Charlie Sheldon's Blog, page 25
August 7, 2015
The Evolutionary Biology of Political Parties by Fred Reed
Websites pour forth heated arguments between liberals and conservative about almost everything—or, as is becoming clear due to brain research, what seem to be arguments but in fact are genetically determined reflexes.
Even before the latest results from PET scans and functional MRI, simple observation convinced the sentient that rationality was not involved in political discourse. The chief evidence is that political adherences tend strongly to cluster together. For example, if you tell me that a man favors capitalism, with high confidence I can predict his attitudes toward China, race, immigration, environmentalism, bombing Iran, evolution, abortion, and so on. If you tell me that he advocates socialism, I will similarly know in advance his ideas regarding these things.
This suggests a genetic origin. The various views have no necessary connections to one another. For example, there is no logical contradiction in being in favor of national medical care and simultaneously of sending heavy weaponry to the Ukraine, or being against abortion but for the legalization of drugs. Yet one seldom sees such juxtapositions. Political views are a package.
This suggests that people start with genetically determined conclusions, and work backward to find supporting evidence.
In terms of evolutionary psychology, the genetic explanation makes sense. While saying so will enrage conservatives, it is clear that conservatism is a Darwinian relic, a selective adaptation to primitive times.
Consider the circumstances of the first barely-human tribes as they emerged from simian darkness on the temporally remote savannas. What psychological characteristics would natural selection give them?
First, intense loyalty to the group and hostility toward outsiders. The former allowed the cooperation needed within the group to survive and the latter a wise response to a savage world. Things that go grrrr in the night are not good, and when the chief means of intergroup intercourse is the tomahawk, it is well to be suspicious.
We see all of this in conservatives. They place high value on patriotism and, in the military, loyalty to the unit. They view other tribes with hostility: the Chinese, Moslems, Russians, Mexicans, Iranians, communists, Jews, hippies, and pacifists.
By contrast, liberals are more welcoming, open, and “laid back.“ This may or may not be a good idea, depending on circumstances, but it is a more-advanced evolutionary position and better adapted to survival in a nuclear age.
Perhaps the sharpest difference between Left and Right is that conservatives lack empathy or, in English, compassion. Evolutionarily this was strongly adaptive, in that being compassionate to a man running at you with a spear does not conduce to survival. It accounts for the espousal of capitalism, which provides a justification for working children to death in foreign sweatshops. Conservatives do not hate the children of Bangladesh. They are just genetically incapable of caring about them one way or the other.
The lack of empathy is neurologically verifiable. Harvard psychologists John Halpern and Alexandra Warmme-Coates performed PET scans on self-described liberals and conservatives. (Their motto is “Truth at Five-Eleven Kev”). When shown a photograph of the mangled remains of a puppy run over by a bicycle, the brains of conservatives showed no response.
In liberals, there was strong activation of the lateral caligulate, which mediates hostile emotions by communication through the posterior lobe of the sagittal epididymus to the occipital canunculus. This stimulates stress reactions such as high heart rate and sweating. These reactions were in fact observed.
When the photo was of the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, liberals showed no response, but in conservatives the prefrontal palpate lit up, an indicator of intense interest.
In primitive times, there was no really effective way to preserve meat. Once killed, a buffalo soon rotted. Natural selection consequently led to the instinct to kill prey when the chance arose. Grab while the grabbing is good. This explains the otherwise incomprehensible acquisitiveness of billionaires, usually conservative. Our buffalo—hedge funds, skyscrapers, and factories—don’t rot, so grabbing the available now results in huge accumulations that the owner cannot practically use.
Among liberals, compassion, not accumulation, is the driving instinct. Examples abound. They favor immigration from Mexico because these poor people just want better lives, favor welfare so kids won’t have to go to bed hungry, want to close the sweatshops and keep the elephants from being slaughtered.
Their compassion is often narcissistic, counter-productive, based on faulty information, and even dangerous. For example, welfare has made blacks into helpless inmates of a custodial state. The desire to be nice to criminals, to abolish harsh punishments, keeps murderers and rapists on the streets. Because the behavior of liberals is genetically determined, they are not concerned with actual consequences. They don’t notice them. Yet the underlying motive is compassion.
Observe further that women are more compassionate than men. This is an evolutionary adaptation to the need to care for children and wounded men. It is why women tend to vote Democratic.
Genetic behavior pervades politics. Conservatives, without compassion, see the problems of blacks and say the hell with them. Democrats, more advanced and kindly, treat them as retarded children. As I write, there is much outrage over the slaughter of a lion in Africa by some dentist. In perfect accord with the genetic hypothesis, Liberals, sympathetic to a splendid animal needlessly killed, expressed outrage. Conservatives, carrying the instinctual baggage of times when killing animals had a purpose, were utterly incapable of understanding why the bunny-huggers were upset. It was just an animal, for God’s sake. Genetics.
Again, the underlying neurobiology can be demonstrated in the laboratory. At Berkeley, Dr. Chupamela Gonzalez and Dr. Louis Lu of the Ev-Psych Department, working on a grant from the Pentagon’s Office of Applied Psychopathy, performed an experiment similar to the one described above.
Liberals and conservatives were shown various photos and asked to say the first word that came to their minds. Shown a towering redwood in a primeval forest, liberals consistently said things like “beauty,” “lovely,” or “spiritual.” Conservatives said, “Sun decks.”
