Mutiny on the Bounty: Alaska Sea Otters in the Crosshairs

Bounties are often proposed as a way to reduce competition between people and animal populations for a limited resource. Alaska is no stranger to bounties. During the 40 years prior to statehood, the Territory of Alaska paid nearly $3 million in bounties for eagles, seals, wolves, coyotes, even Dolly Varden char. Bounties on some species continued after statehood.

Many people have no problem spending public money to “incentivize” their business or occupation. However, placating the demands of a special interest group can have ludicrous results. In “Big Game in Alaska: A History of Wildlife and People” Morgan Sherwood cited a cost-benefit analysis by C. Hart Merriam, who found that Pennsylvania “had spent $90,000 over a period (in the late 1800s) to destroy hawks and owls that killed rodents and other pests and were therefore worth $3.9 million to farmers, all in order to save $1,875 worth of poultry.”

Most professional wildlife managers believe bounties are ineffective. Wolves were eliminated throughout much of the American West, but dedicated government trappers and widespread use of poison accounted for most of the carnage. Coyotes have expanded their range and are more numerous than ever despite more than a century of bounties and other forms of lethal control.

Most bounty schemes fail because they neglected to consider more than one side of the issue or account for human nature. Bounties become a source of income, and fraud is often an issue. For example, when the Territory paid bounties on hair seals, agents required seal flippers for evidence – and they cared little if the flippers were from a target species. The Territory paid $1.2 million in bounties for 358,023 “hair seals” from 1927-1958.

Similarly, the bounty on Dolly Varden was quickly discontinued after the Territory doled out $96,344. Fisheries biologists examined 500 fish tails turned in for the bounty and found only 10 percent were Dolly Varden tails. Most were salmon tails. Bounties can also create an economic disincentive to eradicate or reduce a target species. A prudent bounty collector will leave the breeding population intact so more animals are produced next year.

Nevertheless, bounties seem to be effective on marine mammals. After all, they breathe air, and there aren’t many places to hide on the surface of the ocean. In the November 1915 edition of the Zoological Society Bulletin, C. H. Townsend reported that during the previous two years British Columbia paid bounties of $14,329 on Steller sea lions and hair seals. The province’s bounty fund was exhausted after 2,875 sea lions and 2,987 seals were claimed. Townsend and others believed the harbor seal population along the North Atlantic coast was destroyed through bounties instigated by fishermen.

But who’s to say a sea otter supposedly shot in Southeast Alaska wasn’t taken from Prince William Sound, Kachemak Bay, or elsewhere in Alaska? Fish and Game will be paying bounties on sea otters shot from Ketchikan to Attu Island, including individual animals taken from Southwest Alaska, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated some populations as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. When the funding for bounties is depleted, the program will have had less effect in Southeast Alaska than anticipated.

Townsend, a former chief of the fisheries division of the U.S. Fish Commission, was not amused by the use of bounties. He wrote, “This is the usual procedure with fishermen who may be depended upon to attribute the depletion of fisheries to other causes than the wasteful fishing methods practiced by themselves.”

by Rick Sinnott, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Aaron Jansen illustration

William Ryan Fritch

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Diagnosis: Human

The news that 11 percent of school-age children now receive a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — some 6.4 million — gave me a chill. My son David was one of those who received that diagnosis.

In his case, he was in the first grade. Indeed, there were psychiatrists who prescribed medication for him even before they met him. One psychiatrist said he would not even see him until he was medicated. For a year I refused to fill the prescription at the pharmacy. Finally, I relented. And so David went on Ritalin, then Adderall, and other drugs that were said to be helpful in combating the condition.

In another age, David might have been called “rambunctious.” His battery was a little too large for his body. And so he would leap over the couch, spring to reach the ceiling and show an exuberance for life that came in brilliant microbursts.

As a 21-year-old college senior, he was found on the floor of his room, dead from a fatal mix of alcohol and drugs. The date was Oct. 18, 2011.

