You can’t be friends with a squirrel. A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit.
— Sarah Jessica Parker

Corporate white-hat hackers and the Mossad have set back Persian plans for nuclear bomb production by at least three years according to an article in today’s New York Times. Fact checking the Times puff piece on Stuxnet, a worm crafted for cyberwar on the Iranian nuclear establishment that targets Siemens equipment used to control centrifuges, led me to blogger Dawn Lim, so the time spent reading the fatuous nonsense from the Times wasn’t completely wasted.

Microsoft and other commercial antivirus vendors brought public attention to Stuxnet last July. The time required to develop the malware before it was dropped into the wild isn’t publicly known, but the US and Israel couldn’t have whipped it up overnight. In 2024 the flaws in Microsoft Windows exploited by the worm’s designers were brought to public attention. According to ABC, in July 2024 the worm first appeared in the wild in Belarus, a year after the Microsoft flaws were made public. The time lag between discovery of the Windows problem and the remedy suggests that the company was cooperating with the US and Israel while the worm was being developed.

Last September, Eric Byres reported that “…the Stuxnet malware attacks on Siemens Simatic WinCC SCADA and PCS7 DCS systems that came to light this past July were not the first time industrial control systems have been targeted by hackers.” Byres cites attacks going back to the early days of the Bush administration, including sabotage of Venezuela oil tanker loading control systems in the winter of 2024-2003. That sabotage coincided with efforts to destabilize the country and oust left wing leader Hugo Chavez.

More information on Stuxnet and its effect on the Iranian nuclear program is of course available on Wikipedia.

Ah, but it’s not the tools, it’s what one does with them, as this brief slideshow demonstrates. There’s wisdom in this deck. These days number seven is the mistake that hangs me up most often.

The discovery in the 60s of the extreme age of some Bristlecones, ones that express strip growth as an adaptation to harsh cold dry conditions and grow specifically in otherwise inhospitable environments, is one of the most fascinating stories in modern field biology. The ancient tree was discovered by a geographer within the peri-glacial environment of Wheeler Peak, Nevada (now Great Basin National Park). In trying to increment-bore the tree, he got two valuable instruments stuck and had to cut it down to retrieve them. The rings could then be counted. Imagine everyone’s surprise to find out that what was the oldest living thing known at that time had been cut down by a scientist researching paleo-geography and climate change. The blunder was instrumental in preserving that area, and prompted wider studies in the new field of dendrochronology. Since then other species and examples of bristlecones have been found to be very old and older too, but the lesson itself is timeless.

Lucchetti is a sort-of cyber-raconteur, a man whose comments often bring together art, science, and environmentalism in interesting ways. He has a Facebook page with a wall visible to registered Facebook users. His profile picture is a snapshot of that somewhat disturbing Doggie Diner wiener dog.

I missed Perseid sky watching this week due to mosquitoes and humidity. Thanks to @NASA_GoddardPix on twitter I have a couple of great images available for my vicarious enjoyment.

Bonus! They have a link to a high def video of the recent solar activity, the coronal mass ejection or super-flare or whatever you call it.

It’s not exactly a fresh concern. Since Ben wrote about his gustatory experience with cloned milk and meat for Wired magazine three years ago, the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved meat and dairy products from cloned critters. The US Department of Agriculture, bureaucratic servant of the big ag biz, has called for farmers to voluntarily keep cloned food products out of the supply chain “so it can manage a smooth and orderly transition to market.” In other words, until the “greed is good” crowd can control cloning operations under the umbrella of amoral corporate agribusiness, the USDA wants to keep the market closed.

In the Eurozone, government approval hasn’t been this easily won. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), sensitive to citizens’ concerns regarding animal welfare, genetic diversity of farm animals, and market conditions in the face of pressure from the global agribusiness giants, maintain a cautious attitude about clone products and other “novel foods.” In July clone products were removed from the “novel foods” category and the European Parliament called for more specific regulation (see Amendment 14). A press release accompanying this action said:

“A clear majority in the European Parliament supports ethical objections to the industrial production of cloned meat for food. Cloned animals suffer disproportionately highly from illnesses, malformations and premature death. MEPs have been calling for proper regulation for years: it’s high time the Commission listened to the European Parliament and citizens on this issue.”

There are now over 6 billion people to feed on the planet earth, and the way things are going there will be nine billion by 2024. Agricultural production on an industrial scale results in a degraded environment and ethical shortcuts that end up poisoning people. I’m thinking of mad cow disease, BSE prions spread through the mixture of brains, bones, and meat in cattle feed. USDA regulation is a sick and twisted example of government bureaucracy cross bred with corporate interests to the detriment of us all. In the case of mad cow disease, US beef producers have been restricted by the USDA from testing their own cattle. Whatever regulations emerge in the USA to control the market for clone sourced food, they will doubtless be as noisome and as ineffective as the regs surrounding animal feeding.

Cross posted at Class War.

I had to put tongue in cheek to reply regarding “national character.” I agree that racial or cultural stereotypes are socio-economic in origin and generally based in ignorance. I don’t quite agree that the positive stereotypes should be parsed differently from the negatory. A stereotype is a stereotype, and they can be used as tools of oppression in different ways. Positive stereotypes buttress arguments for American exceptionalism — not a good thing. Also, the story of the empathizing Americans characterized as warm-hearted and full of goodwill belongs to the twentieth century. I think there’s a whole new story for the 21st… the American character has mutated to some kind of snivelly, whiny, fear-driven slugs with a sense of entitlement that they haven’t earned.

