Buckle up

What a fabulous headline:

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

Thank you, Boing Boing for calling it to my attention. My “reading week” semester break is drawing to a close, I failed to completely catch up on reading - let alone get ahead - and I was feeling a little stressed and glum. This really puts things in perspective:

A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.

…Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.

Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. Summarising, it appears that the boffins at the LHC - should one of them clumsily spill his tea on the controls, for instance - could easily catapult the entire world through a rift in the very fabric of space-time, into another universe which could be entirely hostile to life as we know it. (Eg, essential processes such as fermentation of alcohol, TV, pizza delivery, gravity etc might simply not work; or there could be a parallel Earth ruled by an evil victorious Nazi empire with space battlecruisers and so forth.)

That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.

A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC’s superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into “negatively-charged strangelets” which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.

CERN representatives of course insist the particle smasher “is not a threat to the Earth.”

Meanwhile…

Hillary Clinton promises to atomize the Democratic Party if that’s what it takes to be the nominee this fall. And she’s got the chops to do it, having steeled her nerves dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, negotiating peace in Northern Ireland, and making friends with arch conservative and former arch-enemy Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, the man who orchestrated the vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the Clinton presidency) - who now has glowing things to say about her.

(Evidence that we have in fact already slipped into a parallel universe? Photo of new chums Scaife and Clinton, borrowed from TPM.)

Easy to see why McCain supporters are getting worried about his airtime, what with the two-ring circus that is the Democratic Primary. But that benign neglect comes in handy when the press gives him a continuous pass on some serious whoppers. After McCain repeatedly confused Sunnis and Shiites a couple weeks ago, Chuck Todd told Tim Russert that McCain has enough foreign policy experience “in the bank” to get away with these little “slip-ups.” The comment inspired Kevin Drum to write the best characterization of McCain I’ve yet seen:

Let’s recap. Foreign policy cred lets him get away with wild howlers on foreign policy. Fiscal integrity cred lets him get away with outlandishly irresponsible economic plans. Anti-lobbyist cred lets him get away with pandering to lobbyists. Campaign finance reform cred lets him get away with gaming the campaign finance system. Straight talking cred lets him get away with brutally slandering Mitt Romney in the closing days of the Republican primary. Maverick uprightness cred allows him to get away with begging for endorsements from extremist religious leaders like John Hagee. “Man of conviction” cred allows him to get away with transparent flip-flopping so egregious it would make any other politician a laughingstock. Anti-torture cred allows him to get away with supporting torture as long as only the CIA does it.

Remind me again: where does all this cred come from? And what window do Democrats go to to get the same treatment the press gives McCain?

Finally, during my relative silence of the last couple weeks, we passed the 5th anniversary of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, and lost the 4000th (plus) American service person. What does Dick Cheney have to say about the losses? “They volunteered.” Wow. For 3, 4, and 5 tours? For stop-loss? I’m sure that’s all in the fine print, but what an attitude from Mr. 5 Deferments. (Here’s the source of the remarkable image above.) And for all you HRC voters who say you’ll switch to McCain if HRC is not the Democratic nominee this fall? McCain promises he won’t change course in Iraq. Is that really what you want?

The Bridge to Decision: A guest post

A guest post from Cristina White, who contributed Political Tai Chi earlier this month.  Thank you, Cristina!  If you didn’t see Obama’s incredible speech, you’ll find many links to it at YouTube, or you can read the text here.

For the last several months, I have been trying to decide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. One reason I leaned toward Hillary was that she has been through the worst of it with the Republican smear machine. She knows how to fight, and we will need that to win the White House. Then, during her 60 Minutes interview, she was asked about the rumors of Barack being a Muslim. I was shocked at the evasiveness of her answer. It seemed calculated to gain political advantage, and that is the kind of politics Bush-Rove gave us. I want a candidate who can fight, but still fights clean.

