Scientific Republican

Cloning Lysenko?

Consider the tadpole. What occurs deep in the dark recesses of the human body  happens to Kemit's cousins in broad daylight . In either case  the parallel processes start  with the merger , uncoiling , and recombination of DNA from father and mother into a  totipotent fertilized ovum.

It  first few cell divisions give rise to  8–16-cell morula, each cell of which is still totipotent- able to develop into any kind of adult cell.  the next few  divisions yield  a defined structure, the blastocyst,  of 150–250 cells forming  a hollow shell, the placenta-forming trophoblast,  whose inner mass consists  of 20 or 30 pluripotent embryonic stem (ES) cells, able both  to multiply indefinitely and, more importantly,   to differentiate into any tissue or organ, though  no longer able to generate an entire individual.

Developmental potential- -pluripotency--  diminishes during the suceeding embryonic stages of  blastocyst development   until, at the end, all but a few cells in mature organ and structural  tissues are irreversibly committed to their roles  in the new organism's biology, no longer able to multiply or develop further. yet a few proliferative cells, adult stem cells, persist in most tissues, even in adults that already have offspring,  and these cell nuclei can be reprogrammed by inserting them  into an enucleated egg cell ,where they again can multiply, and   generate  totipotent clones  able to  undergo full-scale embryonic developmen. Welcome to the Clone Wars .

Peace almost broke out when it was  reported that  human skin cells- the stuff of dandruff rather than  obsession,  could be elevated  to stem-cell-like pluripotency by  introducing functioning copies of just four growth-controlling genes. But don't break out the champagne and ticker tape for the victory parade just yet --- it remains to be discovered if  transformed and embryonic stem cells are really  medically equivalent , though that has not stopped the shark cartilege and apricot pit purveying classes from concocting quack versions for the treatment of anyone desperate enough to pay.

Nor stayed the Christan Right from declaring a metaphysical crusade against the heretical doctrine that  re-entwining the same DNA in vivo  does not transsubstantiate it into a soul entrapment device  endowed  with certain inalienable rights.  Even more remarkably and in the literal sense  mysteriously , these groups fervently  believe that there is no way  making identical molecular combinations  by fiddling about with dandruff in vitro  ,or using  DNA  mundanely sequenced from bottles of chemicals on a shelf, can precipitate what they regard as a  miracle, for  to presume so would be Godless Materialism.

This may make some mutter about "moral relativism , but to The Base,   the twin modern heresies of evolution and ES-cell biology  are anathema  to fundamentalists  and theocrats of all creeds ,f or in denying human immutability  they seem to mock the sanctity of the soul, which has quite a West Wing constituency, witness the  president's  2001 ban on funding for hES-cell research.

Throwing this executive monkey wrench into the reserch machinery of The  National  Institute of Health , which  life scientists can no  more avoid  using than the federal highway system, has caused a crack-up  in  US stem cell research in the US.  The  Presidential stem-cell edict cannot be  fought  in the courts  like The Discovery Institute's attempt to insinuate  creationism  into public education under the guise of Intelligent design.

A recent review of 'Cell of Cells' in the TLS  grafts Stalin onto Godwin's law by uncharitably comparing The  Bush Doctrine on   ES cells to " Stalin’s embrace of Lysenkoism. Representing a profound misinterpretation of Marxism, it was supposed to support the USSR’s political philosophy that everything, including genetic evolution, could be fitted into a “socialist” fabric, and it set back biology in the then USSR by at least fifty years." 

The comparison more aptly applies to the  Neocon  obsession  with the subject -- not a month pases without some Discovery Institute familiar  writing on it in The Weekly Standard , and applying it to Republicans at large  seems over the top , because unlike Stalin's Russia,  America has a private sector- and states like California, that now how to ignore an executive branch showing signs of ideological derangement or fundamentalist zeal. Neither have the true believers gotten very far in lobbying their  usual  bete noire, the UN to impose a global cloning ban - politics makes strange test tube fellows, witness the latest salient in a battle even farther down-market- The Base's campaign to make cellular evolution go away.

Andrew Schlafly, son of Religious Right uberpundit  Phyllis Schlafly and Editor of a wannabe Wikipedia clone called the Conservapedia, is outraged that taxpayer dollars have gone into breeding  hundreds of thousands of generations of E.Coli under environmental stress in the form of wildly toxic fluorocitrate molecules,  and that the little surviving buggers have reportedly  up and evolved  new biochemical pathways quite unlike those with which they were endowed by their Creator.

