are winning there because they are somehow convincing people to vote for them in elections. If the republicans change their behaviour they can swing that around. Income disparity isn’t growing because free markets are the nature of the world and that’s what happens in free markets, it’s growing because our choices have created a particular form of free-market-based society where disparity can grow. It’s also our choices which have prevented it from growing more. Collectively at least, this stuff is on us. Some people take that as precocious self-importance, but it doesn’t make it less true.

Sorry about the title. Kieran Healy links and juxtaposes some Marxist and Smithist economic theory regarding specialization in the context of a set of photographs of Chinese toy factory workers. Its a good trick and one that I, not being an economist, don’t see don’t very often.

I’m a grown adult and know how to button my shirt and hold two different and legitimate meanings for the same word in my head at the same time. Sometimes it’s productive for words to have different meanings (“progress” comes to mind, in my peer group), sometimes it doesn’t hurt. Sometimes it’s just dumb. For instance, Boston seems to be determined to redefine the word “hoax”.

My understanding of hoax: somebody tries to convince others that a thing is happening that isn’t really happening.

In Boston however, official reality has it that a “hoax” is when authority thinks a thing is happening when it isn’t really happening. Doesn’t matter whether anyone was trying to make them think that it is happening, it just matters that they think it is. Thus if something you do is misinterpreted by them, you are responsible for perpetrating a hoax. Perhaps criminally responsible. More specifically (if this is Boston) you are responsible for a bomb hoax.

Exhibit A: The aqua teen hunger force “bomb hoax”. In which people put up LED-glowy signs which looked nothing like bombs, but were interpreted as bombs by the apparently un-bomb-savvy people in charge of dealing with bombs, and blown up. After they realized they weren’t bombs, and one hopes had the mental flexibility to realize they were never remotely meant to look like bombs, the authorities continued to mouth the words “bomb hoax” for weeks on end, and the term was carried in headlines from most of the major media sources. The “perpetrators” of the “hoax” were treated as actual bomb hoax perpetrators and criminally charged. Luckily for our collective sanity, said perps had the un-Bostonian mental flexibility to be resistant to the insidious pull of official-reality broadcasting, and took the charges with exactly the seriousness they deserved. I loved those guys, I still do.

Exhibit B: some comp-art dork shows up for her flight at the Boston Logan airport with an art-installation stylized electronic device harnessed to her chest. The authorities respond swiftly and with prejudice and for once I think they were in the right to do so. I haven’t seen the device, but if it looked even kinda like a bomb then they really should have worried about it being strapped to somebody in an airport. So they got out the guns and took her into custody and hopefully she retroactively realized that there are some reasonable limits to personal expression and they tousled her hair and told her “get out of here kid and don’t come back with fake bombs” and she said “gee officer, and I hope my friends learned a lesson too!” and we can all expect there to be fewer impromptu bomb-art-installations in airports from here on out.

Except, guess what! The authorities decided she meant to make people think it was a bomb, and what the authorities decide is what’s real even if it isn’t, so they retroactively inserted the intent in her mind of making a “hoax” and told everybody and now that is what the media are calling it. Too bad english language, it’s more important that our homeland security heroes feel self-important and justified in over-responding to future incidents, so you’re just going to have to take the hit, again, in Boston. Better stay out of Boston next time english language. It isn’t safe for you in there.

Reason magazine’s Daniel Rothschild provides a libertarian/anarchist/capitalist/localist and generally anti-bureaucracy view of the efforts of the everyday people of the gulf coast to rebuild their Katrina smashed communities.

Myths of Hurricane Katrina Three: The Gulf Coast is suffering from a lack of leadership

But leadership isn’t something you are elected into. There have been plenty of leaders on the Gulf Coast over the last two years. It’s just that their names don’t roll off the tongues of magazine editors, or appear in newspapers or campaign ads.
….
If there’s any good news to come out of the recovery effort it’s that people in the hurricane zone have learned to become less reliant on political saviors and more reliant on themselves.
….
Enter FEMA. FEMA officials told Voitier she’d need to have a “kickoff meeting” before she could open the schools-where she’d meet not with parents, or students, or teachers, but with a federal environmental protection team, a historical preservation team, and the “404-” and “406-mitigation teams” (terms which refer to specific sections of the Stafford Act, the law that covers federal disaster response). And it wasn’t a “meeting” so much as an introduction to the vast bureaucracy that was FEMA’s “education task force,” basically a list of barriers Voitier would have to clear before she could start classes.
….
Voitier decided to cut her losses and reopen the schools without FEMA’s help. She says she adopted a “the heck with you guys” approach. “We can do it, we’ll make it happen, and we’ll send you the bill.” Before Thanksgiving, Voitier opened her first school, and 334 students attended the first day of classes. By the last day of the year, there were 2,360, and over 3,000 on the first day of the next.