Lunchbreak Biomimicry Alert!

If you haven't noticed, there are some cool things happening with biomimicry lately. From flying squirrel parachutes to insectoid architecture, it looks like humans are learning to learn how to learn from the world around them.

Imperialism = Free Stuff

What's so bad about imperialism?

Every time there is a clash of cultures, war of conquest, and other instance of violance between two peoples seperated by national, religious, or (insert b.s. reason for bigotry here) differences, neither side is unchanged. It's no accident that English, French, and Spanish are spoken in every New World country. The legacy of the Spanish conquest of South American peoples can be seen from the street names in Argentina to the murals that adorn buildings all over my neighborhood in San Francisco, the Mission. Tobacco, a New World plant, is one of the most commonly abused drugs in China, thanks to the English.

As the Bush administration threatens to expand the War on Terror to new shores, we hear at The World You Know what to remind everyone what the true legacy of imperialism is: free stuff. If you don't believe me, just look at how many karate and tae kwon do schools there are in strip malls. If we had never fought Japan or "helped out" Korea, those would have never been possible. Also, Volkswagons.

So, in the intereste of the greater good, we decided to make a list of some of the things to be gained from needlessly and senselessly invading some of the soverign nations on G.W.'s hit list.

China - Leatherette Ipod and cellphone cases, little plastic toys

Myanmar - The country has like half a million monks. We could but them to work churning out those prayer flags that everyone seems to have. I don't care if they aren't Tibetan.

Venezuala - Oil, universal healthcare

Iran - Those bomb-ass sugar cubes with the little bit of saffron in them

Cuba - 90-year-old jazz musicians, sugar, baseball players

Syria - Henna. Lots and lots of Henna.

Hidden Costs and Global Warming

Yesterday I found an old book that I picked up in college, called “Problems of an Industrial Society.”

As you can imagine, it’s a fun read.

Written in the 60s and updated in 1981, the book recalls a kinder, happier time when humankind as a whole did not yet fully grasp how truly f*cked we were as far as the whole global warming/pollution thing.

It also highlighted a classification system for environmental problems (proposed by T. C. Sinclair). The system is as follows:

Class 1 in which the amenities and aesthetic qualities of life are violated. Class 2 in which there is injury or death to individuals from environmental contamination. Class 3 in which whole species are threatened with extinction from disturbances of ecological inter-relationships. Class 4 in which fundamental cycles in the biologic pyramid and its natural environment are distorted or destroyed to such a degree that life for whole series of living forms becomes impossible over wide areas and possibly over the globe as a whole.

This brings up an important point that is often overlooked in the debate about global warming, pollution, and the rhetoric surrounding environmental protection: It's not just about the polar bears. What we do to the environment has an impact on our whole quality of life. What's more, many of these changes are long-term to the extent which they're almost permanent ("irreversible in my lifetime" = "permanent" to me).

I’ve wanted for some time to talk about the “hidden costs of global warming and pollution,” so here it is:

THE HIDDEN COSTS OF GLOBAL WARMING AND POLLUTION (arranged in order of the Sinclair classification system)

Class 1

Ugliness – Think about it.. LA smog isn’t as lethal as the smoke in London from the 1950s, but it isn’t pretty. Glacier National Park may soon be sans-glaciers. I don’t even want to talk about the aesthetic qualities of having 58,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled only a couple of miles away from my house. Smell – Higher temperatures for longer period of time means more bacteria hanging around. More bacteria = more bad smells. All you have to do is walk down Mission Street between 16th and 19th to know get a whiff of what we’re all in for. I have smelled the future, and it is stinky.

Class 2 Crime – What, you don’t believe there’s a relationship between global warming and crime? There is. It may not be provable as a cause-and-effect relationship (yet), but just read this (and while you’re thinking about it, do you really think Iraq would be so violent if it had the ambient temperature of Hammerfest, Norway?). MRSA. Fast facts: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus kills more people each year than AIDS, emphysema, or homicide. West Nile Virus, which can lead to encephalitis and death, is expanding ever northward in the face of warmer temperatures. The threat of encephalitis – it's enough to make your head hurt.

Drought – Not a problem... unless you're in Georgia.

Class 3 Extinctions – There’s still time… for some.

Class 4 In the 1980 printing of Problems of an Industrial Society, the authors state that there have had been no instances of places where biological systems had been fundamentally disrupted. They mention that there was no data on how much pollution the ocean could sustain until this point was reached. Sadly, in some areas, the line has already been crossed. Only time will tell whether we’ll be able to reverse the damage to the environmental systems that we still depend on for our very existence. That was depressing. Next time, I’m going to write about something fun.

Good news for big business: Global Warming is Real!

Just in case all of you conservative-capitalist types missed it, the European Space Agency announced today that there is now a navigable Northwest Passage thanks to global warming. And you guys thought it wasn't real....

Having no internet is like living in Baghdad (without the bombs)

Apologies for not posting lately, but my apartment doesn't have an internet connection. While I'm not posting, you should go to Open Target and check out something that I find to be very interesting....

More Arctic Hijinks

More countries are trying to claim that the rapidly-warming arctic belongs to their continental shelf. Great. At the rate that tropical storms are forming this season, it may be choice beachfront property in a few years, as well.

Big Brother News

Let's face it, when someone pries into your personal life or tries shut you up, you don't like it. Maybe this is something particular to Western societies, what with the long tradition of tolerated dissent (as long as you don't pose an actual threat to the people in charge). Most people who consider the First Amendment to be a good idea are a little afraid of corporations and governments that spend too much time trying to shut down the public exchange of information (see this article about self-serving wikipedia manipulation). That's why there are so many people happy about Karl Rove retiring. In addition to being a political operative whose demagoguery was only outdone by the vice president himself, Karl Rove was an expert at manipulating public opinion and running roughshod over our unalienable rights. There's nothing wrong with PR, mind you. It simply has to be balanced by some kind of ethical code. "Win at all costs" is not an ethical code. Take the various Bush administration wiretapping scandals, for example. It's very hard to violate the basic precepts of constitutional law, lie about it, and be indignant when other countries who state openly that they don't care about privacy at all and actively want to control their population indicate they are going to do the same. I mean, c'mon, China even restricts what's allowed to come up on Google searches (which may end up hurting Google's popularity in the long run). Americans aren't even sure if they like undercover journalists. How did wiretapping get to be okay?