No one made him take the heroin and alcohol, and yet I cannot help but hold myself and others to account. I had unknowingly colluded with a system that devalues talking therapy and rushes to medicate, inadvertently sending a message that self-medication, too, is perfectly acceptable.

My son was no angel (though he was to us) and he was known to trade in Adderall, to create a submarket in the drug among his classmates who were themselves all too eager to get their hands on it. What he did cannot be excused, but it should be understood. What he did was to create a market that perfectly mirrored the society in which he grew up, a culture where Big Pharma itself prospers from the off-label uses of drugs, often not tested in children and not approved for the many uses to which they are put.

And so a generation of students, raised in an environment that encourages medication, are emulating the professionals by using drugs in the classroom as performance enhancers.

And we wonder why it is that they use drugs with such abandon. As all parents learn — at times to their chagrin — our children go to school not only in the classroom but also at home, and the culture they construct for themselves as teenagers and young adults is but a tiny village imitating that to which they were introduced as children.

The issue of permissive drug use and over-diagnosis goes well beyond hyperactivity. In May, the American Psychiatric Association will publish its D.S.M. 5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is called the bible of the profession. Its latest iteration, like those before, is not merely a window on the profession but on the culture it serves, both reflecting and shaping societal norms. (For instance, until the 1970s, it categorized homosexuality as a mental illness.)

One of the new, more controversial provisions expands depression to include some forms of grief. On its face it makes sense. The grieving often display all the common indicators of depression — loss of interest in life, loss of appetite, irregular sleep patterns, low functionality, etc. But as others have observed, those same symptoms are the very hallmarks of grief itself.

by Ted Gup, NY Times |  Read more: 

Image:Keith Negley

The Marvels in Your Mouth

[ed. See also: This NPR Fresh Air interview with Mary Roach (h/t Scott)].

When I told people I was traveling to Food Valley, I described it as the Silicon Valley of eating. At this cluster of universities and research facilities, nearly 15,000 scientists are dedicated to improving — or, depending on your sentiments about processed food, compromising — the quality of our meals.

At the time I made the Silicon Valley comparison, I did not expect to be served actual silicone.

But here I am, in the Restaurant of the Future, a cafeteria at Wageningen University where hidden cameras record diners as they make decisions about what to eat. And here it is, a bowl of rubbery white cubes the size of salad croutons. Andries van der Bilt has brought them from his lab in the brusquely named Department of Head and Neck, at the nearby University Medical Center Utrecht.

“You chew them,” he said.

The cubes are made of a trademarked product called Comfort Putty, more typically used in its unhardened form for taking dental impressions. Dr. Van der Bilt isn’t a dentist, however. He is an oral physiologist, and he likely knows more about chewing than anyone else in the world. He uses the cubes to quantify “masticatory performance” — how effectively a person chews.

I take a cube from the bowl. If you ever, as a child, chewed on a whimsical pencil eraser in the shape of, say, an animal or a piece of fruit, then you have tasted this dish.

“I’m sorry.” Dr. Van der Bilt winces. “It’s quite old.” As though fresh silicone might be better. (...)

Most of the time, while you’re just breathing and not swallowing, the larynx (voice box) blocks the entrance to the esophagus. When a mouthful of food or drink is ready to be swallowed, the larynx has to rise out of the way, both to allow access to the esophagus and to close off the windpipe and prevent the food from “going down the wrong way.”

To allow this to happen, the bolus is held momentarily at the back of the tongue, a sort of anatomical metering light. If, as a result of dysphagia, the larynx doesn’t move quickly enough, the food can head down the windpipe instead. This is, obviously, a choking hazard. More sinisterly, inhaled food and drink can deliver a troublesome load of bacteria. Infection can set in and progress to pneumonia.