Environmental pressures from Bushism, Corporatism, Terrorism, and bizarro libertarian capitalism have forced the production of socio-cultural enzymes that have torn away vast slices of the American national body’s chromosomes and an unrecognizable monster is emerging. Perhaps the new traits of smug religiosity, hypocrisy, and fear-based belligerence will not be inheritable and so will only be here for a single generation.

I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion that skin color is irrelevant to both problem and solution. If, for example, it could be shown that my fellow scandinavians indeed ARE stolid and stupid, that a rude taciturnity is built into our genes, the epigenetic turning of a subgroup of linguistically deprived Utah pioneers subsisting on a diet of grains and honey from stolid and morose knuckle-draggers to light-hearted gregarious friends and neighbors might be due to some enzyme balance shift caused by diet and excessive sunlight.

The offspring of these people would likely return to their natural condition if returned to a more natural dark and frigid environment with a dietary shift back to salt cod, salt pork, potatoes, and the occasional holiday blood sausage.

So, if we could nail down the genetic predictors of behavior, personality, and modes of social interaction then we should be able to identify the stressors that in all likelihood cause epigenetic shifts of character. For example the Swiss, in their own milieu, are partial to lederhosen and yodeling, while when they are isolated in an urban culture of poverty and oppression they turn into rappers and hip-hop aficionados.

(I’m late for my telomerase injections, so I may have to cut this short.)

Fearing for their safety, USian rescue workers in Haiti are having a hard time organizing work parties to shift rubble, set up field hospitals, distribute food and water. Is this an epigenetic effect, I wonder, or perhaps simply the product of minds so saturated with the propaganda that has been used to justify exploitation that the leaders of US rescue teams are paralyzed into inactivity by their own xenophobia?

How much xenophobia is a genetic “otherization” trait that supports the survival of small groups, and how much is the product of marketing (or propaganda, as they call marketing in the political arena)? Or does the marketing merely underscore and enhance genetic tendency?

Lamarck was fairly evolved for a dude lacking even an electron microscope. Spontaneous generation has always been a favorite idea of mine.

Physicists and cosmologists alike are chary about discussing what happened at the moment of the big bang, and indeed what happened in the flash of time that preceded the moment of Planck density, a finite and describable event comprising incomprehensibly vast amounts of matter compressed into a ridiculously small space. Prior to that moment, there was–I guess–a period of unreality, when all time, mass, energy, and antimatter were balanced in a singularity the destruction of which precipitated a big bang that emerged into our reality an absurdly short time after it actually began. Those moments of singularity and displacement that preceded a physical universe with a density of 5.1 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³ are the moments where we can sort out just what it is all about. If we can hurdle the barrier of incomprehension, the limit of our understanding framed by physicists and astronomers, and vault into the realm of poets, tango dancers, and doowop singers… only then will we be able to master this matter/antimatter thing.

Will confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson help us get there? You decide, but read this first!

Wishing I was at F2C, David Isenberg’s annual inside-the-beltway thing. It’s being tweeted here and chatted there, but text doesn’t let you hear the music. Video is streamed from here, rtsp://odo.warpspeed.com/f2c09.sdp, alas I can’t get the audio to come up.

Vacation is over and today I have to pump out a few posts for Super Eco, go to the dump to recycle cardboard, the library to pick up books on hold, and the post office to pick up last week’s mail. Also owe dogs some loving attention, and I must (heavy sigh) make the vet appointment to get Tessa spayed.

In other news, I read that Esther paid three million (US) for her back-up slot on the Simonyi joyride. The ticket cost him like $35 million. Her dad, Freeman, held forth in the Sunday NYT yesterday as the most prominent and distinguished global climate change denier (“The Civil heretic”). Hmm, maybe I can write about that at Super Eco after my recycling run.

This is not to question the ethical standards of the men and women who conducted this research, nor is it to voice a cultural criticism regarding the Veterans Administration as a source of clinical subjects for evaluation. Rather, it’s presented as an eye-opener. Lecture fees, consulting fees, and grant support from the pharmaceutical industry seem to power the engine of clinical research, while cross ventilation of ideas from the clinical researchers to their industry counterparts seems to be the quid pro quo.

“Dr. Boden reports receiving consulting fees and lecture fees from Kos Pharmaceuticals, PDL BioPharma, Pfizer, CV Therapeutics, and Sanofi-Aventis, and grant support from Merck and Abbott Laboratories; Dr. O’Rourke, consulting fees from King Pharmaceuticals, Lilly, and CV Therapeutics; Dr. Teo, grant support from Boehringer Ingelheim; Dr. Knudtson, lecture fees from Medtronic and Lilly; Dr. Harris, having equity ownership in Amgen; Dr. Chaitman, receiving consulting fees from CV Therapeutics, Merck, and Bayer, lecture fees from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and CV Therapeutics, and grant support from Pfizer, CV Therapeutics, and Sanofi-Aventis; Dr. Shaw, grant support from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Astellas Healthcare; Dr. Booth, grant support from Actelion; Dr. Bates, consulting fees from Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca and lecture fees from Sanofi-Aventis; Dr. Spertus, consulting fees from Amgen and United Healthcare and grant support from Amgen, Roche Diagnostics, and Lilly (and in the past, consulting fees and grant support from CV Therapeutics and owning the copyright for the Seattle Angina Questionnaire, the Peripheral Artery Questionnaire, and the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire); Dr. Berman, consulting fees and lecture fees from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Astellas, Tyco, and Siemens and grant support from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Astellas; Dr. Mancini, consulting and lecture fees from Pfizer, Abbott, and GlaxoSmithKline, lecture fees from Merck and Sanofi-Aventis, and grant support from Cordis and GlaxoSmithKline; and Dr. Weintraub, consulting fees from Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb and grant support from Sanofi-Aventis. No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.”