The bacterial threat to civilisation

Archdruid Report writer John Michael Greer highlights another major threat to our way of life - the evolution of bacteria (emphases and paragraphing mine):

"In the case of the spread of antibiotic resistance among microbes, there are at least three patterns at work.

"First, microbes are being selected for their resistance to individual antibiotics.

"Second, as new antibiotics are brought out to replace old ones, microbes are being selected for their ability to develop resistance to one antibiotic after another as quickly as possible.

"Finally, the pressure exerted on the entire microbial biosphere by the pervasive presence of antibiotics in the modern environment is giving a huge selective advantage to species that have the ability to exchange genes for resistance with other species."

This fits in with Greer's long-running theme, which is that when "Man" sets himself against Nature, Nature will win. Whether we consider antibiotics or fossil fuels, quick fixes are not permanent fixes. All we have done is multiplied our numbers and developed a style of living in a way that is unsustainable.

We need to balance the principle of efficiency with that of ability to survive. Crowding into cities and depending on resource distribution grids overseen by computers makes us increasingly vulnerable to natural and man-made catastrophe.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Nick Clegg is a balloon without the rubber

Imagine that you are a senior officer in HM Armed Forces, seated with your colleagues around the table in the war room. The agenda is to discuss the following brief, assigned to you by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg:

"The murder of innocent men, women and children through the use of chemical weapons is a repugnant crime and a flagrant abuse of international law, and if we stand idly by we set a very dangerous precedent indeed, where brutal dictators and brutal rulers will feel they can get away with using chemical weapons on a larger and larger scale in the future. These are weapons which were used on a large scale in the First World War, banned back in the 1920s, so all we're considering is a serious response to that.

"What we're not considering is regime change, try [sic] to topple the Assad regime, trying to settle the civil war in Syria one way or another. That needs to be settled through a political process. We're not considering an open-ended military intervention with boots on the ground like we saw in Iraq.

"What is being considered is measures which are legal, which are proportionate, and which are specific to discouraging and sending out a clear signal that the use of chemical weapons in this day and age is simply intolerable."

You have not yet been shown any evidence that the recent gas attack was in fact initiated by a brutal dictator / ruler, and you are not required to determine the matter.

You are now tasked with discouraging further such attacks, by anyone, without taking sides in the Syrian civil war, or in any way helping to overthrow the present government of Syria. You may not permit British "boots on the ground" there, and must at all times ensure that your interventions are legal and proportionate, so that HMG and yourselves personally can avoid being prosecuted afterwards. The committee is expected to submit detailed proposals to the Cabinet with the utmost despatch. Biscuits are limited and there will be no refills of coffee.

The use of deniable irregulars, such as Tinker Bell, may be considered.

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Walking with a sat nav

Traditional walkers who favour big leather boots and hairy socks still seem to look down on satellite navigation for walkers. Yet bit by bit the practical value of these remarkable products of the electronic age are creeping up on us.

So I recently bought one.

My gadget, from Satmap, isn’t quite the same as a sat nav designed for cars in that it knows nothing of footpaths and how to walk from A to B without getting lost. Instead it has a GPS location map linked to another map such as a digital version of a standard OS map. So basically, the thing is an electronic map which records your route and shows your current position. It does far more of course, but that’s the pared down nuts and bolts of the thing.

In fact there are numerous extras such as a compass, altimeter and facilities for geotagging photos, not all of which I’m likely to use, but modern gadgets are prone to include a host of unwanted frills and I'm used to ignoring the bits I don’t find useful.

My wife and I originally saw the capabilities of these devices while walking the Cumbria Way with a small band of pensioners from our local Ramblers group.

The Cumbria Way is a lovely walk and not at all difficult for reasonably fit walkers. Our route covered eighty five miles in six day. Even though it is a reasonably well marked national route there were quite a few occasions when our leader found his sat nav very useful, in spite of being an experienced walker leading a group of experienced walkers.

For me, the sat nav has three main advantages over a paper map. 

