Day of the Dead

A report from Basic notes:

• The US is planning to spend $700bn on nuclear weapons over the next decade. A further $92bn will be spent on new nuclear warheads and the US also plans to build 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines, air-launched nuclear cruise missiles and bombs. 

• Russia plans to spend $70bn on improving its strategic nuclear triad (land, sea and air delivery systems) by 2020. It is introducing mobile ICBMs with multiple warheads, and a new generation of nuclear weapons submarines to carry cruise as well as ballistic missiles. There are reports that Russia is also planning a nuclear-capable short-range missile for 10 army brigades over the next decade. 

• China is rapidly building up its medium and long-range "road mobile" missile arsenal equipped with multiple warheads. Up to five submarines are under construction capable of launching 36-60 sea-launched ballistic missiles, which could provide a continuous at-sea capability. 

• France has just completed deployment of four new submarines equipped with longer-range missiles with a "more robust warhead". It is also modernising its nuclear bomber fleet. 

• Pakistan is extending the range of its Shaheen II missiles, developing nuclear cruise missiles, improving its nuclear weapons design as well as smaller, lighter, warheads. It is also building new plutonium production reactors. 

• India is developing new versions of its Agni land-based missiles sufficient to target the whole of Pakistan and large parts of China, including Beijing. It has developed a nuclear ship-launched cruise missile and plans to build five submarines carrying ballistic nuclear missiles. 

• Israel is extending its Jericho III missile's range, and is developing an ICBM capability, expanding its nuclear-tipped cruise missile enabled submarine fleet. 

• North Korea unveiled a new Musudan missile in 2010 with a range of up to 2,500 miles and capable of reaching targets in Japan. It successfully tested the Taepodong-2 with a possible range of more than 6,000 miles sufficient to hit half the US mainland. However, the report, says, "it is unclear whether North Korea has yet developed the capability to manufacture nuclear warheads small enough to sit on top of these missiles". 

Iran's nuclear aspirations are not covered by the report.

-- Beyond the UK: Trends in the Other Nuclear Armed States via The Guardian

Yes indeed: every day and in every way the world just gets more and more peaceful as the circle of empathy expands.

'After 42 years' by Khaled Mattawa

A Libyan American poet commemorates the overthrow of Kadafi

in 'print' 

read by the author

via Hisham Matar

'Necessary Daemons'

Possession, in the Haitian context, can be kind of rough, the first time or two. Frightening. Terrifying, even. You feel what you think of as your self being peeled away like the husk from a fruit...

-- Madison Smartt Bell

Lives of a cell

I finally got to the end of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee this weekend, and posted this from penultimate chapter on the blog for The Book of Barely Imagined Beings:

Someday, if a cancer succeeds, it will produce a far more perfect being than its host. 

Preparatory to the observation, Mukerjee has noted that an emerging, although highly controversial, answer to the question of what allows a cancer cell to keep dividing endlessly without exhaustion or depletion generation upon generation is that cancer’s immortality is actually borrowed from normal physiology and, specifically, the stupendous fecundity of stem cells. No less remarkable (at least to me as a naive and ignorant reader) is the ability of the body as a whole to switch this on and off:

The human embryo and many of our adult organs possess a tiny population of stem cells that are capable of immortal regeneration. Stem cells are the body’s reservoir renewal. The entirety of human blood, for instance, can arise from a single, highly potent blood-forming cell (called a hematopoietic stem cell), which typically lives buried inside the bone marrow. Under normal conditions, only a fraction of these blood-forming stem cells are active; the rest are deeply quiescent -- asleep. But if blood is suddenly depleted, by injury or chemotherapy, say, then the stem cells awaken and begin to divide with awe-inspiring fecundity, generating thousands upon thousands of blood cells. In weeks, a single hematopoietic stem cell can replenish the entire human organism with new blood -- and then, through yet unknown mechanisms, lull itself back to sleep. [1]

I also read Will Self's essay on blood disease and drug addiction. Death, writes Self, remains the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all. Cancer, though, is also a distorted simulacrum of life.





Footnote

 [1] Even in normal circumstances, however, haematopoiesis reportedly manufactures more than 100 billion new blood cells every day

Something useful on peak oil

I have criticized wooly thinking about peak oil in the past, but I have a lot to learn, so it's good to come across some clear thinking on the topic from Jim Murray (pdf). This, for example, is quite neat:

Peak oil hypotheses 

It's not about the reserves 

It's about the production rate 

We are not close to running out of oil 

Never predict the future price of world oil or the date of world oil peak. You will only be proved wrong and discredited.

