A headline of the sort “Testing slimming powers of tequila’s agave” stirs promising thoughts. As does the inital text:
Scientists from Mexico’s tequila producing region say juice extracted from the blue agave plant, best known when distilled into the fiery spirit, may help dieters shed pounds and cut cholesterol.
Sign me up! Sign me up!
But alas,
Sadly for the world’s growing band of tequila lovers, agave’s possible health benefits are lost when the plant is distilled into alcohol.
Figures.
The cost this year alone of the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 comes to $225 billion. In other words, the revenue lost because of tax cuts going through this year without any congressional action would more than pay the costs of Katrina recovery.
Source: E. J. Dionne Jr.
My brother the columnist has great readers. Or at least one great reader:
White House Briefing | News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration: White House Briefing reader J. Harley McIlrath of Grinnell, Iowa, e-mailed me yesterday some insightful questions about just one sentence of Bush’s speech.
In fact, his questions about that one sentence alone were more penetrating and important than any of the coverage I read of Bush’s whole speech this morning.
The sentence from Bush: “The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon the mission.”
McIlrath wrote:
“1. Who are ‘the terrorists?’ He’s talking about Iraq. Are ‘the insurgents’ also ‘the terrorists?’ Has Bush ever defined just who ‘the terrorists’ are?
“2. What would constitute a ‘win’ for the terrorists? What do they want? Do we know? Has Bush ever asked himself what ‘the terrorists’ want and whether or not it’s reasonable? Tactics aside, what do they want? Don’t tell me ‘they hate freedom.’
“3. What constitutes ‘losing our nerve?’ Is it losing one’s nerve to pull resources back from an ineffectual approach and apply them to an approach that is more promising? How many times in WWII did we pull resources off one front to reinforce another?
“4. What is ‘the mission.’ Can we abandon a ‘mission’ that has never been defined? To quote George Harrison: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
“Imagine if the press corps took this one short sentence and forced Bush to define his terms.”
Seth Edenbaum points us to Granite Shadow, an expose by the Washington Post’s William Arkin, inaugurating a very promising new blog, Early Warning. One the one hand, it’s obviously good to have the federal government do disaster planning. On the other hand, having an off-the-shelf plan in place for a military takeover is not one of your warm and fuzzy developments.
Early Warning by William M. Arkin – washingtonpost.com: Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military’s extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.
A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.
That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Concept Plan (CONPLAN) 0400 is a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that serves as the umbrella for military efforts to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It has extensively been updated and revised since 9/11.
Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.
…
My guess is that Power Geyser and CONPLAN 0300 refers to operations in support of a civil agency "lead"(most likely the Attorney General for a WMD attack) while Granite Shadow and CONPLAN 0400 lays out contingencies where the military is in the lead. I’ll wait to be corrected by someone in the know.
Both plans seem to live behind a veil of extraordinary secrecy because military forces operating under them have already been given a series of ”special authorities” by the President and the secretary of defense. These special authorities include, presumably, military roles in civilian law enforcement and abrogation of State’s powers in a declared or perceived emergency.
This sort of contingency plan may have a place, indeed probably has a place, but only in the context of carefully crafted legislation which spells out the circumstances under which the emergency plan can be activated — and more importantly sets out the ways in which the emergency authority will end. (Was it really Robert Heinlein — and not someone more like or Machiavelli or de Tocqueville — who first said “There is nothing so permanent as a temporary emergency”?)
For the executive branch to draft secret plans for a military takeover of government, however laudable the motives and however extreme the circumstances for which they are intended, does not in the end best serve our long-term national interests.
Two years later, I'm no more optimistic than I was when I wrote Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist. Less, rather.
Forget hurricanes. Forget global warming. For a good panic, consider Bird Flu.
Apparently it’s broken out of China and is now Epidemic in Indonesia. Or, at least, in the cautious language of bureaucrats “Indonesia could be on the brink of a bird flu epidemic if the virus continues to accelerate.” Normally when bureaucrats will go that far, it translates into something worse.
Having just had graphic proof that the US government cannot be trusted to protect us from the consequences of disaster, coupled with the fact that at present the US has no stockpiles of the relevant drugs — in part due to sloth, in part due to the speed at which this strain can mutate — some people are going all survivalist on us.
Take a look, for example, at Flu Pandemic Preparation. (And don’t forget your emergency gear.)
I’m not entirely sure I get the threat model here. Why do I need a month’s worth of food? Is the idea I hide in my house to avoid infection, or that everyone around me is sick and dying and the FEMA trucks don’t come?
On a slightly more positive note, there’s the FluWiki, “a new experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health” where presumably rather than work on self-directed survivalist, the objective is a community-centered response.
Meanwhile, I’m still scratching my head as to why I want to pack my brown rice in dry ice, which presumably will keep it cold in my very hot garage for only a very limited period. Does the CO2 have preservative qualities too? If I even knew where to get dry ice. Or 50 pound bags of rice, for that matter.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
