A Lame Excuse to Rattle the Sabres

Bush administration officials announced yesterday that they are going to shoot down a disabled military spy satellite, and that the sole reason for this is “to avoid a spread of toxic fuel in an inhabited area.” Bullshit alert! The odds of this satellite crashing down near anywhere inhabited by people are so low, it’s not worth sweating over. The odds are far better that you’ll be struck by lightning. And besides, the “toxic fuel” they’re referring to is hydrazine, which isn’t all that dangerous. If a populated area were contaminated with hydrazine gas, at worst you’d have some people with symptoms similar to chlorine gas poisoning. This satellite shoot-down attempt is just a way for the U.S. military to test their high tech anti-satellite defenses; the toxicity risk is a lame excuse. The political implications of this action are ugly, especially considering that America got on China’s case for doing the same thing last year. And for pete’s sake, this plan poses a risk to other orbiting objects, such as the International Space Station! Granted, it’s not a very big risk, but it’s still higher than the odds that any of us would be wiped out by a single school bus-sized gas tank dropping out of orbit.

For the record, I am adamantly opposed to any combat occurring in space. If you can shoot at a satellite, it won’t be long before the satellites can shoot back.

Frankenstein’s Mycoplasma

There’s incredible news this week in biotechnology. Dan Gibson, a geneticist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland (strong deeds, gentle words!), has announced that his team of researchers have succeeded in constructing the largest man-made DNA structure—at 582,970 base pairs in length, it’s over 20 times longer than the previous record! The artificial sequence was pieced together from four smaller (but still massive!) strands of DNA by utilizing the transcription power of yeast, and is precisely modeled on the genome of a bacterium known as Mycoplasma genitalium. With characteristic optimism, they’re now confident that they will be able to produce the very first man-made organism within the year. If they do that, the goal of biofuel production from cellulosic biomass will be within arm’s reach.¹

What does this mean? Imagine the end of fossil fuels: a cessation of ecologically devastating drilling operations, deflation of the political and economic power of neoconservative oil barons, and affordable, low-emission transportation, heating, and electricity. The impact of this technology is profound, and it doesn’t stop there. By discovering the details of biochemical and metabolic pathways, we can more closely mimic their elegance and efficiency to solve problems that plague industrial civilization. Maybe we’ll engineer a primitive, self-sustaining bio-robot that feeds on CO2 and excretes O2. Perhaps we could remove mercury from our water supplies. The limitations are not known, but the possibilities are awe-inspiring.

There has been some criticism of this work, notably by the Canadian-based ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization. I agree with most of ETC Group’s principles (conserving agricultural biodiversity, fighting against patents for bioengineered plants). It is therefore fair to accuse me of wanting to have it both ways on this issue. I do see both sides, and I think that governments should regulate this kind of biotechnology. I am not worried about the J. Craig Venter Institute, which has demonstrated a responsible concern with ethics in this and previous projects. Venter himself shared the human genome’s raw code with the public for free after decoding it; his business aimed to make money by selling analytical services and bioinformatics software used for studying the genome. Others, however, are not nearly as scrupulous. I can’t say I endorse a moratorium at this point, but I do think that the USDA and Centers for Disease Control should be closely monitoring this type of research.

Still, this is exciting. You can expect me to post more on this topic in the future.

¹ Science Volume 315, No. 5813, 9 February 2007, pp. 801-804. Challenges in Engineering Microbes for Biofuels Production, by Gregory Stephanopoulos.

The Grim Reaper v. The United States of America

Tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in two lawsuits involving the use of lethal injection to execute condemned prisoners. The last time the court considered a method of execution, in 1878, they ruled to allow executions by firing squad to continue. The court is not directly considering the constitutionality of the death penalty itself, although if lethal execution is ruled to be “cruel and unusual punishment,” it might effectively be a death knell (yuk, yuk) for capital punishment in the United States. Of the nearly forty states that still have the death penalty, only Nebraska uses electrocution as its sole method of execution. There has been a de facto moratorium on executions in the United States since September, when the court first agreed to hear arguments in these lawsuits.

