I frequently go on about all the technological marvels that await us “just around the corner”. Given that, I have been somewhat surprised by reactions to the news items reporting on China’s manipulation of weather.
(AFP) – – Chinese meteorologists covered Beijing in snow Sunday after seeding clouds to bring winter weather to the capital in an effort to combat a lingering drought, state media reported.
The unusually early snow blanketed the capital from Sunday morning and kept falling for half the day, helped by temperatures as low as minus 2 Celsius (29 Fahrenheit) and strong winds from the north, Xinhua news agency reported.
Besides falling in the northeastern provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the northern province of Hebei, the eastern port city of Tianjin also got its first snow of the autumn, the report said.
“We wont miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,” the report quoted Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, as saying.
Chinese meteorologists have for years sought to make rain by injecting special chemicals into clouds.
As they progress along this front [no pun intended] and refine their capabilities I grow ever more uneasy and queazy.
Is messing about with the weather a good thing? By doing so is there a risk of unintended consequences? Will the ability lead to a potential weapon? What happens if China decides to punish a rebellious province by withholding precipitation… or perhaps bringing on torrential rains that ruin crops quicker than a drought would?
I’m probably being uncharacteristically silly. After all, I find the fear of genetically modified foods to be unrealistic because I view that ability as our best hope to feed an ever growing world population. Is not the ability to cause rain also beneficial, and specifically beneficial to crop production?
Is it the fact that I view one as solidly grounded in science and the other to be “god like powers” of control? Why one and not the other?
I’m genuinely puzzled by my reactions and the thought lines inspired by them.
Ultimately, I fall back on my assumption that anything that relieves human suffering is a good thing, god like or no. Weather manipulation is not the first technological advancement that has pressed the nausea inducing button labeled “Gone too Far”. Nor will it be the last as we stand at the precipice of astounding advancements, most we are not even yet capable of imagining. So I suppose I should just get used to that nausea on occasion.
Note: This post was started on Friday evening and due to a health issue not completed until Sunday night. The stimulus package bit is, by now, a “dated” but it informs the last part so I kept it in. Besides, this is the first day of NaBloPoMo [National Blog Posting Month] and this is the post I have closest to publishing.
I will claim drug induced fog for any errors or rambling, but fair warning… there was [prescription] drug induced fog.
Uh Oh… it appears our federal government lied to us… and may even be preparing to further that lie even more:
Gasp
I became aware of the Numbers Game the White House and our Legislature was playing with the stimulus package when an uproar erupted in Flublogia over the inclusion then removal of funding for “Pandemic Preparation”.
Now, given my long time involvement as a “citizen advocate” on the pandemic influenza front you would assume I was all for spending that nearly billion [900 million] dollars. That assumption would be correct, I was, and am, all about preparing our nation and citizenry for a pandemic, but I took great exception to these funds being included in a Jobs Creation bill.
And, my goodness, gee whiz, we actually find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, thankfully one that is mild. The funding was meant with H5N1 in mind, and that not so little threat has not gone away.
Jobs were needed desperately at the time the Stimulus Package was passed. Jobs are still needed desperately. My own state has suffered greatly during the economic downturn. In fact, the post I was writing prior to finding the CBS story has to do with Boeing’s recent announcement to build their new 787 plant in North Charleston. I will finish that post after this one [unless something else distracts me yet again].
This is an article from March 2009, prior to the world waking up towards the end of April facing the very real prospects of an unfolding pandemic from a novel influenza virus, a novel influenza that would later be dubbed Swine Flu, or more “officially” A/H1N1-2009.
Associated Press Via Forbes.com
SC unemployment hits 10.4 percent in January
By JEFFREY COLLINS , 03.11.09 [excerpted]
Thousands of job seekers streamed into a convention hall in South Carolina’s vacation mecca for an annual tourism job fair Wednesday, but they found only a fraction of hiring taking place compared with past years.
The massive Job Expo was being held the same day South Carolina reported its unemployment rate shot to 10.4 percent, the second-highest in the nation, behind Michigan. People in the resume-toting crowds in Myrtle Beach didn’t need statistics to know the recession is slamming the state.
“I have been stunned at some of the people who have come by saying they’ll do anything – even clean rooms,” said Lorrane Ammons, who was hiring housekeepers for the Sea Mist hotel. “I’ve been telling them I don’t even know what we are going to need.”
South Carolina’s unemployment rate for January was its highest in nearly 26 years. A record 227,986 people were jobless and all but 11 of the state’s 46 counties had double-digit unemployment, according to the state Employment Security Commission. Even those home to the largest cities had rates above the national average of 7.6 percent for that month.
In South Carolina, rural Allendale County had the highest rate, with 23.4 percent. Lexington County registered the lowest with 7.5 percent – the only one clocking in below the national average for January.
So, like many others, I wanted, desperately, for stimulus funding to create jobs. After all, that is what the bill was meant to do — CREATE JOBS for all the folk who had suddenly, and through no fault of their own, found themselves unemployed with no prospects of finding a new job. What the stimulus bill was meant to do, and what it was written up to are two different things, however. Even at the time of its passage there were voices of dissent, this from February 10, 2009 …
[excerpted]
“We got rid of funding for such projects as $870 million for pandemic flu preparedness – that is something that may be needed but doesn’t belong in a stimulus package,” Collins said. “We made a number of cuts like that, difficult cuts but important, so that we could keep to the purpose of this package.”
But the majority of Senate Republicans railed against the bill, suggesting it will do little to help the economy.
Arizona Republican John McCain called the Senate stimulus package an “act of generational theft,” describing the measure as “neither bipartisan nor a compromise.”