'We are awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare'

Slavoj Žižek recalls an old joke from the German Democratic Republic:

a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

The Grand Map

This happens to be how many of us enter the great map. One night, you locate a distant childhood intersection. You leave the street map and enter the scene, passing seamlessly from map to territory. But there are no goofy hijinks or bloody corpses there. No sublime horses. Just a bright, sunny street with uneven sidewalks, lined with parked cars—a place that once contained everything that you knew and needed to know, which once held the entire range of possible truths. Then you take a Google-step back, and suddenly it’s a bit less sunny and a bit more populated. You swing around to your left, and now the sky is overcast and foreboding. A step forward and a neighborhood man you once knew, who was pictured sitting on his porch a frame ago, has vanished. Now the sun is out again, but setting. This private territory, with its radically shifting light, its dreamlike angles, and its specters popping in and out of view—that odd combination of detailed recollection and ever-thickening fog—resembles the structure of memory itself. It’s like visiting a lost place. It’s not the grandest idea but, at certain moments in life, it’s the best we’ve got.

-- from The Grand Map by Avi Steinberg

The Angel of Capital

Above and beyond the monopoly of violence claimed by the major states, there has emerged a new kind of command, a monopoly of actuality, exercised on one hand through the power to teletechnology to shape the world in its own image, and on the other by the power of money to decide what deserves to exist. The effective horizon of this control oscillates somewhere between the news cycle and the business cycle; moment by moment it translates everything it knows into the present tense. It seeks to glory not only in ratifying its mastery over what happens today; it meticulously amortizes what used to be and assiduously discounts what is yet to come.

-- from The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst.

'Temple of the winds'

Interesting section in Jim Al-Khalili's Hearing the Past, starting about 9 minutes 30 secs in, on the acoustic characteristics of Stonehenge. And he quotes from Hardy in Tess:

The wind playing upon the edifice produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one stringed harp.

Some of the work by Rupert Till et al is explored at Sounds of Stonehenge.

Perhaps archaeoacoustics will, one day, inform an even broader 'archaeology of the senses' in which the deep history of other senses including smell is even better understood.


P.S. 20 Sep: Bill Fontana wants to bring sounds of Chesil Beach to central London.

P.P.S. 17 Feb '12: Did otherworldy music inspire Stonehenge?

The Stalin Prize

I have little to add to Jonathan Steele's commentary on the launch of everycasualty and the issues it raises. Here are a few quick notes:

The dedication and courage of Sandra Orlovic and Bekim Blakaj, Deputy Director and Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre in, respectively, Belgrade and Pristina, and their colleagues is magnificent. There is great nobility in projects such as The Kosovo Memory Book 1998. Both Orlovic and Blakaj emphasized the importance, in the face of considerable opposition, of recording and describing in some detail the lives of all who died in the violence, military and civilian on both sides. By way of reminder that this in itself is not enough, Blakaj noted that 12 years after the end of the war there had been only 12 successful prosecutions for war crimes. No justice, however, was possible without an honest account of what actually happened.

Wissam Tarif of INSAN expanded on this last point. Those documenting the identity of individuals murdered or abducted in Syria and elsewhere were sometimes accused of opening tombs and opening wounds. But that was precisely the opposite of what they were doing.  Tombs and wounds could never be closed without a full accounting for what actually happened. In his own country, Lebanon, people were not fighting at present but there was no peace, only a ceasefire. This was because the Lebanese had to failed to acknowledge facts, to recognize the humanity of all those who were killed and to face their families.

According to the 2011 World Development Report, around 1.5bn people today live under the shadow of organized violence. Much of this violence is criminal. One of the questions at the launch was: should  innocent victims of crime and criminals who were themselves killed also be counted by projects such as everycasualty? One of the challenges in the 21st century, it was argued, is that while war between nations and even 'formal' civil wars are actually less frequent than before, large-scale, inchoate criminalized violence is on a greater scale than ever. This presents a challenge to existing institutional arrangements: agencies such as the Red Cross, for example, cannot act in Mexico even though the scale of the violence (recent small but typical example here) resembles war because the government does not recognize a state of war. [1]

Dan Smith of International Alert said that by making it possible to know who had died in a conflict and how, the charter had the potential to reduce the traction of wild claims (up or down), which were the meat and drink of propaganda. The charter could help us respect the 'fact of war', a continuing reality which is too often hidden behind cliches and euphemisms.

everycasualty, said Smith, was a civilising idea. Like all great ideas it was obvious once stated, but it also subtly challenged the norm. Also, there was something slightly obsessive, unrealistic about it. In this, it shared much with the ideals of the Red Cross at its foundation -- a 'wildly unrealistic' idea at the time of its inception, which acted on nothing but moral authority.