I turned toward Obama. I admire his fighting style, but wondered how he would deal with difficulty. During this long campaign, he has mainly met with adulation and success. The first real trouble he has encountered was in his proximity to his former minister, a man who condemned America. In Obama’s speech addressing the issue of race, my question was answered. He repudiated Jeremiah Wright’s vitriolic remarks, but he did not reject him. He spoke of the good that he had achieved and inspired, and reminded us of the history that the man had lived through, the tentacles of racism that had left an imprint of anger and bitterness. Obama asked us to look squarely at the road that brought us here, and to begin the work of repairing the fissures and cracks of our common national highway.

All these months, I have been constructing a bridge toward a decision. When the final trestle was in place, I realized it was Obama’s response to this current controversy that landed me squarely in his camp. Because there he was, between a rock and a hard place. What would he do? He put one foot on the rock, one foot on the hard place, and stood taller because of it. He said this is who I am, this is what I’m made of, these are the people who shaped me and brought me to this day and to what I believe. Here I stand. Will you stand with me?

Yes, Barack Obama. I will stand with you. And proud to be there.

“Meat Out”

Late note: I started this post several weeks ago when the news broke, but forgot to finish it! So I’m finishing the thoughts and putting it up in honor of Meat Out day.

The HSUS investigation into abuses of cattle and protocol at the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse has now led to the largest beef recall in the United States — 143 million pounds.

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

“Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall,” Schafer said in a statement.

They say 37 million pounds went to the National School Lunch Program, and that most of the meat has probably been eaten. (So what’s the point of the recall?) And here’s the thing: this is just one processing facility, and it happened to get caught - thanks to an undercover investigator. Just how widespread and longstanding might these practices be? Notes Anna Lappe’:

This incident — including the abuse and questionable food safety of the meat from this slaughterhouse — is not just a case of a few bad apples. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system in which animal abuse and health concerns are predictable by-products of following the prime directive — maximizing profit — in a context of inadequate oversight.

The brutality captured in the video may be particularly extreme, but the nature of slaughterhouse’s ramped-up production inexorably leads to such animal suffering. With pressure to keep lines moving fast, for example, workers often fail to completely stun animals, so that cows can be conscious during slaughter. And those production levels? They’re soaring. Tyson, the largest processor in the country, slaughters 222,000 head of cattle a week, the equivalent of 1,321 an hour, seven days a week.

This high-octane production threatens eaters’ health, too. Under such conditions, meat can become tainted with fecal matter, increasing the likelihood of contamination with the potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. Since April 2007, concerns about E. coli instigated recalls of at least 30 million pounds of beef — enough to have provided a burger to every man, woman, and child in the nation. With this week’s recall, add another four for each of us.

Armchair Sierra Hiking

I’m the kind of hiker/wannabe-naturalist who will jettison a bottle of water if it’s taking up backpack space I could use for another field guide. I might dehydrate, but I’ll lose consciousness knowing what kind of lizard was sunning itself on the rock I passed moments before.

Which is to say I’m a bit of a field guide junkie. I cannot be left alone with a credit card, an internet connection, and an enticing review of a beautifully-illustrated guide. It is inevitably a “get behind me Satan” moment, and I lose. But The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada, by John Muir Laws, is so worth the shame of relapse. Go to his web site and take a look at some of the incredible watercolors that illustrate this wonderful guide. I’m four hours and two years away from a meandering hike in the Sierras, but I keep this guide on my bedside table and thumb through it at the end of the evening. (I also read trail descriptions in hiking guides. Wanna make something of it?)

“Jack” Laws is also a columnist/illustrator for “Bay Nature” magazine, which I’ve been reading since its inception, and his monthly “Naturalist Notebook” is my favorite feature. The illustrations are so quaint and old-fashioned, with such attention to details of setting and behavior, that I pictured Jack Laws as an “old-school” nature illustrator in his late 70s - the last of a dying breed. Imagine my surprise to learn he’s actually a little younger than me! I love that. I love knowing that a youngster like Mr. Laws is paying this kind of attention to nature.