The very idea is too much for Andy , who wants to use his inalienable rights , created by the  Freedom Of  Information  and Data Quality Acts, to seize a copy of every data point ,and bacterial culture generated in 20 years of research ,  to see if he can falsify the unwelcome  and Metaphysically Incorrect news published in the Proceedings Of the National Academy of Science.

Never mind that all the data and experimental details appeared in the  peer-reviewed article,  or that no biologists have found fault with them.  Schlafly , who has never published a scientific paper , made his demand  for the raw data without  first reading the PNAS article in detail, its  conclusion alone being too much for so  faithful an anti-evolutionist to stomach. He has accordingly issued a "Conservapedia  Challenge' and is calling for lawyers to aid him in acquiring several tons ofpaper and  a freezerful of frozen cells, at the researcher's expense, so that Andy  can magisterially proceed to ...what ?

Spend the next 20 years in his non-existant biolab  using his non-existant knowledge of biochemistry  to retrace the steps of author Lembski? Or is The Conservapedia bent on setting research back as far as it can by an extended paper chase through the courts at taxpayer expense?  How about asking NOAA to re-analyize every air sample gathered at Mona Kea since he was born  in the hope of proving rising CO2  a hoax ? If this is what postmodern conservatism is evolving into , the extinction of liberals seems a slight consolation. Having known Sin at Hiroshima, science was bound to run into Metaphysics sooner or later. What better place than inside the Bible Beltway ?

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With Enough Bathtubs

In Leaderless Jihad, former Foreign Service Officer  Marc Sageman, now a University of Pennsylyania professor,distills what he learned from years of  reading the daily feed of intelligence, both classified and open source,  streaming  through the State Department. But Sageman is no mere desk warrior-- he went to see the forces of terror in action on their own turf in Afghanistan, and has combed the files on the jihadist organizations that operate there still.

Ohio State  political science professor  John Mueller, whom I've known since he commented on "Weaker Than We Think" the assessment of al-Qaida's diminished capacity for terror I published in The American Conservative in 2004,    [ http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_06/article.html  ] reports on Sargeman's analysis at http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=451cde94-97e5-4a6c-a01c-9acfddc44b60:

" Mr. Sageman sorts the enemy into three groups.

First, there is a cluster left over from the struggles in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. Currently they are huddled around, and hiding out with, Mr. bin Laden somewhere in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. This band, concludes Sageman, probably consists of a few dozen individuals.

Joining them in the area, although perhaps with more on the periphery, are 100 more fighters left over from al-Qaeda's golden days in Afghanistan in the 1990s. These key portions of the enemy forces would total, then, less than 150 actual people. They may operate something resembling "training camps," but these appear to be quite minor affairs. They also assist with the Taliban's far larger and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan.

Beyond this, concludes Sageman, the third group consists of thousands of sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the globe who mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare each other actually to do something.
All of these rather hapless, even pathetic, people, should of course be considered to be potentially dangerous. From time to time they may be able to coalesce enough to carry out acts of terrorist violence, and policing efforts to stop them before they can do so are fully justified. But the notion that they present an existential threat to just about anybody seems at least as fanciful as some of their schemes, and any notion that these characters could come up with nuclear weapons seems far fetched in the extreme.

The threat presented by these individuals is likely, concludes Sageman, simply to fade away in time. Unless, of course, the United States overreacts and does something to enhance their numbers, prestige, and determination -- something that is, needless to say, entirely possible.

I've checked this remarkable and decidedly unconventional evaluation of the threat with three prominent experts who have spent years studying the issue. They generally agree with Sageman.

One of them is Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College, whose brilliant book, The Far Enemy, based on hundreds of interviews in the Middle East, parses the jihadist enterprise. As an additional concern, he suggests that Sageman's third group may also include a small, but possibly growing, underclass of disaffected and hopeless young men in the Middle East, many of them scarcely literate, who, outraged at Israel and at America's war in Iraq, may provide cannon fodder for the jihad. However, these people would mainly present problems in the Middle East (including in Iraq), not elsewhere.

Another way to evaluate the threat presented by jihadist terrorists around the world is to focus on the actual amount of violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists since 9/11 outside of war zones. Included in the count would be terrorism of the much-publicized and fear-inducing sort that occurred in Bali in 2002, in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey in 2003, in the Philippines, Madrid, and Egypt in 2004, and in London and Jordan in 2005.