A less lethal and more entertaining swallowing misstep is nasal regurgitation. Here the soft palate — home turf of the uvula, that queer little oral stalactite — fails to seal the opening to the nasal cavity. This leaves milk, say, or chewed peas in peril of being horked out the nostrils. Nasal regurgitation is more common with children, because they are often laughing while eating and because their swallowing mechanism isn’t fully developed.

“Immature swallowing coordination” is the reason 90 percent of food-related choking deaths befall children under 5. Also contributing: immature dentition. Children grow incisors before they have molars; for a brief span of time they can bite off pieces of food but cannot chew them.

Round foods are particularly treacherous because they match the shape of the trachea. If a grape goes down the wrong way, it blocks the tube so completely that no breath can be drawn around it. Hot dogs, grapes and round candies take the top three slots in a list of killer foods published in the July 2008 issue of The International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology (itself a calamitous mouthful). A candy called Lychee Mini Fruity Gels has killed enough times for the Food and Drug Administration to have banned its import.

by Mary Roach, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: David Plunkert

Peter Turnley, A Food Lover's Guide to Paris.
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The Art of RAW - The Unlimited Possibilities of Denim

[ed. This is how you do advertising.]

Justin Timberlake

[ed. From the 20/20 Experience. Golfers supporting golfers.]

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Jean Michel Benier
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Margareta Jungerth Boo - search. Painting, watercolour, 56 x 40 cm (2009)
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The Bitcoin Boom

On March 16th, the Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who’d been in office for about a month, announced a strategy to solve the country’s banking crisis. This plan, which would be funded in part by confiscating money directly from every single bank account in Cyprus—even the very smallest—met with instantaneous and violent opposition from the country’s citizens. Offstage, the European Union, led by a group of adamant Germans, Finns, and Danes, as well as the I.M.F. and the European Central Bank, pointed a cannon at Anastasiades’s head: if he didn’t move forward with this plan, the Cyprus banks would go bust and their hapless customers would lose pretty much all their money, instead of a measly 6.75 per cent. However, under great pressure from their constituents, Cypriot M.P.s rejected the proposal and sent Anastasiades back to the drawing board.

The following Monday, the price of the decentralized electronic currency bitcoin rose from forty-five to fifty-five dollars on the major exchanges, and by Wednesday it had nipped up to sixty-five dollars. The financial media generally agreed that the two dramas are related. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, it appears that Spaniards are liable to have been particularly active buyers of bitcoins that week, having taken the debacle in Cyprus as the likely sign of a forthcoming governmental plunder of their own savings. The evidence coming out of Spain is circumstantial—a spike in Google searches for “bitcoin,” and another on mobile-app downloads of Bitcoin-related software were widely reported—but the pieces appear to fit. Subsequent developments (including the announcement of an eleventh-hour bailout deal for Cyprus) have so far failed to stabilize the euro or cool the bitcoin fever, with the price over a hundred and three at the time of writing.

That a number of panicked Europeans appear to have reckoned the wildly volatile, vulnerable, and tiny bitcoin market a preferable alternative to their own banking system, even temporarily, signals a serious widening of the cracks between the northern and southern E.U. countries in the wake of the euro-zone debt crisis. It also illustrates the broader collapse of trust that is threatening the world of global banking and fiat money.

The weakness in existing currencies stems from lack of faith in institutions—particularly central banks, which are often in league with commercial and investment banks. When a government bails out a failed bank or insurance company—in essence, by printing money—the net effect is that the currency as a whole is debased, in favor of a few and at the literal expense of everyone else, which amounts to a fair description of today’s global financial system. Hence the sudden appeal of bitcoins, which appear, for the moment, at least, to be immune to the machinations of inept or crooked bankers and politicians.

In many ways, bitcoins function essentially like any other currency, and are accepted as payment by a growing number of merchants, both online and in the real world. But they are generated at a predetermined rate by an open-source computer program, which was set in motion in January of 2009. (...)