I think this is right. The everycasualty charter challenges the disturbingly plausible observation, misattributed, perhaps, to Joseph Stalin, that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. It aims to make visible and irrefutable the tragedy of the violent death of each individual, including the deaths of those who are themselves killers.

Wissam Tarif told those present at the launch that the previous evening he had talked by telephone to one the volunteers on his team in Syria. The volunteer had said that in the midst of conflict people are completely focussed on what is happening right now. But others not caught up in the conflict -- such as those gathered together peacefully in London -- had the opportunity to think about the future. This was a tremendous gift.

everycasualty is an idea big enough for a version of the 21st century in which there is hope.  It will not of course end tragedy.  Ideals are frequently subverted (it is reported, for example, that death squads in Syria are using Red Cross/Red Crescent ambulances to abduct protestors).  And even a full accounting need not guarantee reconciliation. But it is a start.

A couple of other points: in June the Oxford Research Group published a working paper on The Legal Obligation to Record Civilian Casualties of Armed Conflict. And, drawing on the model of Iraq Body Count, there is now a Pakistan Body Count.


Note [1] My language and legal understanding here are shaky.

P.S. 24 Sep: A blog post by Dan Smith, who was on the panel at the launch

Flying (1)

Unacknowledged noticers

Scientists are:

partly poets for they are not merely embellishing with their metaphors, but extending meaning into new domains

-- from a review by Nancy Golubiewski of Brendon Larson's Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability Redefining Our Relationship with Nature.

Sleeping with one eye, like a dolphin

Reverie, writes Raphaël Enthoven:

borrows the power of narration from wakefulness and the power of divination from sleep, and keeps them vying to suspend the alternation of day and night. Reverie is how one arrives at immediacy.

After writing Hypnagogia I should be sympathetic. Enthoven has considerable insight, but packages it in prose that -- at least in translation, or for my taste -- teeters on the edge of parody:

Between the sweetness of being and the pain of thinking, between sleep that is opaque to itself and the blindness of one who can’t see the stars because of daylight, lies the talent to glimpse what escapes us, the equivalent of the dawn that threatens at every instant to evaporate into dream or condense into knowing, but in that interval (and pen in hand) replaces something impenetrable with something immaterial and reveals the imaginary foundations of reality...

Because it generously accords the world the absentmindedness it deserves, reverie is light years distant from being a distraction, which does reality the considerable honor of turning its back on it. In fact, reverie celebrates the rediscovery of understanding and imagination, sets free the secret of disinterest which, because it lets you see beauty without your consent and see nature without ego, invests the world with intense interest.

Regions of light

All things, including the species to which we belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and reproduce successfully endure at least for a time;  those which are no so well suited die off quickly.  Other species and vanished existed before we came onto the scene; our kind, too, will vanish one day. Nothing -- from our own species to the sun -- lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.

In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, it is absurd to think that the earth and its inhabitants occupy a central place, or that the world was purpose-built to accommodate human beings: "The child, like a sailor cast forth by the cruel waves, lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every kind of vital support, as soon as nature has spilt him forth with throes from his mother's womb into the regions of light." There is no reason to set humans apart from other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature. Instead, he wrote, human beings should conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.

-- from an essay on Lucretius by Stephen Greenblatt. But, notes Greenblatt, there is something disturbingly cold in Lucretius' account of pleasure.

 P.S. 1 Oct: In a review of The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt's, Sarah Bakewell quotes Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered a complete manuscript of De Rerum Natura in 1417:

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Stormy weather

On Saturn a raging storm has developed from a small spot to cover an area about 4 billion square kilometres, or eight times the surface of the Earth (NASA, New Scientist).

Neptune's moon Triton has a thin atmosphere and huge streaks of black material across its surface. These are created by geysers of dust and nitrogen erupting from under its icy surface as it is heated by the sun. In other words, even at the edge of the solar system, where temperatures are below -200C, sunlight can still drive distinctive weather systems. (Carl Murray of UCL quoted in Guardian report)

'Into Eternity'

Here are a few half-thoughts (predictable for those who know my views) about Into Eternity, which I watched last night.