Hillary Rove Clinton

Two months ago, I said I “kind of like” Hillary Clinton. Most definitely not as a presidential candidate, as I think made clear, but as a public figure. I even said that she seemed to hold public service in high regard.

Well, let me rephrase that. HRC holds HRC in high regard, so much so that she would apparently prefer to see John McCain elected if she is not the Democratic nominee this fall. She is so eager to cripple Obama that she has repeatedly touted McCain’s leadership and experience (and drastically overstated her own) over Obama’s. She declared that both she and McCain have both passed some as-yet-unspecified Commander-in-Chief test, leaving that poor green Obama at the kids’ table. Then her campaign opened and dealt a crisp new deck of race cards: while HRC was campaigning for McSame, her staff was caught red-handed running a web site video of Barack Obama, edited to make the bridge of is nose wider and his skin darker… making him, you know, “blacker.” Just in case people weren’t aware that he’s black. (Then they lied about it.) Meanwhile, HRC went on 60 Minutes and did her level best to not quite kill off the “Obama is Muslim” rumors being circulated by her high profile surrogates and a viral email campaign. And Geraldine Ferraro went on every program that would take her to charge that Obama would not have gotten this far if he weren’t black, and that she wouldn’t be taking so much flak for speaking truth to power if she weren’t white.

And somewhere in the past two weeks, my grudging respect and modest admiration for HRC turned to disappointment and disgust. Either she is a spineless, valueless figurehead allowing vicious campaign managers to position her as a race-baiting megalomaniac, or she’s a race-baiting megalomaniac. (Or, equally plausibly, she’s a Republican.)  Keith Olbermann seems a bit disappointed, too (I tried to embed that video, but it’s not working; so click that link and watch it on Americablog; it’s so worth it.)

Political Tai-Chi: a guest post

A guest post by Cristina White, who graced Left at the Altar at its previous address with two other contributions, an essay and a theater review. Many thanks, Cristina!

Watching Barack Obama during the 20th debate with Hillary was a revelation. It was political debate taken to another level, that of T’ai Chi as martial art. Forty-some years ago, when I began studying T’ai Chi, one of the concepts that fascinated me was that, in facing an opponent, you offered no resistance; instead, you yielded to the on-coming force and used your opponent’s energy to let him topple himself.

I watched Obama do that repeatedly during the debate, and it was incredible. One example: he was asked about Louis Farrakhan’s support, and he stated that he had denounced Farrakhan. Hillary said that it was all very well to denounce, it was better to reject. Obama pointed out that no offer was made for him to reject, but if she thought reject was stronger, fine — “I denounce and reject.” The audience laughed and, once again, he won the point, and the audience. No wonder that nothing the Clinton campaign throws at him sticks. He simply keeps his center, yields, and then turns the force directed against him to his advantage. The energy meant to bring him down instead levels his opponent. He did it again and again with Hillary during the debate, and the next day, when challenged on the issue of al-Qaeda in Iraq, he did it with McCain.

Brilliant.

Wrong again

You know all those Freeper and Newsmax and dittohead-type climate change skeptics who like to pronounce, with a “gotcha!” smirk, that just 30 years ago scientists were worried about global cooling? (…a talking point they undoubtedly picked up from one of those esteemed publications, or O’Reilly or Limbaugh or Senator James Dummkopf.) Well, they’re wrong about that, too:

Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

But never let the facts get in the way of a good story. While we’re on the subject, it will probably come as no surprise to you, given their steadfast refusal to acknowledge consumer demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles, that the Vice Chairman of GM calls global warming “a total crock of shit.” He also says just because he thinks so doesn’t mean GM isn’t committed to manufacturing environmentally friendly cars (that would be…um… when?): “My thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors…”

(I think it’s been awhile since I recommended The Republican War on Science, so let me just take this opportunity to say that if you haven’t read it, you should. But read it with a bottle of Maalox at your side. Or Wild Turkey.)