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, whose real identity is not known, cleverly combined existing peer-to-peer network technologies, cryptographic techniques, digital signatures, and the potential power of network effects to design and develop the Bitcoin system. Nakamoto was very clearly motivated in this effort by the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. When the experiment was launched and the first fifty bitcoins (the so-called genesis block) were mined, in January of 2009, he (or she, or they) included this line of text along with the data: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

Until his disappearance from the Web, around the spring of 2012, Nakamoto was a visible participant on cryptography forums, where he discussed Bitcoin freely, and published a nine-page paper outlining the details of the project. These posts reveal that even in 2008, Nakamoto was able to respond to concerns regarding the scalability of bitcoin with remarkable prescience; he clearly understood the ramp-up of computing power that would be required for producing bitcoins as the system grew.

by Maria Bustillos, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Grafilu.

It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors

[ed. Umm... about those FDIC-insured deposits you thought you had in the bank...?]

Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . . 

Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.

Can They Do That?

Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.

The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.” It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state:

An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equitywould become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.

No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks. The directive is called a “resolution process,” defined elsewhere as a plan that “would be triggered in the event of the failure of an insurer . . . .” The only mention of “insured deposits” is in connection with existing UK legislation, which the FDIC-BOE directive goes on to say is inadequate, implying that it needs to be modified or overridden.

An Imminent Risk

If our IOUs are converted to bank stock, they will no longer be subject to insurance protection but will be “at risk” and vulnerable to being wiped out, just as the Lehman Brothers shareholders were in 2008. That this dire scenario could actually materialize was underscored by Yves Smith in a March 19th post titled When You Weren’t Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives. She writes:

In the US, depositors have actually been put in a worse position than Cyprus deposit-holders, at least if they are at the big banks that play in the derivatives casino. The regulators have turned a blind eye as banks use their depositaries to fund derivatives exposures. And as bad as that is, the depositors, unlike their Cypriot confreres, aren’t even senior creditors. Remember Lehman? When the investment bank failed, unsecured creditors (and remember, depositors are unsecured creditors) got eight cents on the dollar. One big reason was that derivatives counterparties require collateral for any exposures, meaning they are secured creditors. The 2005 bankruptcy reforms made derivatives counterparties senior to unsecured lenders.

One might wonder why the posting of collateral by a derivative counterparty, at some percentage of full exposure, makes the creditor “secured,” while the depositor who puts up 100 cents on the dollar is “unsecured.” But moving on – Smith writes:

Lehman had only two itty bitty banking subsidiaries, and to my knowledge, was not gathering retail deposits. But as readers may recall, Bank of America moved most of its derivatives from its Merrill Lynch operation [to] its depositary in late 2011.

Its “depositary” is the arm of the bank that takes deposits; and at B of A, that means lots and lots of deposits. The deposits are now subject to being wiped out by a major derivatives loss. How bad could that be? Smith quotes Bloomberg:

. . . Bank of America’s holding company . . . held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June . . . .

That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.

$75 trillion and $79 trillion in derivatives! These two mega-banks alone hold more in notional derivatives each than the entire global GDP (at $70 trillion). 

by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt |  Read more:
Image: Web of Debt

Facebook and the Solitary Practice of Friendship

What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life) 

To be a friend to many people in the complete kind of friendship is not possible (Aristotle ,Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII)

There is a nice moment in Desmond Morris’ documentary The Human Zoo where, as he ponders the means by which the human animal deals with dense urban living, he hoists his address book and declares: “This is his [the urban dweller’s] personal tribe!” No doubt if he were writing the documentary today he would make the same point by recourse to his Facebook page.

Facebook provides us a convenient mnemonic device for keeping track of family and acquaintances. More than this, of course, it offers the means to friendship itself. We can carry out a range of cordial tasks on Facebook: we can post, comment, like, poke (does this even exist anymore?), chat, re-share, or indeed, if we incline to do so, quietly monitor the lives of our friends.

