Bush Needs Brain, Lobotomizes EPA

NPR's Science Friday did a piece [mp3] with Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) on the closure of the Environmental Protection Agency's library system that went into effect this afternoon. Here's the gist from the PEER website:

These libraries and their staff provide essential services to EPA staff and to the general public, such as finding the most current information on health risks of chemical substances, providing documentation in enforcement cases against corporate polluters, and helping to prepare scientific support for new regulations.

Shuttering the EPA libraries means that:
• Tens of thousands of unique holdings will be boxed up and inaccessible for an unknown period;
• Public access to EPA holdings will cease; and
• EPA scientists, enforcement agents and other specialists will have a much harder time doing their jobs. See EPA scientists’ letter of protest to Congress.

While cloaked as a budgetary measure, the actual motives appear to be rooted more in controlling access by both EPA staff and the public to information. (An internal EPA study estimated that the library network saved approximately $7.5 million annually in professional staff time, an amount far larger than the agency library budget of $2.5 million.)

I want to highlight that this is irreversible. It is not a matter of cracking open the sealed archives and digitizing them. The library in Chicago has already started to find new homes for many of their documents. Also, FOIA requests will not be effective since these records have not been catalogued. If you can't name the document, you can't request it.

Also, this is NOT about balancing the budget and finding a responsible way for paying for our dabblings in offensive warfare. It is not even an effective way to achieve a "small government." The library program IS small ($2.5 million isn't even a rounding error compared to the proposed $350 billion non-military discretionary spending) and it is not "government waste." It's what keeps the Agency running. In fact, removing the program will likely cause the $7.3 billion spent annually by the Agency to get tied up in paperwork and data mining. And THAT is wasteful.

I've stopped seeing stars when I stand up to fast. Must be election season. Call your Congressman.

End of the Line

Foreign Policy Magazine has a stunning photo essay about the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh. About half of the worlds super tankers are disassembled there, the others mostly go to China or India. The methods and work conditions are almost medieval. From the essay:

When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.

The OSHA factsheet [PDF] on shipbreaking includes a who's who of toxic chemicals including PCBs, lead and other heavy metals, asbestos and CFCs. Not to mention all the sharp metal, broken glass and fire-prone liquids aplenty. The US has workplace standards to protect its citizens from these hazards. The laws of economics see to it they are protected from doing the work at all. Bangladesh has few or no standards, which is why you see 200,000 people in bare feet and no protective equipment. Bangladesh also has lax environmental regulations, so when the tide comes in, all those chemicals get washed right into the Bay of Bengal.




The magazine isn't the first to cover this story. Will Englund and Gary Cohn were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their 1998 piece in the Baltimore Sun on Alang shipyard [google satellite image] in India, and Greenpeace (yes, they're still around) has declared it one of their priorities. So I'm a little surprised I hadn't heard more about it.

Hold me

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Take a Bow

My friend Annick has been working hard as producer for a documentary about Clare Woods Academy, a school for kids with special needs. From the website:

The film chronicles the amazing kids, with various disabilities, through rehearsals, classroom time, their home lives, and finally, the sold -out, standing-room-only performances of the musical. The film aims to show that despite outward appearances or physical differences, these special kids are just like any other child, with the same hopes, dreams, and fears.

She just posted an announcement that the rough cut has just been finished and the real thing shouldn't be too far behind. The trailer is wonderful (I found the quicktime file to work better for me), and the whole project oozes with a professionalism that just awes me. But as LeVar would say, take my damn word for it and make a donation.

Tomatoes

My dad never ceases to amaze me with his ability to be trendy at least a decade too early. He was making himself "western-style" shirts back in the late 80s. He developed a predecessor to GIS for Wayne county way before it became an important land-use planning tool. To be fair, he has his share of things that never caught on. Before I was born, he started a croquet league that played during the lunch hour - in 1970's downtown Detroit. This time, though, he's caught something just before it reaches its tipping point.

Every August, the kitchen becomes inundated with tomatoes of all shapes, colors, and states of decay. By the second week, my tongue is raw and my sense of taste diminished. I start to wonder if the same happens to the fruit flies which have by then fortified a perimeter around the kitchen table.