• I am able to record walks such as those organised by my local Ramblers Association.
• A large number of walks can be downloaded from a variety of internet sources.
• I know where we are when the path is unclear. 

As an example of the last point, we recently found ourselves unsure of the right path while walking in Somerset. Apparently confronted with two paths skirting a large field of wheat, our book of local walks said to take the right hand path. Fair enough – off we went.

However, the sat nav soon showed that we were deviating from the OS footpath, so we retraced our steps and soon discovered a signpost to a third path buried in the hedge. Maybe this meant the middle path was the right hand path referred to in our guide?

Wrong again according to the sat nav.

In the end it became obvious that the OS path went straight through the field of wheat but walkers simply skirted the field and rejoined the official path on the other side. The sat nav showed that this was indeed the right conclusion.

Okay – it would have been easy enough to work this out with a paper map, but the sat nav showed us we were going wrong after about fifty feet or so – no messing about looking for landmarks and no need to dig out the compass. Once we’d reached to other side of the wheat field, it also confirmed that we were back on the right path.

Even so, I don’t use the thing without a paper map unless the walk is one I’m familiar with, but the sat nav comes out far more often than the paper map these days.

An additional benefit is that it records miles walked, average speed, time spent actually walking and total ascents.

The last one is a little misleading, because a recorded total ascent of say 2000 feet does not necessarily imply a stiff climb or two. Instead it is the sum total of all the undulations of the whole walk which may have been somewhat less strenuous than a figure of 2000 feet appears to suggest.

In the end, the gadget is a digital map, a GPS system, a route recording system and access to a library of walks on the internet - all neatly packaged in one device. It makes walking life easier and I think a little more enjoyable.

Will these gadgets get more people walking though? Maybe - they do work rather well.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Liberty and cannabis

Go ask Alice.

Quite by chance, while flicking through the many TV channels in search of something, anything, that wasn't cheap drivel, I stumbled partway through a BBC This World programme, "America's Stoned Kids", presented by addiction expert Professor John Marsden. He was looking at Colorado's experiment in legalising the growing of cannabis plants for medical use, and the development of THC-infused products.

Showing him around a factory that manufactured a confectionery-like edible dose that packed the drug punch of a dozen joints into something that resembled a little coconut pyramid, the owner boasted that the company's capital value had just soared by $200 million. He was most put out when the professor asked him why the medicine had been made to look so attractive to children, but (unless it had been edited out) didn't hasten to repudiate any such intention.

There was also a soft-drink-like bottle that contained the equivalent of something like 24 spliffs. The official line was that it was a multi-dose product to be consumed over several days, but the MD easily agreed that many would drink it all in one go, and some would have more than one bottle at a time.

The last section of the programme featured a visit to a rehabilitation camp for teenagers, out in the mountains, and despite the self-knowledge gained from their months-long stay, it was obvious that a number would relapse shortly after returning to mainstream society. They understood that the drug was their enemy - it had started as an occasional joint, and inevitably progressed to one every two waking hours - but they weren't going to be able to hold out against opportunity, social pressure and the internal emotional turmoil that was looking for quick temporary relief.

The desire to indulge ourselves leads to much twisted argument. For example, some say we should legalise cannabis because of the suffering caused by criminals in the drug trade, but for those who are so compassionate the obvious direct solution is not to consume the drug. Others try to limit discussion of the potential harm, to the likelihood of psychosis or cancer or whatever, glossing over the damage caused to youngsters by their losing energy, initiative and clarity of mind in the very years when they should be finding their economic place in the adult world, not to mention forming social relationships.

Libertarian hardliners will take the absolutist existential line about being essentially free, and deny the philosophical implications of addiction, the subconscious and the conflicting drives within us. They will say that what they choose to do has nothing to do with anybody else, even though there are indeed wider social and financial consequences of an individual's decision to gratify himself.