The bill is “a spending spree that masquerades as a stimulus,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. “We are taking an enormous risk with other peoples’ money … I won’t take that risk.”
Voices of dissent that were marginalized. Those that said the bill would not create jobs were shouted down. But, if even I, a non-economist, non-financial expert, could see the Folly of the Funding why is that the vast majority did not? Why is it that the White House feels it can get away with lying to the American people — especially the American tax payers?
Oct 29 02:43 PM US/Eastern By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY AP Music Writer [Excerpt]
NEW YORK (AP) – Sting isn’t a religious man, but he says President Barack Obama might be a divine answer to the world’s problems.
“In many ways, he’s sent from God,” he joked in an interview, “because the world’s a mess.”
But Sting is serious in his belief that Obama is the best leader to navigate the world’s problems. In an interview on Wednesday, the former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and “found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world.”
[snip] “It’s aggressive and violent and full of fear,” he said of the backlash against Obama. “They don’t want change, they want things to feel the same because they feel safe there.”
Sting’s comments are not uncommon, in a general way that is. But these are no mere political rhetoric – party line – comments. They are comments expressing genuine beliefs and emotions.
There are people who idolize President Obama. There are those that have vested him with not only divine guidance, but divinity itself. There are those who felt he actually deserved that Nobel Peace Prize he was recently awarded.
There are those who love Obama because he has given them hope and inspired them to dream that things can be much better.
Hope and inspiration are two powerful psychological drivers. Hope is even listed by some as a requirement of survival — without hope human beings do not thrive. Hope and inspiration are wonderful things. Those two things can change the nation — and even the world. President Obama gave this nation – and the world – a great deal of those two things.
I do not believe there is any deliberate misfeasance or malfeasance that President Obama has engaged in. I do believe he has an abundance of arrogance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I’m fairly certain it takes a bucket full of arrogance to presume one is capable of being president of the United States.
But I ask – what happens when arrogance meets adulation?
Hubris and callous disregard.
According to Sting, and those that believe as he does, that is “aggressive and violent and full of fear“.
There is not an iota of any of those things. There is, however, a growing disappointment.
The hope and inspiration was real — is real — the potential of that hope and inspiration was inspiring itself. Now, the potential has taken on new — and ominous — hints of a building wave of intolerance. Intolerance of disagreement and dissent. And then the reactions to that intolerance.
When I first saw the Levi’s jeans commercial campaign Go Forth, I was shocked. It shocked my middle-aged-middle-class sensibilities. The same sensibilities that are shocked by some of the popular rap music or the “gansta culture”. What can I say… I am middle aged and middle class.
So, I found it the hight of irony when I read Sting’s comment. Aggression and violence have become a part of our culture. Is it unreasonable to think that there are those who also fear in the sense of Sting’s comment?
I found this today on Instapundit, snipped out from the Levi’s commercial above..
Have you your weapons? Your pistols? Your sharp edged axes?
This is from Levi’s? Left wing, San Francisco, “We hate the Boy Scouts” Levi’s?
I can see them quoting old Walt, but it surprises the f*ck out of me that they quoted the part about the pistols. Unless, of course, they are advocating some kind of Obamabot led Peoples’ Guard that will herd the rest of us into big fenced in pens somewhere out in Western Kansas or something.
Well, it mostly has more of a junior Burning-Man vibe, but there is this bit:
But I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about.
I have no fear of President Obama, nor of his administration. I am not without my own hopeful expectations. I fear those that believe he is the answer to all ills. Even before I stumbled, quite coincidentally I might add, on the Instapundit website [the first time I have visited it] I had made the connection of the “hope and inspiration” invested in President Obama with that invested in Hitler – before he was the Hitler we would all come to know about.
President Obama is not the danger. I would argue he is the one in danger. In danger of becoming what he is not now. The thing is, I don’t think it’s those that disagree with Obama that pose the risk. I believe the danger to him resides in those like Sting, the Nobel commission, and all the not famous or influential who idolize and deify him.
President Obama needs his arrogance, said another way – he needs the audacity. He needs it to lead the nation in these very turbulent times. But that is the exact thing that lays his ego bare to the pitfalls of adoration and blind faith.
The Obama administration feels empowered to lie about their stimulus package results. Is it unreasonable to begin to worry about what they may feel empowered to do in the future? It’s probably not unreasonable, after all, President Bush was feared because of his perceived power grabs under a policy of “the politics of fear” that Democrats and liberals were always on about.
So at the end of this way too long and rambling post, I find myself asking: What has happened to us as a nation that we fear those we find ourselves in political disagreement? Why do we invest “evil” in their intent?
Our nation was founded with the protection of “checks and balances” and it is intrinsic to the two party system that serves to support those “checks and balances”. Political disagreement is a part of any political system not based on totalitarianism. If our president, regardless of who he or she may be, needs those in disagreement to keep them honest and that inherent arrogance in check. No one, and especially the president of the United States, should feel empowered to do anything they wish.
It’s a mistake to view those who oppose our positions as evil. Those beliefs will inspire behaviors at a minimum disruptive to the process, and potentially, even violence as the vitriol spirals ever upward and out, and those so deemed respond with their own spiraling vitriol and potential for violence.
Whitman’s O Pioneer captures my own sense of this moment in time in all its grand potential in the scientific world…
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep, Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
But the opening lines…
Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
… do not speak of a future “seized” for the betterment of humanity via technological and humanitarian advancements, they speak to a future world conquered literally.
We need to be cognizant of the messages we send and the messages we receive. That goes for President Obama, his administration, his supporters — and his detractors.
I did not write all this with any political motivations. I wrote it out of a deepening concern about the ever widening and deepening rift my country is experiencing.