This year, our troubles were alleviated when People's Food Co-op in Ann Arbor agreed to sell his tomatoes - at $5.69 a pound. The PFC was already carrying his heirloom vegetable seeds, which were profiled in a Michigan Radio piece in May last year. I'll work on posting the audio file later. Michigan Radio doesn't have a very friendly archive. Meanwhile, you can listen to a higher-profile bit [transcript. Scroll up for the mp3.] on heirloom tomatoes that aired on NPR's Living on Earth just a few weeks ago.

As I was searching for the segment, a bit of fill music caught my ear. It was Wendy Mae Chambers' car horn organ playing "New York, New York"

The instrument is comprised of 25 car horns operated by a homemade keyboard and powered by a car battery charger. The car horns were selected with a pitch pipe and purchased from junk yards, with the exception of the Cadillac C-Trumpet and the "ahooogah" horn which were purchased new... She believes she got the idea for the instrument while asleep in her apartment in Brooklyn, waking up to a distant traffic jam on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway that sounded like a Mahler symphony.

Bonus points for the apt Mahler similie. She also has a quite charming version of "Winter wonderland" that she plays on her toy piano. John Cage would be proud.

Speaking of Cage, youtube has his "Sound" posted in three parts. If you can tolerate Cage's urgent and self-important blatherskite, it's worth a look to see why I like Roland Kirk so much. Kinda like my blog. Was that too self-aware? C'mon, you like it when Eggers does it!

Kirk and Cage

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Holy Ballot Proposal!

Even though same-sex marriage is rapidly losing ground, it has still cast its morally ambiguous shadow over the institution as a whole. Opponents of same-sex marriage often suggest that allowing such unions could pave the way for even less desirable nuptials such as intra-family and inter-species wedlock. Indeed, two liberal eurotrash fowls have proven them right. I must admit, what worries me more is high school english classes having to deal with five more chuck dickens. Groan again, into my good ear?

Vinyl Sharity

I've been finding a lot of sites where people are "ripping" their old out of print LPs to mp3 and sharing them online. Most of these are novelty items that are fairly safe from any applicable copyright interests. For instance, Bellybongo specializes in lounge music and Swedish pop. Sabadabada offers a small selection of Brasilian music from the 1960's, and a large collection of album art from the same era. Unpleasant.org is a better music blog than I could ever write, and dabbles in a little sharity. Singing science records has a bunch of those campy (albeit catchy!) let's-make-science-fun songs. Funky16corners posts funk tracks and albums of varying obscurity.

Some of my favorites:

• 'Summertime' by Klaus Wunderlich has got the funk. I really want someone to mash this up with a thicker drum track.
• 'Y Deja Andar El Reloj' byOsmar Milito Y El Quarteto Forma is a laid back tune featuring the cuica. My family named our first dog after it because of the noise it made locked in the bathroom at night before it was housetrained. While you're on the page check out 'Magnolia' by Jorge Ben. Fans of Seu Jorge's contributions to the Life Aquatic soundtrack should like this. Also, Side A of Obofe is also a gem. One minute it sounds like Sergio Mendes and the Brasil '66, the next minute like the Sesame Street theme. 'Madame Sabe Tudo' sounds like a Brasilian Bob Dylan over a Dixieland jazz band.
  
• 'Kiedy Allach Szedl (When Allah came)' by Marek Sewen and his band. The whistling (or theramin?) and woodblock remind me of Ennio Morricone's work on the spaghetti Western soundtracks. I guess Allah came by for tea and an afternoon cha-cha.
  
• The Very Best of Robert Delgado. It is mandatory that you enjoy a drink with a miniature umbrella in it while listening to this album at least once this summer. Let me know if you can't figure out how to get the rapidshare thing to work.
• 'Sheherezade' as done by Trumpet A'gogo reminds me more of 'One Nation' off of Roland Kirk's Blacknuss more than Rimsky-Korsakov.
  
• Lastly, if you don't have enough to do with your life, check out 'Zoom a Little Zoom' over at Singing Science. As the page notes, it features the guy who penned "On top of Spaghetti". The harmonies warm me from the inside.

That's all for now. If I know me at all, there will be more. Thank you for indulging me.