Assuming that the nature of friendship has not budged much since Aristotle wrote about it in the Nicomachean Ethics, this means that in order for Facebook to serve be a one-stop companionship-shop it must allow for friendships based upon use, pleasure, and finally should facilitate the mutual exchange of well-wishing between the virtuous. There is more to say about this, but at first pass this can translate into commercial acquaintanceships, mutual affinities between those who share an interest, and finally the reciprocation of mutual respect between people of fine character – besties, in other words.

One of the implications of Facebook use, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is that is slows the decay-rate of friendship. Facebook allows us to collate intimates from the fragmented geographies of our contemporary lives and to sustain contact with friends from our past with whom we might otherwise only have sporadic contact. In doing so, Facebook may be, in fact, just one of a progression of technologies that allow us to keep track of our personal human networks (our “tribe”) when these extend beyond the so-called “Dunbar’s number”, that is, those 150 people predicted to be within the “natural” limit of our information-retention ability. Dunbar’s observations were based upon a supposed general relationship between the size of a primate brain’s neocortex and the size of the average social group. Dunbar’s Number seemingly finds support in analysis of social aggregations of hunter-gatherer tribes, military units, and even Christmas card networks. Lending further support is Facebook’s own assessment that the average number of friends per account is between 120 and 130.  (...)

Now, this is all well and good but what accounts for the unsettling feeling that some of us share that Facebook and other social networking tools are not providing all the required vitamins of friendship. The concern is that Facebook is, in fact, just one of the innumerable fetishistic things we do to distract ourselves from the harder task of cultivating our best capabilities. In reflecting on the older social technologies, for instance spoken language, one recalls that a person can become especially adept at them: one can be a skilled orator or a notable conversationalist, but can using Facebook become a source of a unique human excellence? Perhaps excellence in Facebooking is demonstrated by using an appropriate ratio of likes to written comments? Or perhaps the appropriate comic timing of status updating? Another way of expressing the concern is to wonder if Facebook is worrisome precisely because it makes something like expertise at friendship too easy, too readily and conveniently available? That is, rather than not being good enough at replicating friendship has it, rather, become, confusingly, all too good at it?

Furthermore, has Facebook commodified friendship? The price we pay is not only in the cash-investment in the supporting technologies required to service one’s account (computer, smart phone, or even the new Facebook phone) but there is a price also paid in the sort of faith-investment entailed in going down the virtual friendship rabbit-hole: the confidence that spending time will enhance happiness.

A helpful way to frame and address the issue of Facebook’s ability to seemingly add and subtract from friendship simultaneously is by means of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm”. Borgmann is a German born American philosopher, who teaches at the University of Montana. In his classic critique of modern technology, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) Borgmann investigates a “debilitating tendency” of our modern technological lives, represented in the manner in which technology makes promises and subsequently erodes the quality of life in attempting to make good on its promises. Technology, Borgmann says, promises to place nature and culture under our control and it does so by means of devices that make goods and services effortlessly available to us. The characteristic feature of devices is that they perform their tasks immediately, and without making much in the way of demand upon us in return. Emblematic devices for Borgmann include television sets, automobiles and so forth. Facebook and other social media tools seem to fit the bill (though there is some squabbling it seems in the secondary literature about what counts as a device and what does not). Expressed in Borgmannesque terms the Facebook is a device that makes our friends available to us whenever we choose. Space and time all but disappear. Thus I can conjure up my pals over my morning tea or by means of a Facebook app on phone as I commute to work. It’s easy, ubiquitous, effortless.

So, why might any of this be a problem?

by Liam Heneghan, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Dead Man @ Dead Fest - Topher by J. Astra Brinkmann on Flickr.
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FWB- Benefit Summary Prospectus

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Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives

There are things about women that most men would just as soon never discuss. The stirrups in a gynecologist’s office, for one; the tampon aisle at the grocery store, for another; and pretty much any matter involving words like “cervix,” “uterus,” and “vagina.” At least, that’s how it was until March 2, 2011. Back in January of the same year, at the start of that legislative session, Governor Rick Perry had pushed as an emergency item a bill requiring all women seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound 24 hours beforehand. As Sid Miller, the legislator who sponsored the bill in the House, put it, “We want to make sure she knows what she is doing.”

