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Wednesday, December 04, 2002
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Maureen Dowd writes: It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange—— I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team. There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to lead the 9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist, not so much Metternich as Machiavelli. They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's résumé: keeping the Vietnam War going for years after he realized it might be unwinnable; encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard Nixon, telling him he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers running the Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to track down leaks on the Cambodia bombing. If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too many results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself "a secret swinger." (12/04/02) | |
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Donivan Bessinger, MD writes: The conscious is capricious. It can be deluded into defining the good in many ways, and the principles which it derives are subject to wide variations in interpretation in society. To say "Pursue your own values," or even "choose your own test," is hardly a definitive solution to global or individual ethical problems. Ethics, then, must appeal to a principle operating beyond consciousness. However, the principle must be one of which the conscious may be made aware, for the principle must be applied to "every deliberate action of pursuit" (Aristotle), and rigorously tested not only for result but for its concordance with reality itself. An ethical principle operating in nature outside of consciousness is by definition, unconscious. It is that world operating outside the influence and regulation of our normal human consciousness that we commonly call the natural world. It is a fundamental premise of our systems worldview that human consciousness and human functioning are themselves integral with the world, and are indivisibly one with "nature." However, there is a difficulty in attempting to base ethics on nature. Writing in 1903, British philosopher G. E. Moore cautioned about the naturalistic fallacy of saying that some particular quality (valued by the conscious) is Good because it occurs in nature. That is, we may not base ethics on some good merely because it is "natural" -- that could, in fact, be a special case of the ego's conflict of interest just mentioned. (12/04/02) | |
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New York Times -- A few weeks ago, officials of the American Petroleum Institute met in Denver to discuss their chief goal for the new Congress: an energy bill that would open up public lands in the Rocky Mountain West to further oil and gas exploration. At that meeting, the oil executives decided among other things to undertake a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to convince voters in five Western states that new exploration in the Rockies would bolster their local economies while inflicting minimal damage on the environment. The campaign is timed to start early in the new year, just as Congress convenes with Republicans in control of both houses and eager to take up an energy bill. Around the country, businesses and industries that donated millions of dollars to elect Republicans are mapping out strategies to take advantage of the party's sweep in Washington. The White House was already sympathetic to business concerns, but with all of Congress now under Republican control, industry's expectations are higher. On Tuesday, for example, several power industry representatives are meeting here under the banner of the Edison Electric Institute, the lobby for electric utilities, to discuss the new lay of the land and what they may be able to achieve. A checklist of goals for the "extractive" industries — oil, gas, mining and timber — begins with a comprehensive energy bill. Provisions pushed by those industries and others would include $34 billion in tax incentives for an array of projects: to promote exploration and expansion, develop new technologies, increase the use of ethanol in gasoline, build a natural-gas pipeline in Alaska and limit the liability of the nuclear power industry in case of catastrophic accidents. (12/04/02) | |
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New York Times -- Yucca Mountain cannot be used for disposal of the nation's nuclear waste, the State of Nevada said in a brief filed today, arguing that the site does not meet criteria that require its natural features to contain the material for thousands of years. The brief, filed in a suit in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, includes Energy Department estimates that if "engineered barriers" fail, Yucca will leak. According to the department, if the man-made containers do not hold, the radiation dose at the site boundary will be six times higher than the rules allow after 1,000 years; after 3,000 years, the dose will be 67 times higher. ... The host rock at Yucca, a ridge in the desert 100 miles from Las Vegas, is formed by volcanic emissions. The main mechanism for waste to escape from the mountain is rainwater seeping down from the summit to the groundwater far below. That water flows steadily across the site's boundaries, where it can feed wells and come to the surface in springs. Government scientists initially believed that water would take 9,000 to 80,000 years to flow from the repository to the accessible environment. But researchers have discovered fractures in the rock where water flows much faster. In 1997, scientists found traces of chlorine-36, which does not exist in nature, in the five-mile tunnel drilled to explore the mountain's rock. That meant that material produced by nuclear explosions, the first of which was in 1944, had already penetrated through 800 feet of rock. According to the suit, in 1996 the Energy Department said that some water could go from the repository level to the water table, 1,300 feet down, in 50 years, and then flow beyond the site boundaries. (12/04/02) | |
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New York Times: Science -- Dr. Melody A. Keena's enemy is armed with supersensitive detection devices and a pair of deadly pincers that can shear through the toughest armor. It also has cute blue bands that hang like sagging socks on the ends of its legs — all six of them. "It's actually kind of pretty," said Dr. Keena, aware of the contradiction of extolling the hidden beauty of an insect as dangerous as the Asian long-horned beetle, which her research has shown to be an even graver threat to $700 billion worth of hardwood trees in America's forests and cities than had been expected. Now that the trees have lost their leaves, foresters, guided by Dr. Keena's research, are searching for telltale signs of how far the beetles have spread. Dr. Keena, a United States Forest Service entomologist, has found that the beetles are twice as prolific here as in China, their homeland. Although maple trees are their favorite snack, the black and white beetles, which can be two inches long and have body-length spotted antennas, will also feed on ash, poplar and other trees and deposit their eggs in them. (12/04/02) | |
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New York Times --The Nassau grouper, a large, colorful fish known for its spectacular spawning ritual, has all but disappeared in much of the Caribbean. But last month, under pressure from environmental organizations, Belize agreed to protect 11 spawning sites from commercial fishing in a move that could save the fish from extinction. The grouper, which can grow to three feet and weigh up to 55 pounds, is a highly prized food source and a commercially valuable export whose spawning ritual makes it a sitting duck for fishermen. Each year, at the winter full moons in December and January, thousands of groupers congregate at sites off the coast of Belize to mate. Local commercial fishermen are well aware of their tendency to "group" at the same time each year. So like the fish, they gather at the spawning sites and easily scoop up huge catches, often before the groupers have had time to reproduce. ... The new regulations, passed on Nov. 16, prohibit commercial fishing in 11 known spawning areas, including Glover's Reef and Cay Glory, and leave two other sites open for commercial harvest. "The fact that this legislation is so widespread and recognized in the government is great news," said Dr. Ellen Pikitch, director of marine conservation programs for Wildlife Conservation Society, which is based in the Bronx. "The Belize barrier reef is the second-largest barrier ecosystem in the world and was declared a World Heritage site," Dr. Pikitch said, "so this is extremely important from a global standpoint." (12/04/02) | |
5:56:48 AM 
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2003
Timothy Wilken.
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