1. This is an outstanding piece of work. Do go out of your way to give it the time and attention it deserves.



2. Andrei Tarkovsky already made this movie. It was called Stalker.

3. A viewing of Into Eternity reinforces my view that it is corrupt and wrong to continue to increase the amount of nuclear waste unless and until we have proven and economically sane solutions as to what to do with that waste and we ensure that those who profit from new investment in nuclear power also bear their fare share of the liabilities and long term costs it imposes.

4. It would be good to see a thorough investigation of what the options are for (third, fourth generation...) nuclear power, and what prospects there may be for rendering nuclear waste, not least plutonium, less dangerous. A participant in Into Eternity says that it is theoretically possible to make transform waste into harmless substances but not practical to do so, but the film takes the issue no further. This assertion does need to be explored and tested in many fora, including non-technical documentary film.

5. The reality in the UK seems to be rather different from Finland/Sweden. Sellafield, where ... tonnes of plutonium are ‘temporarily’ stored on the surface in what is by some accounts a Steptoe and Son operation, with chaotic record keeping and people routinely ignoring alarms when they go off. Britain has at least £70 billion of liabilities in remediation at this and other sites to meet before we even start on something new. Meanwhile, as a polity, we are not yet anywhere remotely approaching serious regarding potential alternatives. We invest, according to one account, around £12m (20p per capita) per year into renewable energy generation and storage (wind, solar, hydrogen etc) R&D.

6. Watch this clip:



Note: Thanks to Jessie Tegin and OpenCity UCL for sending a copy of the film

P.S. There is a campaign to stop new nuclear power stations in Britain.

P.S. 5 July: George Monbiot has a useful commentary here, to which I have added my one penny worth of response here.

'I guess what I’m saying is at some point, we’ve all parked in the wrong garage.'

Apart from the whole Mao was “70% correct, 30% incorrect” blather which the [Chinese Communist] Party has been clinging to like a crazy shut-in on an episode of Hoarders, there’s also a growing tendency to excuse the worst excesses of the 1958-1976 period as simply “Mao being Mao.” Like a kindly but eccentric drunk uncle who gave out candy to little children but also did to 5-10 for putting the candy store owner into a coma with a 2×4. I don’t count myself among the “Mao the Monster” crowd, but give the guy his due: His reign featured some of the the craziest and most destructive events in 20th century history, and whether he was the mastermind or a dupe is kind of irrelevant. As bad ideas go, having this guy run your country is up there with hitching a ride with Ryan Dunn or hiring R. Kelly as your baby sitter.

Mao may have been great as a political visionary, a poet, a revolutionary general and/or a noted connoisseur of stewed fatty pork, but when that many people die on your watch and the NEXT guy (or the next, next guy – sorry Hua) presides over a historically unprecedented period of economic development…that’s not good. That’s not even 30% not good. That’s like 70% sucks and 30% really, really sucks and all the Red Songs in the world aren’t going to change those numbers.

-- from It’s a Mad Mad 90th Anniversary by Jeremiah Jenne

The Aquarium

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling -- that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. [My daughter] Isabel's suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. We learned no lessons worth learning; we acquired no experience that could benefit anyone. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place, as there was no place better for her than at home with her family. Without Isabel, [my wife] Teri and I were left with oceans of love we could no longer dispense; we found ourselves with an excess of time that we used to devote to her; we had to live in a void that could be filled only by Isabel. Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is to a continuous secretion of sorrow.

-- from The Aquarium by Aleksandar Hemon

Nothing to envy

Reading Barabara Demick, I understand better how it is that the North Korean regime has survived so long. Potential dissidents in the 1990s knew that, on the 'tainted blood principle,' not only they but their families for three generations and including cousins could be irreparably harmed. A lot of people, says Demick, were content with the idea of risking their own life in the hope that things might change but not those of their entire families. The system combined the most repressive aspects of Confucianism and Stalinism.

There's that line in The Big Lebowski:  'say what you like about National Socialism but at least it's an ideology.'   

P.S. Recent articles on N. Korea : Exogenous Zones and North Korea’s Meth Export.

'The profound weirdness of quantum mechanics'

Your connections to all the things around you literally define who you are.

--Aaron O'Connell via GrrlScientist