Two think-tank publications have independently provided lists of such incidents. Although these tallies make for grim reading, the total number of people killed comes to some 200 or 300 per year. That, of course, is 200 or 300 per year too many, but it hardly suggests that the perpetrators present a major threat, much less an existential one. For comparison: over the same period far more people have drowned in bathtubs in the United States alone."

In 2004, I found that  estimates of al-Qaeda's potentially armed  forces had fallen as low as 3,000 highly dispersed individuals, with a technical cadre  far below the threshold of autonomous  development of nuclear arms-- the 'existential threat ' threshold, and reluctantly concluded that  9-11, like Pearl Harbor or the Trojan Horse, was intrinsically unique- its mastermind, and literal architect having self destructed along with the element of surprise.
I want to closely examine Sageman's book,and invite readers to do likewise.   Because if  OBL's franchise  has fallen below regimental strength,  the tempo of GWOT operations may stand  in need of adjustment -

The nuclear genie remains a valid cold war metaphor, but predicating policy on mythology remains a risky business . Besides being famously stingy in dispensing  their favors  Djinn rarely  come in refillable bottles . Little wonder Homeland Security's latest effort  at self justification extends to adding  hand grenades to its list of  Weapons of Mass Destruction .

On the other hand,Antioch is in Syria
 

The Seven Degree Solution

More on this at Taki's Top drawer

Lost Mines Of The Olmecs

  DISCOVER  January 2003

100 Top Science Stories Of 2002

  81. Rare Jade Riddle Cracked

The Kunz Axe, a 3,000-year-old Olmec blue-jade sculpture, features a snarling creature that is part human, part jaguar. Courtesy of The American Museum of Natural History, New York.

In 1804 naturalist Alexander von Humboldt returned to France from the Americas with jade artifacts crafted by the Olmecs. This pre-Mayan, pre-Columbian culture had left behind statues and axes made of a translucent blue-green jade found almost nowhere else in the world. Today archaeologists know the Olmecs had stopped using the stone by about 500 B.C. Later cultures favored other shades of jade, and the blue-green version became known as Olmec blue. But the geological source of the jade had never been found. Geophysicist Russell Seitz, field director of a study of Mesoamerican jade for Harvard's Peabody Museum, had spent years looking for the elusive transparent blue-green stone. By 1999, when he took his fiancée to Guatemala for a vacation, he had given up hope of finding the mother lode. Then, by chance, he stumbled upon half a dozen shops selling small items crafted from the blue-green gem: "It had become an ornamental cottage heritage industry." It took him nine months to track down the jade miners, who finally agreed to lead him up into the mountains. There, at an elevation of 5,700 feet, he found "a giant, economy-size jade vein." Seitz returned several times before discovering the biggest boulders last January. Most of the jade he found is worthless. But one 300-ton monolith does contain three tons of the prized translucent blue-green mineral.
    The find puts to rest one mystery but leaves many questions for archaeologists and pre-Columbian scholars, including: Why did the Olmecs stop carving jade? Perhaps their culture disappeared, or maybe the seams of jade that the Olmecs were mining, and the Olmec carvers themselves, were destroyed by volcanoes. "The deposits," says Seitz, "have been Pompeiied several times."
— Michael Abrams

Our Friends In The Swamp

This Sunday , all good Greens , and countless greenflies , will celebrate the centennial of Rachel Carson's birth. The numbers attending this year's festivities will of course be lower than they might, for if The World Health Organization is to be credited , there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, a million of them fatal.

Never fear- Green funding will not suffer. The deceased are largely Third World infants without a credit card to their name. Why cavil that tens of millions of them would be alive but for the ban on applying DDT to their thatched hovels, when their absence has scarcely trimmed the fuse on the population bomb ?  Had they lived to drive the rising spiral of Greenhouse gases , the inconvenient truth is that arctic meltdown would have accelerated , thawing ever more tundra into an ideal mosquito habitat, and creating a vicious circle of insect borne disease.

Give thanks instead for the living. The tropical DDT ban has so far killed scarcely one child per square kilometer , while saving literally thousands of mosquitoes per square meter--sixty of the peaceable creatures share a square yard of pesticide-free organic swamp. To do the math is to discover one of the wonders of post-modern creation. Over the half century since Silent Spring, mother Earth has been graced by tens of billions of extra mosquitoes per absent child , yet not a single polar bear cub has perished of malaria.

