Cavalcade of Mammals

The 60 Minutes TV show has joined the push to deploy the Active Denial System (ADS), a millimeter-wave transmitter that causes intense pain but doesn’t kill or cause burns with short exposures.

60 Minutes has covered the pain ray several times, but today aired a complete endorsement and argument for its immediate deployment. A parade of military, government, and ex-military police officers lauded the pain gun, said it was safe, harmless, and would save lives.

It was so over the top it got creepy. An assistant secretary of the Air Force, the woman in charge of buying the weapon, said the pain ray works so good that anyone that doesn’t run away is a ‘determined adversary’ and can be considered a ‘hostile’, a ‘terrorist’. The direct implication of that is anyone who doesn’t run away can be shot dead. Of course it has a range of half a mile, so if a person doesn’t see where it is coming from and runs the wrong way he or she will get killed. The weapon looks to have a small focus area, so if used on a crowd it would need to be waved around or several pain rays used. This also makes it hard to know the expected or ‘safe’ direction to run. And of course, the use of an intermittent pain ray in a crowd is likely to start a panic, with people trapped in the crowd running every which way.

Also creepy was the military’s test footage provided to 60 Minutes. People carrying anti-war and peace signs in English walking around peacefully were the targets of the pain ray. Err, so why exactly does the military think a demonstration on how the pain ray can disperse peace rallys is a great demonstration? The US does have a long history of peaceful demonstrations disrupted by illegal police actions, but doesn’t seem to suffer from a lack technology…

So what’s the plan? The 60 Minutes episode pushed the pain ray as a US/Iraq War weapon. This is no doubt mostly hype–every new weapon being pushed today is no doubt sold as an Iraq War weapon. But exactly why would the US Army be called out to disperse political protests in Iraq? Isn’t that exactly the role the US has been training the Iraqi police to handle for the last five years?

No doubt the end game has US police departments equipped with the pain ray and using it mainly on peaceful protests. Of course after the police starts firing the pain ray, I’m sure people will be running around screaming–a ready made riot for TV news condemnation.

After a few years to accommodate the US public to the pain ray it will likely get shopped out to foreign governments and used primarily for suppressing protests.

Of course the pain ray is just the most prominent of the anti-democracy technologies in the pipeline. There are many ways being developed to monitor and disrupt democracy activists and their efforts.

Funniest political blog, http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com.

Things younger than John McCain include the chocolate chip cookie, the shopping cart, nylons, velcro, Cheerios, the Cobb salad (whatever that is), Spam, Kodachrome, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Slinky.

Before the Slinky, kids played in the mud. And before that, John McCain was born.

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol agreement to reduce green gases was signed by 30+ nations including (as best I can tell) all the Western countries except the US. So it was clear in 1997 that the world was warming and green house gas emissions needed to be reduced, but *when* exactly did scientists figure this out?

My memory of the issue with a little proding stretches back to the 1992 climate agreement signed by George HW Bush, officially called the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change. It called on countries to cut green house gas emissions but didn’t set binding targets. So global warming was understood back in ’92, and must have been known about years earlier for political action to have been taken then. I didn’t know about research earlier than the 1970s modeling research.

A great talk laying out the history of global warming science by historian Naomi Oreskes is on the web:

She lays out a number of landmarks. She gives an interesting talk–I’ve pared it away and just list the landmarks here:

• 1931, E. O. Hulbert, increasing atmospheric CO₂ 2-3X will lead to 4-7°K increase in world temperature.
• 1938, G. S. Calender, increasing CO₂ leading to increased temps, 1880-1930s
• 1957, Suess and Revelle paper pointing out that dumping back into the atmosphere over a few decades CO₂ stored over millions of years in coal and oil could heat up the world. Calls for detailed research into the world CO₂ budget–where will the CO₂ go, and what secondary effects will there be?
• 1964, NAS committee warns of “inadvertent weather modification” caused by CO₂ from burning fossil fuels.
• 1965, Keeling, about 1/2 of CO₂ from burning fossil fuels will end up in the atmosphere.
• 1965, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Board on Environmental Pollution, by 2000 there will 25% more CO₂ in the atmosphere and marked and uncontrollable changes in climate could occur.
• 1979, JASON committee reports that predicted increases in atmospheric CO₂ will increase world temperature 2.4°C or 2.8°C (two different JASON models). Further, the increase will be much greater at the poles, 10-12°C [Now observed].
• 1979, Charney report summarizes climate science “If CO₂ continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”
• 1988, IPCC created to study climate and suggest solutions.
• 1988, US National Energy Policy Act, “to establish a national energy policy that will quickly reduce the generation of CO₂ and trace gases as quickly as is feasible in order to slow the pace and degree of atmospheric warming…to protect the global environment.”
• 1992, U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change
• 1997, the Kyoto Protocol

Here’s a video that describes what Republicans mean when they call for bipartisanship:



This is not what all Republicans want from bipartisanship. Grover Norquist, a leader of the conservative movement, thinks of it this way: “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.” (May, 2003)

How did the Washington papers cover Presidental candidate Dodd’s threat to filibuster the proposed law giving the telecom companies retroactive immunity for breaking the law and illegally spying on Americans? Dodd was able to get the bill delayed at least until January, one of the biggest victories for civil liberties this year.

The NYT has it on page A29.

Washington Post has a story on page A2, but written so you can’t tell what happened. Dodd is described as fighting the bill, but his crucial role is not described. Reid’s extraordinary effort to pass a bill that included telecom immunity, bypassing normal senate rules, working hand-in-hand with the Bush administration and Dodd’s single-handed stand against it aren’t described.

It’s a scene out of the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”! Updated slightly–there’s no free paper trying to print the news so we are spared the sight of NYT thugs beating kids, and the A29 mention allows the NYT to claim they ‘covered’ the story.

Those old science fiction stories predict the future remarkably well, but the details are always slightly off. :)

The next President is going to have enormous challenges. And not just the typical ones that make being US President such a big, all-consuming job. I mean when done right, of course. The Bush years have shown that a monkey can sit in the chair and the US will muddle through. But the problems Bush created, the problems the Republicans ignored, and a heap of new challenges will confront the next President.

The next President will have to fix what the Republicans have screwed up. Let’s only consider first the federal budget. The budget is $250 billion out of balance. And the $4 trillion in debt added over the Bush years have debt payments sucking up an even larger share of the federal budget. The Iraq occupation is has an ongoing cost in lives and $150 billion a year (plus a similar amount in deferred costs).

The US army is pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Growing US medical costs need to be dealt with, and the US is out of simple fixes, and running out of time to ignore the problem. We need to change how the US health care system is run.

The economy is heading into a recession.

The world is at peak oil. Oil will get more expensive every year. Likely oil prices will rise slowly for a next 2-3 years as world production stays constant while demand rises. Then it gets worse as world production starts to fall 5% a year and oil gets *really* expensive and/or shortages develop. Natural gas is running short as well.

Global warming needs to be addressed with carbon cuts. This will require restructuring the US energy economy, a huge undertaking. Funnily, lucky chance, peak oil will help reduce oil usage, but the US will need to start replacing coal power plants with something more expensive.

That’s a huge set of problems, each presenting a big political challenge, but many of them combined technological/natural disaster/political problems that each individually would be a once in a generation problem.

I have listed these problems not to depress people, but to make a point that the next Presidency will not be business as usual, four years similar to the last decade or two. The next President needs to start making the challenge clear to start building political support for the required effort. And yet none of the Dem candidates have done this.

They need to do this, start making the size and nature of the problems clear to the US people. Talking about them, providing people with the background and showing them where things are heading. Of course detailed proposals can’t be offered yet, but the candidates can sketch out the problems and what give people a notion of how the US can deal with them.

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