Stephen Bodio

The Alpha Environmentalist, knowing of my interest in China issues, just alerted me to this op- ed piece from the Arizona Daily Star on the Chinese government’s bid to buy the California based oil company Unocal (don’t know how long the link will be up).

Exactly who– other than, say, the Peoples’ Liberation Army– thinks this is a good idea? Assuming the most benign motives possible, it will doubtless divert oil from us in the future. As the Star states:”…..if the point of this purchase is to increase China’s oil sources, it seems only a matter of time before pressures would build to divert U.S. supplies to China’s domestic use”.

But, worse, what will happen if, down the road, China chooses to confront us over Taiwan, or… well, I can hadly begin to list the possibilities. To quote the Star– quite a liberal paper by the way– again: “There is a contradiction between the communist repression we don’t see and the economic surge we do. It is easy for us to forget that the People’s Republic of China is a repressive, totalitarian government.”

We don’t have time today to go into the Chinese record on the environment (air quality, the Yangtze Dam, animals in traditional medicine, and more). But over the next weeks I will be writing a lot more on China– on John Derbyshire’s novel trilogy, on Mark Elvin’s Retreat of the Elephants (China environmental history) and more.

Oh and– China also wants to acquire IBM’s computer division. Makes me glad I drive a Mac.

Didn’t Lenin say that the last capitalist would sell his executioner the rope with which to hang him?

UPDATE 6 July:
Both conservatives (National Review Online) and liberals (The New Yorker) have now defended the Unocal sale, mostly on the grounds of free trade and the nature of the oill market. The New Yorker adds for the record that we should NOT sell off defense companies like Lockheed Martin. They make some rational points, but I keep seeing that rope…

Check this hilarious post from Dymphna at Gates of Vienna.

She pefectly captures our mutual addiction: “Read-a-holics cannot resist the printed word: It starts with cereal boxes at the breakfast table or newspapers abandoned in the restaurant booth by whomever ate there before you and continues into reading your high school English lit books the day you get them. This is not virtue. A therapist once posed the question: “so when did you discover that books were a neurotic escape?””

“Motto: never leave home without a book. You never know when you might be trapped somewhere with nothing to read. Horrors”.

Read the whole thing, as the man says.

Libby insists I take at least two books to go to the Post Office where she works (two miles away). I take about five on our biweekly two- hour trip to Albuquerque… you never know.

My favorite New Mexico book dealer, Jerry Lane of the Book Stop, once whirled on me as I entered and said to a customer: “THERE is the perfect example of a man who needs a book muzzle!”

“Michael Blowhard” of 2Blowhwards– see my blogroll– has just written a touching link and description of my site. Michael was the first person to admit me to a blog, with a guest post on the writer’s life, several years ago. I guess that makes him my “blogfather”. I am honored. Please, check out Blowhards– it is one of the most original and diverse sites on the web.

Below is a generous quote on my writing. But understand, there is a LOT more on Blowhards than I have yet dreamed of putting up here, including but not limited to art criticism, movies, architecture, nude modeling, car design, evo- bio, and as my old friend Elaine used to say approvingly. “more and worse”.

“Stephen Bodio is a beyond-excellent nature writer who manages the distinctive — and too-rare — feat of fusing the lyrical and rhapsodic with the harshly down-to-earth. (I especially loved his collection of essays “On the Edge of the Wild: Passions and Pleasures of a Naturalist.”) Based in New Mexico, he’s accessible yet sophisticated, full of curiosity and interests, and has a good sense of rueful humor about the ultimate absurdity (and beauty) Of It All. He also has a special affinity for raptor birds”.

The moas of New Zealand were the largest true birds that ever lived. They were preyed upon by an eagle that was itself so large it probaby ate the first human settlers, the Maori, as well– they have legends saying so, and pictured it on rocks. As in so many places, humans probably put an end to the big birds and its predator– aboriginal humans are as efficient as any others at that practice. Aussie zoologist Tim Flannery calls it the “Black Hole Theory” of extinction, said hole being the human digestive system…

A new story from Yahoo News Service suggests why moas were so vulnerable (other than being huge and slow):

“….how did a small Maori population, armed only with close-range wooden weapons and traps, wipe out such a plentiful species in such a large country?

The answer, according to the new research, may be found in growth rings in the bones of these extinct giants.

These marks are common in many animal species and are caused by differing growth rates in changing seasons. But bird species do not have these rings as in most cases their growth phase is confined to less than a year.

The moa, though, was the exception.

Examination of rings in stored bones suggest that the two moa species, luxuriating in the safety of New Zealand’s unique eco-system, may have taken several years to reach reproductive maturity and up to a decade to attain skeletal maturity.