We owe it to Rachel Carson's memory to sustain our winged allies in the war on terrifying population growth by promoting the ecological recovery of the nation's capital. So write Former Next President Gore before the 4th of July , and demand a District Of Columbia-wide ban on insect repellents during his LiveEarth concert. The Tree  Of  Life cannot flourish unless watered with the blood of patriots.

Weighing The Web

The Internet weighs two ounces .

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard's comparison of his home energy costs to Google's multi-gigabuck annual power bill is intriguing. $1,200 a month is rather a lot of Pacific Gas & Electric.

But like Al Gore's 22.6 Megawatt hour a month Eco-mansion , it only serves to make the $3 a year per capita it takes to power the global internet seem a roaring bargain, even by third world standards. Still, my dollar a day ISP bill gives me no joy , because the electrons I feed my pet laptop are costing me about half a billion dollars a pound. Let me explain.

I'm taking about the power that drives the bytes , not lights the lights. Geodesic dome guru Bucky Fuller baffled architects by asking how much their buildings weighed?  Not being paid by the pound , few cared , but  mass and energy matter more than ever in the aftermath of 9-11. Built like a Hummer on steroids , the Empire State Building shrugged off a  bomber crash in 1945 while the World Trade Center's economy model frame collapsed. So how much does the internet weigh ? And how many horsepower does it take to run it ?

The Ministry of Supercilious Walks

When Tony Blair  came to power fewer than 5,000 CCTV cameras spied on public life in the UK. Today there are five million--one for every 12 citizens. As the Brave New Labourene gets set to turn 10 Downing Street over to Niel Kinnock's understudy, the average Londoner goes about his or her business monitored by  over 300 CCTV cameras a day.

The implosion of privacy continues.  Auto license plate recognition was followed by facial ID software , and suspicious behaviour recognition programs to scan CCTV pixel clusters for “behavioral oddities.”

Tony Blair's final Homage to George Orwell & Monty Python is a £500,000  research grant to develop gait recognition cameras  to alert Big Brother if anyone gets out of step.

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Arms And The Weatherman

Hard cases make bad law ,  but worse science policy can arise when commanders in the Climate Wars deploy the mode of ideological rhetoric Paul Weyrich and Michael Lind style"armed cant." It's hardly new -- in 1990 I noted that  "In the name of the greenhouse effect,some environmentalists are demanding a 30 percent rollback in C02 emissions by the year 2000." Today that green fire blazes in Al Gore's belly.Wielding  rhetoric inflammatory as William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech, he seeks a " 90%  or greater " cut in CO2 by 2050.

In 2000, the Former Next President's campaign economists dismissed Green proposals to knock America's energy economy back into the 1960's . Now their man demands we  crucify coal , starving the national economy down to  CO2 emission levels last seen in the 1880's . If he reaches any farther back into the future , he may pull a Constitutional amendment to abolish fire out of his stovepipe hat.

An old school political Neanderthal like Bryan could only applaud Al's road show. With the same didactic preachyness as Jurassic Park , An Inconvenient Truth deprives viewers of polemically inconvenient scientific facts by design.

But that's show business--the Alley Oop constituencies on both sides of the aisle haven't cracked a science textbook since the late neolithic . They don't give a whoop if debate still rages in scientific journals nobody reads.They'd much rather see the climate change controversy downshift into the more popular--and political-- media staffers can handle without recourse to a technical dictionary. If the Supreme Court of the United States can exhale a condemnation of CO2 without troubling itself over terms like " troposphere " and "radiative forcing" why should the Senate loose sleep over them ?

Tabloid climate science makes better bedside reading. One side's depiction of  any human impact as tantamount to Weather of Mass Destruction has become a soporifically predictable feature of late night television. The other evening, Al Gore calmed the excitable Conan O'Brien by assuring "We don't know enough not to make a catastrophic mistake in dealing with the world's climate". before expounding a half century's worth of policy plans founded on climate modeling art that , while it has improved as much as microwave cooking in a generation, still has far to go before achieving the satisfying crunch of hard science.

Lacking  media traction, the Green climate warriors Red State counterparts base their anodyne opposition less on scientific evidence than political intuition, trusting in the authority of scientific bedtime stories that  wouldn't trouble a ten year old expecting the tooth fairy. Yet as the Climate Wars enter their second century, the atmosphere remains the Earth's most complex dynamic system.