At a public hearing on the bill the following month, Tyler representative Leo Berman took the mike and insisted that 55 million fetuses had been aborted since Roe v. Wade—or, as he called it, “a Holocaust times nine.” The author of a book on abortion rights gave a somewhat overwrought speech about the differences between “a zygote and a baby.” A woman named Darlene Harken described herself as “a victim of abortion” because, she maintained, she wasn’t warned about the mental and physical fallout from the procedure; Patricia Harless, a representative from Spring, thanked her for her “bravery” and “strength.” Alpine’s Pete Gallego countered by expressing his resentment of “people who stop caring after the child is born.”

In March the bill reached the House floor, where debate raged for three days, as much as ten hours a day. Tensions ran high in the chamber, which was lit by a benevolent winter sun that glinted off the manly oak desks and supersized leather chairs. On the first day, March 2, Miller, a burly man with white hair and a sun-lined face that wrinkles into a bright, inviting smile, explained the legislation. A former school board member from Stephenville, he has a loamy Texas accent and favors a spotless white Stetson. If you stare at him long enough, you might easily forget that it’s the twenty-first century.

Miller described his bill in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were pushing a new municipal utility district. “What we’re attempting to do is to provide women all available information while considering abortion and allow them adequate time to digest this information and review the sonogram and carefully weigh the impact of this life-changing decision,” he began. Miller then listed everything his bill would require before an abortion could be performed. A woman would have to review with her doctor the printed materials required under the 2003 Woman’s Right to Know Act. While the sonogram image was displayed live on a screen, the doctor would have to “make audible the heartbeat, if it’s present, to the woman.” There was also a script to recite, about the location of the head, hands, and heart. Affidavits swearing that all of this had been properly carried out according to Texas law would have to be signed and filed away in case of audits. A doctor who refused could lose his or her license.

As soon as Miller finished, Houston Representative Carol Alvarado strode up to the podium. There could have been no clearer contrast: her pink knit suit evoked all those Houston ladies who lunch, its black piping setting off her raven hair. Her lipstick was a cheery shade of fuchsia, but her disgust was of the I-thought-we’d-settled-this-in-the-seventies variety.

“I do not believe that we fully understand the level of government intrusion this bill advocates,” she said tersely. The type of ultrasound necessary for women who are less than eight weeks pregnant is, she explained, “a transvaginal sonogram.”

Abruptly, many of the mostly male legislators turned their attention to a fascinating squiggle pattern on the carpet, and for a rare moment, the few female legislators on the floor commanded the debate. Representative Ana Hernandez Luna approached the back mike and sweetly asked Alvarado to explain what would happen to a woman undergoing a transvaginal sonogram.

“Well,” Alvarado answered helpfully, “she would be asked by the sonographer to undress completely from the waist down and asked to lie on the exam table and cover herself with a light paper sheet. She would then put her feet in stirrups, so that her legs are spread at a very wide angle, and asked to scoot down the table so that the pelvis is just under the edge.”

At this point, if there had been thought bubbles floating over the heads of the male legislators, they almost certainly would have been filled with expletives of embarrassment or further commentary on the carpet design.

“What does this vaginal sonogram look like?” Luna asked, ever curious.

“Well, I’m glad you asked,” Alvarado answered, “because instead of just describing it, I can show you.”

And so the state representative from Houston’s District 145 put both elbows on the lecturn and held up in her clenched fist a long, narrow plastic probe with a tiny wheel at its tip. It looked like some futuristic instrument of torture. “This is the transvaginal probe,” Alvarado explained, pointing it at her colleagues as she spoke, her finger on what looked like a trigger. “Colleagues, this is what we’re talking about. . . . This is government intrusion at its best. We’ve reached a”—she searched for the word—“climax in government intrusion.”