That made them “extremely vulnerable” to hunting. If too many adult moa were caught too quickly there would have been no chance of replenishment, and the species, dominated by unreproductive birds, would have been placed under severe pressure.”

This is bigger scientifically than it seems. It makes moas more like mammals– or dinosaurs. Virtually every bird attains full size in a year, and only a few longer- lived groups take longer than that to attain sexual maturity. And they usually do it in that order…

From England via Cox News Service: fake mud for your four wheel drive vehicle:

” Maybe your rugged SUV never goes anywhere wilder than the mall, but you can look like a wilderness adventurer with Spray-On Mud.
 
For owners who don’t want it to look like they’re driving an unnecessary gas-guzzler, a little splash signals that the vehicle spends time tackling the back country.
 
The product is the brainchild of Colin Dowse, a businessman from Shropshire, England, a village close to the Welsh border.
 
“Spray-On Mud is an urban camouflage designed to give the impression that you are a serious off-roader,” he said.
 
Dowse, a Web designer, came up with the idea about a year ago while sharing a few pints with friends at a local pub.
 
It’s genuine local dirt – strained to remove stones and other debris – mixed with water and a secret ingredient that Dowse says helps it stick to a vehicle’s bodywork.”

Thanks to Bruce douglas. I have a feeling I am going to hear from my hard- core Land Cruiser friends on this….

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s comment on a paper submitted by a colleague: “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.”

(Shamelessly stolen from Cathy Siepp).

Frederick Turner, classicist, poet, teacher, and polymath, is one of our most important and unfortunately least known intellectuals and philosophers. His remarkable body of work transcends genres and easy political categories. He is a biologically and scientifically literate humanist and a poet who writes epics and metered lyrics. A quick view of his work can be seen at the invaluable 2Blowhards here, and his own website is here.

His best prose may be in The Culture of Hope, linked to in the Blowhards site. But my favorite of all his books is Genesis, a novel in the form of an epic poem, in various meters, about the colonization of Mars. There is nothing like it, and everyone I have ever given it to loves it, even if they dislike science fiction.

Recently Fred wrote a post in Tech Central Station on what he believes was a severe lapse in judgement, to say the very least, in the New York Times: “A recent article by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams in the New York Times revealed the use of aircraft charter companies by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, together with specific aircraft markings, bases, routes, and other information helpful to identification of such flights.”

One doesn’t have to believe in the Iraq war to think that this is just plain wrong (for the record, I am comfortable with the Afghan invasion, and think Iraq was at least partly the result of faulty intelligence, though not malice. But I don’t know that the best way to deal with the insurgents is to cut and run immediately –a LOT too much to go into here!

Fred says it well: “A fourth motivation could be that the patriotic authors believed that the US is making a huge mistake in the current war, and any hindrance to its use of secret intelligence and covert action will help prevent the continuance of this mistake. Two problems present themselves here. The first is that if this were the motivation, their proper role would be to say so in an opinion piece, in which citation of specific secrets would be unnecessary, since America already accepts and has voted for covert services that employ private companies.”

He, like so many of us, knows someone well who is being deployed there: “If my friend dies in his tour of duty I shall be thinking very specifically about Mr. Scott, Mr. Grey, and Ms. Williams. Quite likely they would have had nothing particularly to do with this misfortune. However, human nature being what it is, I know that I would not be able to exclude them from my meditations. If the authors were just publishing their article to get a chance at a Pulitzer, I really have no moral quarrel with them at all, any more than I would have with a crocodile that eats a child or a raccoon that raids my larder. However, if they do have a moral identity as human beings, they should know that, if a certain civilian plane comes down over an unnamed Middle Eastern country, and all the US personnel aboard are killed, there is one compatriot who will regard them as murderers. “

Amen. Could you have imagined such harebrained idiocy in WW II?

Two Iranian women make it to the top of Everest.

Dr. Ana Pinto did just that and found a Spanish cave that was inhabited for 60,000 years, and more. This New York Times interview covers carnivorous cave bears, even more carnivorous Neanderthals, and the possibility that H. sapiens greater omnivory might have given us a competitive advantage.

Via Cronaca.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has begun to burn the houses of thousands of urban poor people and drive them into the already-starving countryside. One of Africa’s rare food exporters has been turned into something resembling a subtropical North Korea.

I was in Zimbabwe shortly before the current troubles began and fell in love with it. Even then, the eerie “Big Brother” porteaits of Mugabe in every public room struck an ominous note. I wonder if I could ever go back knowing what we do now. A village council elder in a southwestern village we visited to see their (then) excellent “Campfire” conservation program has since been beheaded. I believe I shook his hand.

From Winds of Change the whole story, which has made at least one Canadian rethink his position on the right to bear arms.

Thanks to Chas of Nature Blog.