If you think it will grow simpler in time for the election, dream on. Those unwilling to heft the heavy scientific chronicles of climate change research risk falling  prey to views by turns parochial , tendentious, or just plain daft. Conservative scientists find themselves in a waking nightmare, as scanning from Fox TV to the Washington Times, they see right wing journalism  devolving into a 21st century scientific eyesore. Some raise a disturbing question : is a sensible Conservative consensus on climate change even possible?

Both sides talking heads seem more interested in trading truth for influence than speaking truth to power. Those on the right, though well , lawyerly , lack a first-rate scientific constituency to back them. behind their  stalwart front , there's little stomach for seriously debating the scientific  facts  Ditto  Al Gore, who his 1001th performance of  The Speech to an audience of 12,000 earth scientists in San Francisco last month, but wisely skedaddled before they could ask too many questions.

Only one skeptic on climate change counts as a real player in the fast moving scientific game underlying the debate. Richard Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a prolific and respected author of peer-reviewed papers on the atmospheric sciences explaining  climate's 'Quasi-Biennial Oscillation'  and the role of tides and gravity wave drag in the circulation of the upper atmosphere.His sheer creativity sets the  MIT professor of atmospheric sciences  conspicuously apart from a cohort largely comprised of  politically appointed TV weathermen and researchers with careers at best tangential to state of the art climate studies.

Lindzen is no stranger to technical controversy. He has over the years posed  several novel and  scientifically interesting objections to the common wisdom  in the climate change debate, focusing on how rising amounts of atmospheric water vapor could curb the rate of man made temperature rise. But each of his serial objections has been coherently replied to in the peer reviewed science literature. So good scientist that he is , Lindzen has accepted as valid many quantitative objections to his theoretical views, and altered his stance accordingly.{ THIS JUST IN }

That's how science works. Senator Inhofe's words notwithstanding , the iconoclast celebrated in Michael Crichton's 'State of Fear ' no longer defends some talking points yack TV pundits refuse to relinquish. To their dismay , he has committed the unpardonable political sin of allowing scientific facts to change his mind. What he chose not to say about the state of the science in seconding Crichton and British geographer George Stott in a recent debate in New York  speaks even more loudly than his vigorous denunciation of hype in the service of politics.

This may never register with  some , for the ditto head common wisdom on climate has been projected into the halls of congress-- before Pelosi and Waxman returned to the center ring, the Congressional  climate policy circus was presided over by  Rush's Limbaugh's scientific casting director Marc Morano. Al Gore steers clear of MIT, but what about Lindzen's impact on his colleagues there ?  Lindzen has had twenty years to persuade The National Academy's thousand-plus members that man-made warming remains too uncertain to be a serious issue. Like most respectable skeptics, he began by questioning warnings detectable existence , and  pointing out that negative feedbacks could curb  it in models and reality alike.

Ask around the  Academy as to how many  have been won over to these views ,and you will discover that the answer is closer to none than a dozen This is just as true on Lindzen's home turf.Other MIT professors share the view that the Climate Wars have become egregiously politicized , and that climate models are sorely constrained as predictive tools. Yet in a quarter century of almost daily interaction Lindzen has failed to persuade  such colleagues as MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel or oceanographer  Carl Wunsch that global warming is" not a big deal." Wunsch agreed to appear alongside Lindzen in the recent  British TV program , 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' but has ended up accusing the producers of swindling him -and their audience by playing fast and loose with scientific truth.

Emanuel is a far cry from a liberal icon; MIT is not Harvard, and like Lindzen ,he harshly criticized Carl Sagan's attempt to use a primitive climate model as a policy lever during the Cold War, calling ' nuclear winter '  studies "notorious for their lack of scientific integrity "  They may disagree as to both the nature of solutions and the immanent need for them , but it is worth noting where their views coincide-  a bipartisan commitment to the integrity of science makes Emmanuel's take on what the climate wars have come to 'Phaetons' Reins'  a necessary  compliment  to Lindzen's. Both agree that whatever is happening is happening slowly - policy maters may lack the energy ,but they do not lack the time  confront the full spectrum of facts that define a debate that defies both sides attempts to reduce it to sound bites. One that emerges from such study is an economic  analogy -- their are parallels between the  problems posed by climate change and gradual inflation.