Those who could still focus gaped at Alvarado. No one spoke. The silence seemed to confirm for Alvarado something she had long suspected: most of the men in the House chamber didn’t know the difference between a typical ultrasound—the kind where a technician presses a wand against a pregnant belly and sends the happy couple home with a photo for their fridge—and this. She locked Miller in her sights. “What would a woman undergo in your bill?” she asked.

Miller seemed confused. “It could be an ultrasound, it could be a sonogram,” he began. “Actually, I have never had a sonogram done on me, so I’m not familiar with the exact procedure—on the medical procedure, how that proceeds.”

“There are two different kinds of sonograms,” Alvarado said, trying again to explain. “The abdominal, which most of our colleagues may think [of as] ‘jelly on the belly’—that is not what would be done here. A woman that is eight to ten weeks pregnant would have a transvaginal procedure.” Miller stammered a response, but Alvarado was not done with him. She continued the grilling for several more minutes, keeping Miller on the ropes with a sustained barrage of icky female anatomy talk. Ultimately, however, the room was stacked against her.

On March 7 Miller’s bill passed 107–42.

Over the next few months, as the Senate passed its version of the bill, which was sponsored by Houston senator Dan Patrick, and as Governor Perry signed the legislation into law at a solemnly triumphant ceremony, the exchange between Alvarado and Miller stood as a glaring reminder of the peculiar way in which women could be largely boxed out of decisions that were primarily concerning them. (A number of female Republican legislators supported the bill too, but the overwhelming majority of the votes cast in its favor were from men.) Of course, women have rarely held the reins of power in Texas, but there has also seldom been a season as combative on the subject of women’s health as the one we have experienced in the past eighteen months.

Miller’s bill was only the beginning of what turned out to be the most aggressively anti-abortion and anti-contraception session in history. In the words of one female reporter who covered the Legislature, “It was brutal.” Not only did the sonogram law pass, but drastic cuts were made to statewide family planning funds, and a Medicaid fund known as the Women’s Health Program was sent back to Washington, stamped with a big “No thanks.” When the dust settled, Texas had turned down a $9-to-$1 match of federal dollars, and the health care of 280,000 women had been placed in jeopardy. (...)

It’s a decades-old battle between the sexes over who knows best and, more importantly, who’s in charge. And over the past year, the fighting has intensified. On the one side are the Carol Alvarados of the world; on the other, the Sid Millers. The outcome will determine nothing less than the fate of Texas itself.

by Mimi Swartz, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Photo: Marjorie Kamys Cotera

The Meme Hustler

While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.

This is not to deny that many of our latest gadgets and apps are fantastic. But to fixate on technological innovation alone is to miss the more subtle—and more consequential—ways in which a clique of techno-entrepreneurs has hijacked our language and, with it, our reason. In the last decade or so, Silicon Valley has triggered its own wave of linguistic innovation, a wave so massive that a completely new way to analyze and describe the world—a silicon mentality of sorts—has emerged in its wake. The old language has been rendered useless; our pre-Internet vocabulary, we are told, needs an upgrade.

Fortunately, Silicon Valley, that never-drying well of shoddy concepts and dubious paradigms—from wiki-everything to i-something, from e-nothing to open-anything—is ready to help. Like a good priest, it’s always there to console us with the promise of a better future, a glitzier roadmap, a sleeker vocabulary.

Silicon Valley has always had a thing for priests; Steve Jobs was the cranky pope it deserved. Today, having mastered the art of four-hour workweeks and gluten-free lunches in outdoor cafeterias, our digital ministers are beginning to preach on subjects far beyond the funky world of drones, 3-D printers, and smart toothbrushes. That we would eventually be robbed of a meaningful language to discuss technology was entirely predictable. That the conceptual imperialism of Silicon Valley would also pollute the rest of our vocabulary wasn’t.