I have tried before now to sketch out a map of liberty. The kind for which (for example) Americans fought the War of Independence, or the struggle against the Nazi menace, or Greece's liberation from the Ottoman Empire (and her resistance to the current subjugation by the new European Empire) has very little to do with consumerist self-addling. In my view, liberty is in danger of being trivialised by the aggressively slack-willed and self-ignorant, rationalising their weakness, selfishness and lack of self-control.

On the individual level of freedom, I find the Buddhist analysis persuasive. We can spend our entire lives fighting to break out of our attachments - I do - and those that succeed spend the rest of their time trying not to fall back into the traps, as well as helping others who want to escape. This would be a worthier (and less self-deluding) mission for the libertarian.

Will there be any reply from the Toking Taliban?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Fukushima radiation: "Don't buy Pacific fish"

One of John Ward's scientific correspondents tells him:

"I would also advise your Sloggers, not to buy fish products, salmon, tuna, sushi from the Pacific: as the Caesium plume spreads, the chances of ingesting contaminated fish will grow, and it will be interesting to ascertain what measures government is taking in this regard….”

Back in May, BBC News reported how Pacific tuna have absorbed radioactive material in their oceanic wanderings. The reporter was at pains to say that the fish were still safe to eat. There are further reports here.

I am less inclined to accept scientific reassurances than I used to be. I recall how the UK nuclear reactor at Windscale (since renamed Sellafield to shake off poisonous memories) was thought to be safe, and local schoolchildren would sometimes go up to the site to led condensation droplets fall into their mouths. Later, perhaps after the fire there that was covered up, scientists moved their children away from the nearby school but did it quietly, so as not to scare the general populace. I'm sorry, but although I recall the information I can't now find the references to back this up. The main point is, we don't always know how safe things are and when concerns develop we commoners are not kept abreast.

There are reports of fish - Pacific herring - bleeding from eyes and gills. Now this may have nothing to do with radiation (think of the great swirling garbage patches - there's more than one - in the oceans, and stretches of oxygen-depleted and algae-covered sea); or if there is a connection, it may be indirect, like the way that pesticides may weaken the defences of bees, rather than killing them outright.

A core issue is our degree of trust in the openness and competence of governments and scientific agencies.

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Carl Hiaasen's green mischief

http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/arcimboldo_paris/gaml1007_15.htm

If you haven't read Carl Hiaasen (and he's not yet well-known here in the UK) I hope you will. Much of the best and most original postwar writing in English has come from the US - I defy anyone to name a British writer to stand next to Thomas Pynchon, for example. Maybe it's that America is less hung up on its cultural heritage (having so many), maybe it's simply the literary efflorescence that accompanies economic and military expansion as it did in Elizabethan England, I don't know.

But things that grow also decay, and Hiaasen's very funny crime novels are a symbolic organic revenge for property developers' depredations in his beloved Floridian wetlands. He's attacked the Disney Corporation in Team Rodent (1998).

His viscerally-felt objections are partly ecological, partly moral, but also aesthetic. The developers are merely crass, gripped by a nearsighted obsession with money, and as long as they turn over the cash and get out that's all they care about. The retirees who flock South are similarly dumb and disconnected from their environment; for them, a condo close to the Everglades is like one in New York, just warmer in winter. A long-brewed reckoning awaits them all.

In the book I've just (re)read, Double Whammy, the arch-enemy is a ratbag TV preacher who has sunk his profits in a disastrous residential complex pierced by canals ("lakes", he angrily reminds his salesmen) which he hope will be a selling feature for keen bass catchers, but which for historical land-use reasons turn out to be nearly as toxic as Love Canal.

But Nature is fighting back, not least because it has recruited a former State Governor who has despaired of resisting the forces of capitalism and gone wild, living in the forest and only sallying forth to harvest roadkill for his dinners. In this book, he loses an eye in a fight and replaces it with one from a stuffed owl; in another, his long hair becomes braided Indian-style, with eagle claws hanging from the ends.

