As you say, Spot, people usually do their best when they know that somebody important is probably watching. So maybe, like you said, the cleansing sunlight of Truth is necessary to burn out the pockets of evil eating into our System like gangrene. Or maybe it's just that people up-to-no-gooding don't wanna be caught, and like most all vermin problems, you can limit the damage by depriving them of safe places to feed and breed. You know, good old fashioned habitat destruction. And you are correct, that's what the good old fashioned journalists did. But the good old fashioned journalist habitat has been seriously degraded by the fact that nowadays the billionaires own all the best printing presses. Nowadays prospective journalists need to choose between doing their job and having one. That's why it's kinda cool when somebody like this Assange guy builds his own printing press and then cranks it up to eleven.

While things seem to be otherwise moribund around here, I just thought I'd share a detail of an image taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite. For some reason when I come across these images they stop me cold. If there were an attack on the country in which we live we would be inundated with images about it constantly. And yet, the profound environmental threats that we are facing are for the most part swept under the rug of discussions of short-term economic harm to people along the coast and how to compensate them.

I suppose reading everything in terms of short-term economic impact shouldn't surprise me -- these days, nothing is more important than daily stock prices, and we've begun to worry more about those than those obsolete concerns like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But there is still something deeply disconcerting about a moment when we've just added poison to the cup we're drinking from, as we are turning up the thermostat to make the room we're in even more uncomfortable, and somehow manage to keep acting as if we know what we're doing.

We don't know what we're doing, though. And I think there is a reason that we still act as if we do. I've long thought that people often make fundamental errors in assessing risks because they apply models based on interactions with other people to how they deal with the natural world. It is understandable, but it leads to bad decisions.

With people, intent is very important. If a person pushes you, your assessment of the risk is crucial to your reaction. You look up, read their body language, and judge whether it was accidental or on purpose. Your response entirely hinges on this assessment. If it is accidental you smile or growl or whatever your personality dictates, but you don't mark down the person as someone to be avoided, or the location where it happened as a dangerous area. If it was on purpose, it is an entirely different story -- you kick into fight or flight mode, and afterwards change your habits in order to avoid getting into this situation.

Some threats fit into this intent model. I read the old Cold War novel Failsafe when I was a teen, about a detachment of bombers accidentally sent to drop nuclear missiles on Moscow. The novel hinged on the USSR's trying to discern the US intent. The moral quandary that faced the US President faced was the result of the need to prove that the missile launch was accidental. And indeed, a threat is a real threat if the person who bumped you did it on purpose, and just like your body's peripheral nervous system and switches into high gear if people perceive the media go berserk when someone means to do us harm. Hopeless shoe bomber, wall-to-wall coverage, and shoes become public enemy number one at airports across the world. BP spills 200,000 gallons of oil on Alaska's North Slope, and no one mentions it until they spill some 30,000,000 gallons (and counting) into the Gulf of Mexico.

Taking risks when driving at high speeds, though, doesn't fit that model. Contexts where we're "in control" don't worry us, even as consequences of a minute risk get more and more dire. Stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, working in hazardous environments, extracting natural resources deep underwater? We're in control, so any mishap would simply be an accident, and doesn't require us to change our habits. If we get pushed, but don't see bad intentions, we don't change our behavior. As a result we assess risk in situations like deepwater oil extraction particularly badly. The intention of the oil companies is to limit environmental damage and maximize profit, and that trumps the "blind luck" involved in using inherently risky technology.

It also doesn't help that questioning the importance of the producing oil is a taboo subject. Despite the prospect of long-term damage to the ecosystem of large part of the Gulf and even the Atlantic Ocean, with all the long-term damage to animals and people that will result, the majority of the policy debate about the response has to do with economic factors: compensating fishermen for lost income, BP's payouts and stock prices, the effect of a moratorium on other companies, and the impact on tourism. As long as the currency of the debate is dollars, long-term damage and more complex injuries to environment, health, ways of life, and the suffering of animals don't actually count.

Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael points to the importance of the story that we tell ourselves in dealing with Nature: "given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now." This analogy is made more accurate by the fact that, generally, in the media it is the deaths of Americans that "count" and are reported in foreign conflicts. Generally, it is only the economic impacts on people and corporations that "count" in BP's attack on the Gulf.

Which sucks for us, because our appetites for energy, in addition to causing us to engage in unnecessary wars, will keep us doing risky activities like deepwater oil extraction. We're not assessing the risk properly because we've stopped caring about anything in life but the dollars we stand to win in the game. And, like an addict, as long as we keep rolling the dice, we'll keep losing to the house.

Cappy Rudyard:

$5,900,388

Is the amount Common Cause reports Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman received in health industry campaign contributions from 2000-2008.

$77,000

A year is how much his wife Hadassah received from a lobbying firm to consult on health care in just one year during that period. Prior to this, she also ran PR for drug companies like Hoffman-LaRoche and Pfizer, according to Salon.

Priceless

Is my forlorn hope that somehow the founders designed a system that can weather the craven cash-for-obstruction breach of the public trust that has paralyzed the national legislature:

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.

- Federalist Papers, No. 62

Free Market Squirrel:

Nice try, Cappy. That was how Madison and Hamilton justified the creation of a deliberative body called the "Senate" that would be isolated from the winds of public instability that buffet the House. What they don't seem to have predicted was that lawmakers like Joe Lieberman have a vested interest in maintaining the imbalance between rich corporate interests and poor people too busy scrambling to pay their medical bills. As George Bush put it, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." Which means that as dollars replace votes as the currency used to buy political influence in government, actual governing becomes increasingly impossible. As the forces of obstruction grow ever more dominant, the private sector emerges as the only agent of change. And that's when everyone will learn to love and accept the efficiencies of the market. Bwah-hah-hah-hah. Enjoy your last few years of freedom before you too learn to love your squirrelly capitalist overlords!

• Thinking of committing an atrocity?
• Frustrated at your former boss/girlfriend/lifecoach, are you going to bust into their workplace/daycare/muffler store and murder everyone indiscriminately?
• But you’re worried about the hard time and humiliation that is sure to follow?

At Blackwater Massacre Legal Services (BMLS) we’re here to help.

Once we, too, were in your position. Our guys had just massacred 17 Iraqi civilians because… well, we don’t really know why. There were cars in the way, and they didn’t move fast enough – you know the drill. It has been reported that:

At 12:08 p.m., at least one guard began to fire in the direction of a car, killing its driver. A traffic policeman said he walked toward the car, but more shots were fired, killing a woman holding an infant sitting in the passenger seat.

But honestly, who the hell knows? Despite the fact that there have been five investigations launched, not one American contractor has been punished.

Why not?

That’s where BMLS comes in. We’ve taken our experiences with the Nisour Square killing spree and turned it into a proven method to evade justice.

The key here is to realize that justice is a relative concept. If our guys had been real soldiers, do you think they would have avoided discipline? If this happened to American civilians, do you think this wouldn’t have been the trial of the century? Not bloody likely.

We have distilled our experience to two core principles:

1) Justice isn’t blind. To money.

In 2007, we spent over a million dollars to bribe Iraqi officials “to silence their criticism and buy their support”. And we can do it for you.

However, we’ve found that principle number one works best when the government is a client state of our own. So we invented principle number two.

2) Outsource your atrocity.

Let’s say you just got fired from your job in a canning factory. Iraq has canning factories! We can fly you out, put you up in deluxe accommodations, and drive you out to the canning factory in a well-appointed SUV with a wet bar. As we approach it in a heavily-armed convoy, you can sit at the window and fire away. Alternatively, Afghanistan has numerous high schools, and Haiti has many post offices.

Here at BMLS, our motto is: Immunity from prosecution isn’t cheap. But aren’t you worth it?