The death penalty is an abomination, an obtuse expression of state power, hypocritical, institutionally racist, anachronistic, and utterly wrong. We live in an age where DNA evidence has exonerated prisoners who were mistakenly convicted and sentenced to die at the hands of the state. Even that, however, I feel is tangential to the more salient point: murdering people to punish them for the crime of murder makes no sense at all, and sends no reasonable message to society. The sanctimoniousness with which judges impose the death penalty and executioners carry it out belies its real nature. It is a monument to state authority and power, a relic of times when monarchs and emperors ruled by fear and intimidation.

The crime committed by the prisoner should not be a part of the ethical calculus here. Further, this debate over a method of execution is just a technical squabble. The fundamental question: is it ever acceptable to kill a human being against their will? I say no, with the only exception being an immediate act of self-defense (or defense of others under direct threat of serious harm). Because this exception could never apply to the state, and because the death penalty is carried out with malice aforethought, there seems to me little room for argument over whether it is “cruel or unusual punishment.” At least most murder victims are fortunate enough not to anticipate their untimely end for very long. State murder victims suffer the added torture of anticipating their death.

I hope that this Supreme Court case raises an outcry against capital punishment in the United States. As a society, we need to break the grasp that our prison-industrial complex has developed on our justice system. We also need to get off our fucking high horses, stop imprisoning drug users, and start concentrating on fixing our crumbling public education system. That’s a policy that would pay off in the long run. Instead of jailing and murdering the dregs of society, let’s stop raising so damn many of them.

As an aside, it also gets my goat that so many Christians support the death penalty. These wackos worship a mythological person who was allegedly crucified by the powers that be, and they can sleep at night knowing that their beloved republic carries on that barbaric tradition dozens of times a year. Suffer unto me…

Michael Vick’s Sob Story

I just read these letters written by Michael Vick and a few of his supporters (including his mother, Hank Aaron, George Foreman, and Shirley Franklin – the goddamn mayor of Atlanta) to the judge in his dogfighting trial.  They’re pleading for a lenient sentence in light of all the “good things” Vick has done, and how he’s genuinely remorseful.  First of all, I can’t understand why anyone is willing to gloss over Vick’s vicious, cruel, deliberate, and premeditated actions just because he maintained a good public image — let alone people with reputations, and no personal connection to the case.  How can anyone perceive dogfighting as anything short of shockingly cruel?  And how could they claim that his entrepeneurship and operation of Bad Newz Kennelz for six years was a temporary lapse in judement, a one-time mistake?  Their shoddy arguments are all the same in principle: that an already wealthy athlete’s canicidal cruelty to dogs for his own profit is morally insignificant compared to his history of visiting poor kids in the hospital.  The prevailing sentiment seems to be that compassion is for humans, and if we throw any scraps of it to the dogs, they’re lucky.

The main point is: fuck Michael Vick.  His letter reeks of hyopcrisy; he even has the audacity to portray himself as an animal lover who never learned that dogfighting was a serious crime.  Perhaps he loves women too—so much so that he’d start raping them and taking their money if they ever knocked that statute down to a misdemeanor?  I also bristled at the part where he emphasizes that his dogs were in “good health” and he always “made sure of the continuous upkeep of the dogs.”  I suppose if you counted running the fighting dogs on treadmills as keeping them in “good health,” he might have had a point – if only his other method hadn’t been drowning, hanging, and electrocuting the dogs who weren’t in such “good health.”  It’s also morbidly amusing that he says he’ll work with PETA to fight animal cruelty — PETA is responsible for far more unnecessary animal deaths than he is, especially in North Carolina, not far from Vick’s hometown of Newport News!  I hope the judge has enough ethical sense to give Vick the maximum sentence.  Maybe in prison, when Vick gets his ass kicked by other inmates, he’ll realize that Cajun Rules aren’t really fair.

And shame on Hank Aaron, Warrick Dunn, George Foreman, and Mayor Franklin.  They’ve exemplified the worst kind of anthropocentrism and do not deserve the respect and recognition they’ve traditionally enjoyed.

Lastly, to those of you who are still clinging to some fantasy of Vick’s righteousness, get real.  He led a double life, and he was a brute who hurt living, feeling beings for his own perverse enjoyment and profit.  No matter how remorseful he claims to be (while pleading for leniency), he wouldn’t have ruthlessly engaged in this blood sport for six years unless he were, face it, a bad man.