Even the lesser villains are mutating in the vicinity of nonhuman life, with which (as we now know) we share so many genes. Here, a kidnapper kills a pitbull and unable to remove its death-locked jaws from his arm, simply cuts off the head and carries on. When he and his victim pass through a traffic tollbooth, the changetaker calmly expresses her regret that she hasn't any Milk Bones to offer the creature; for in Florida, anything can happen and Man is beginning to forget his distinctive nature.

Hiaasen has a writer's fascination with language, which like the nearby primeval landscape burgeons beyond our ability to grasp it all. In the midst of his scorn for the daftness of fishing competitions, he gives us this rococo recital of its commercial artefacts:

"As was everything in Dennis Gault's tournament artillery, his bass lures were brand new. For top-water action he had stocked up on Bang-O-Lures, Shad Raps, Slo Dancers, Hula Poppers, and Zara Spooks; for deep dredging he had armed himself with Wee Warts and Whopper Stoppers and the redoubtable Lazy Ike. For brushpiles he had unsheathed the Jig-N-Pig and Double Whammy, the Bayou Boogle and Eerie Dearie, plus a rainbow trove of Mister Twisters. As for that most reliable of bass rigs, the artificial worm, Dennis Gault had amassed three gooey pounds. He had caught fish on every color, so he packed them all: the black-grape crawdad, the smoke-sparkle lizard, the flip-tail purple daddy, the motor-oil moccasin, the blueberry gollywhomper, everything."

Wonderful. And best of all, good triumphs over evil.

It's escapism, naturally. As Oscar Wilde said, "It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all."

But in stimulating our imagination, perhaps Hiaasen's gonzo tales and misshapen brood are preparing us to take the side of the angels, or at least that of the more enigmatic Green Man.

http://www.vosper4coins.co.uk/stone/GreenMan_files/GreenMan.htm

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Chris Ryan's "Killing for the Company"

Until not so many years ago, I naively took the view that fiction was made up and non-fiction was true. I now realize that much fiction is dangerous truth smuggled past the guards.

Chris Ryan's 2011 novel shows the usual expertise gained from his time in the SAS, and his characters shoot and stab (and are killed) with believable detail. I read this type of thing as a vicarious thrill, but perhaps also to inure myself somewhat to the horror of what humans do to each other. It's a sort of cognitive dissonance: imagining the awfulness so that I can be reassured that it won't happen to me and mine in reality.

But Ryan's books, blood-soaked though they are, don't seem to inhabit a completely bleak moral universe. This may be to do with the heart of the man: when Ryan called his wife after his escape from Iraq, almost the first thing he said was "I've done a terrible thing," referring to his having had to kill two people during his solitary flight through the desert. The profession of arms is a tough one, but soldiers can still have a conscience, even if they look at religion sideways. I get the feeling that Andy McNab manages to keep the side doors of his mind shut a little tighter, though his references to the incidence of suicide among some of his fellows, and to the need for the psychological counselling that is more easily available to American Special Forces, suggests that many who do what they have to do find difficulty in preventing emotional leakage from those shut rooms.

It's said that psychopaths do understand how other people think and feel; what makes them so dangerous is that they don't care. There are two such in this book. One is a female Mossad agent who kills man, woman and child without the slightest compunction. The other is a British Prime Minister called Stratton, who holds secret meetings with an American arms manufacturer and undertakes to get his country involved in the Iraq conflict. Years later, we see him as a peace envoy to the Middle East, with more hidden plans and connexions. Throughout the book, he shows a quick perception of others and a superficially charming manner, but has a mood that turns on a sixpence. And he's a first-class God-botherer with a messianic ego and millenarian enthusiasm.

Events come to a head in 2013, in a Middle East becoming unstable and with Western powers preparing for imminent direct military involvement.

I can't say whether Stratton is simply a great fictional villain, playing to the prejudices of many of the readership, or whether the writer has a genuine dislike for those who give the orders but never wield the knife or gun themselves. I felt that the work was climbing over the border fence of fiction.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.