As long as CO2 is rising by a few parts per million per year , radiative forcing of warming is growing   by microwatts  per square meter per day. It does not sound like much, , given the kilowatt per square meter power sunlight already deposits , but the microwatts have been adding up since  The Wealth Of Nations  manuscript first lay on Adam Smith's desktop, and some hundreds of thousands of days , and a lot of Mr.Watt's steam engines later, CO2 bracket creep has given rise to unavoidable debate as to the present and future costs of ignoring climatic  inflation.

If any species of Palaeoconservative principle is at once worth conserving , and profoundly endangered , it is that the political neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist in order to be respected. That sentiment may not be ready for prime time today. The disdain shown science by erstwhile conservatives and intransigent liberals waging the Climate War on TV too much recalls Thucydides view of an earlier conflict :

"The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools"

At present, none speak for science in a warming debate caught in the crossfire between vying political agendas. That may be the way Washington works , but while Republicans and Democrats clearly have different  metaphysical views of the world, its atmosphere neither knows nor cares.  There can be no scientific  armistice in the Climate Wars until both sides acknowledge that  there can be , at most , one kind of physics.  --Russell Seitz C.2007

 

Cool Heads At A Hot Concert

Denialists may reckon the risk on a par with the displacement of water by Cleopatra's barge , but Cris Horner, the incumbent climate wizard of Planet Gore , fears sea level may rise to inundate DC if ravers at Al's Live Earth concert exhale too much CO2. Yet it is only natural that Democrats with carbon neutral yachts should agonize over the Precautionary Principle ashore. To spare Washington from a watery grave  when the Great Green Rave breaks over the nation's capital , perhaps they should  advise Al to follow Venice's saving example.

The party animals of the Serene Republic devised a sartorial solution to the party's air quality problem centuries ago. Threatened with an outbreak of the Black Death , cool  Venetians packed their Carnivale mask schnozolli with spices to soak up the deathly Miasma , and bravely boogied on. The imposition of the germ theory of disease on innocent Venetians by AIDS activists has since cooled Carnivale somewhat.  So today ratty plague masks can be picked up for a song in better Adriatic flea markets.

Exported to Green ateliers , the masks can be recycled as Carbon Dioxide capture systems by repacking their beaks with SodaSorb to keep the satanic gas from escaping into the pristine Foggy Bottom air. Al is on the Congressional Record as demanding  society suck in its CO2 production 90%  by 2050 ,but don't hold your breath about the crowd at the 2007 event- EcoRock concerts entail heavy breathing.So how can the mask's sustainiably absorb the revelers CO2 as the bands play on ? And on-- Snoop Dogg, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Eyed Peas, Fall Out Boy, The Foo Fighters......

Using coal -fired power to tame such an electric guitar Gotterdammerung could raise sea level enough to turn the Supreme Court porte cochere into a Gondola stand. So though Vanity Fair subscribers may enjoy being leashed with electric cords, using renewable energy is the only democratic way to keep the revels green.  Conspicuous consumption of corny old gasohol could trigger a tortilla inflation riot--it's better conserved for washing down Ecstasy tabs in case Al whips out his Inconvenient Truth slides. So what's to empower the party people?

Once again, it's Venetian fashion sense to the rescue ! No respectable palazzo dweller appears masked in public without a hat , and the solar micro turbine baseball cap answers to that description. Apart from generating power to sell to Al's minigrid , their sweatbands can feed molten salt fuel cells , furnishing ecsydiasts with streams of absorbent lye to cleanse the good green air. The dusk to dawn blast from the departing rockers Gulfstream V's will disperse any attendant chlorine , and provide  wind-power enough to propel the party into a proper rave. before dismissing such high-tech haberdashery as outlandish , consider the glad rags our Former Next Doge last wore to a masked ball of Venetian proportions--

Survivors of Al's bash can judge if LiveEarth has tamed the hot air of the Capitoline fever swamps by using the internet's coolest online CO2 viewing tool. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's CarbonTracker website. If all goes well, DC won't appear as a Red State on its Global Greenhouse map. This Fourth Of July 2005 CO2 snapshot shows seasonal CO2 sources, like the Amazon Rain Forest , shaded red and sinks, like the thawing Arctic shaded blue. Somebody had better show this to Al before he forgets he invented it.

Full Disclosure : Russell Seitz has been known to coauthor David Jones' Daedalus column in Nature