The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.

Tracing O’Reilly’s intellectual footprint is no easy task, in part because it’s so vast.[*] Through his books, blogs, and conferences, he’s nurtured a whole generation of technology thinkers, from Clay Shirky to Cory Doctorow. A prolific blogger and a compulsive Twitter user with more than 1.6 million followers, O’Reilly has a knack for writing articulate essays about technological change. His essay on “Web 2.0” elucidated a basic philosophy of the Internet in a way accessible to both academics and venture capitalists; it boasts more than six thousand references on Google Scholar—not bad for a non-academic author. He also invests in start-ups—the very start-ups that he celebrates in his public advocacy—through a venture fund, which, like most things O’Reilly, also bears his name.

A stylish and smooth-talking self-promoter with a philosophical take on everything, O’Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Lévy of Route 101, the favorite court philosopher of the TED elites. His impressive intellectual stature in the Valley can probably be attributed to the simple fact that he is much better read than your average tech entrepreneur. His constant references to the learned men of yesteryear—from “Archilochus, the Greek fabulist” to Ezra Pound—make him stand out from all those Silicon Valley college dropouts who don’t know their Plotinus from their Pliny. (...)

None of this is necessarily bad. On first impression, O’Reilly seems like a much-needed voice of reason—even of civic spirit—in the shallow and ruthless paradise-ghetto that is Silicon Valley. Compared to ultra-libertarian technology mavens like Peter Thiel and Kevin Kelly, O’Reilly might even be mistaken for a bleeding-heart liberal. He has publicly endorsed Obama and supported many of his key reforms. He has called on young software developers—the galley slaves of Silicon Valley—to work on “stuff that matters” (albeit preferably in the private sector). He has written favorably about the work of little-known local officials transforming American cities. O’Reilly once said that his company’s vision is to “change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators,” while his own personal credo is to “create more value than you capture.” (And he has certainly captured a lot of it: his publishing empire, once in the humble business of producing technical manuals, is now worth $100 million.) Helping like-minded people find each other, sharpen their message, form a social movement, and change the world: this is what O’Reilly’s empire is all about. Its website even boasts of its “long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.” Who says that spiritual gurus can’t have their own venture funds?

O’Reilly’s personal journey was not atypical for Silicon Valley. In a 2004 essay about his favorite books (published in Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell, brought out by O’Reilly Media), O’Reilly confessed that, as a young man, he had “hopes of writing deep books that would change the world.” O’Reilly credits a book of science fiction documenting the struggles of a young girl against a corporate-dominated plutocracy (Rissa Kerguelen by F. M. Busby) with helping him abandon his earlier dream of revolutionary writing and enter the “fundamentally trivial business [of] technical writing.” The book depicted entrepreneurship as a “subversive force,” convincing O’Reilly that “in a world dominated by large companies, it is the smaller companies that keep freedom alive, with economics at least one of the battlegrounds.” This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.

The Randian undertones in O’Reilly’s thinking are hard to miss, even as he flaunts his liberal credentials. “There’s a way in which the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,” he wrote in 2012. But it’s not just the hacker as hero that O’Reilly is so keen to celebrate. His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword. Hiding beneath this glossy veneer of disruption-talk is the same old gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism that we associate with Randian characters. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.

However, it’s not his politics that makes O’Reilly the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley; a burgeoning enclave of Randian thought, it brims with far nuttier cases. O’Reilly’s mastery of public relations, on the other hand, is unrivaled and would put many of Washington’s top spin doctors to shame. No one has done more to turn important debates about technology—debates that used to be about rights, ethics, and politics—into kumbaya celebrations of the entrepreneurial spirit while making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject. As O’Reilly discovered a long time ago, memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.

by Evgeny Morozov, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Philip Burke

Bertien Van Manen. 100 Summers 100 Winters, 1991.Tomsk Railwaystation. Edition of 5.
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