Similarly, shown a photo of a giant squid taken at depth in the open Pacific, liberals said, “beautiful,” “magnificent,” or “Oh…Jesus.” Conservatives said, “Sushi.” In evolutionary terms, this latter shows an adaptive practicality toward the natural world in which food and shelter were scarce.
We observe also that conservatives display aggressiveness and a desire, or at least a tendency, to attack out-groups. In the primitive world, this was adaptive across species: One sees the same thing—band together, attack outsiders–in modern dog-packs, for the same reasons. Republicans, conservative, are traditionally the party of war. Most career military men, and virtually all of the officer corps, glory in war and readily obey orders to attack anyone they are ordered to attack, including their own citizens. The police, also conservative, demonstrate the same aggressiveness and are likely to have the same neural responses, though further research is needed.
It therefore seems to me desirable to abolish websites and publications devoted to politics. They serve no purpose. Vituperation does not alter genes. Nobody ever persuades anybody, and can’t. The tweeters of the Left, and the woofers of the Right, are what they are, and will be. There is no purpose in talking about things. And think of the blessed silence.
May 28, 2015
Dogs have been around for at least 27,000 years
This image compares an ancient Taimyr Wolf bone from the lower jaw to a modern pipette.
Credit: Love Dalen
Dogs’ special relationship to humans may go back 27,000 to 40,000 years, according to genomic analysis of an ancient Taimyr wolf bone reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 21. Earlier genome-based estimates have suggested that the ancestors of modern-day dogs diverged from wolves no more than 16,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age.
The genome from this ancient specimen, which has been radiocarbon dated to 35,000 years ago, reveals that the Taimyr wolf represents the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and dogs.
“Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than is generally believed,” says Love Dalén of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. “The only other explanation is that there was a major divergence between two wolf populations at that time, and one of these populations subsequently gave rise to all modern wolves.” Dalén considers this second explanation less likely, since it would require that the second wolf population subsequently became extinct in the wild.
“It is [still] possible that a population of wolves remained relatively untamed but tracked human groups to a large degree, for a long time,” adds first author of the study Pontus Skoglund of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute.
The researchers made these discoveries based on a small piece of bone picked up during an expedition to the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia. Initially, they didn’t realize the bone fragment came from a wolf at all; this was only determined using a genetic test back in the laboratory. But wolves are common on the Taimyr Peninsula, and the bone could have easily belonged to a modern-day wolf. On a hunch, the researchers decided to radiocarbon date the bone anyway. It was only then that they realized what they had: a 35,000-year-old bone from an ancient Taimyr wolf.
The DNA evidence also shows that modern-day Siberian Huskies and Greenland sled dogs share an unusually large number of genes with the ancient Taimyr wolf.
“The power of DNA can provide direct evidence that a Siberian Husky you see walking down the street shares ancestry with a wolf that roamed Northern Siberia 35,000 years ago,” Skoglund says. To put that in perspective, “this wolf lived just a few thousand years after Neandertals disappeared from Europe and modern humans started populating Europe and Asia.”
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Skoglund et al. Ancient wolf genome reveals an early divergence of domestic dog ancestors and admixture into high-latitude breeds. Current Biology, 2015 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.019
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Cell Press. “Our bond with dogs may go back more than 27,000 years.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 May 2015. .
April 25, 2015
Ancient Tools….
15 Apr 2015
Sonia Harmand presented a talk at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting this week describing her team’s discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old context at Lomekwi, on the west side of Lake Turkana. Michael Balter reported on the talk in a story in Science: “World’s oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya”:
In 2011, Harmand’s team was seeking the site where a controversial human relative called Kenyanthropus platyops had been discovered in 1998. They took a wrong turn and stumbled upon another part of the area, called Lomekwi, near where Kenyanthropus had been found. The researchers spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.
The story discusses the contents of the talk, that the tools have been found both from surface and excavation contexts. According to the article, the artifacts show quantitative differences from known Oldowan assemblages, all of which are at least 700,000 years more recent. These differences led Harmand and colleagues to name a new tradition, which they are calling the “Lomekwian”.
I can’t really comment more informatively about this until the work is published so that I can evaluate it. The obvious implication is that stone tools were invented and used by multiple lineages of early hominins. Just as there were different styles of body shape and bipedal mechanics among early hominins, there were likely different styles of technical traditions. A few of these were stone, but almost certainly there were perishable tool traditions among most populations of early hominins. Just taking what we know from living chimpanzee populations, with different traditions of tool use, complex tool sets made from perishable materials, and occasional use of durable objects made from stone. All hominins added initially was the deliberate flaking of stone to make objects recognizable in the archaeological record.
That is to say, humans have elaborated upon a technical ability that is latent among all the apes. This technical ability rests upon social learning skills that are necessary in chimpanzee societies, and early hominin societies inherited those skills from the common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees. After millions of years of exploring this technical space, some experiments led to the manufacture of stone flakes and choppers. Possibly one or more experiments led to the manufacture of bone points or piercers, as evidenced at Swartkrans and Kromdraai, and often attributed to robust australopithecines.
Such traditions may or may not have been shared across different hominin populations. In chimpanzees, technical traditions are not widely shared, yet we know that they may last locally for at least a few thousand years. If a chimpanzee-like model applied across the Pliocene, traditions that lasted a few thousand years across local areas would occasionally be visible to archaeologists, if they were looking for them.
Now they are.
Ice Age Population
Ice age Europeans on the brink of extinction
Ice-age Europeans roamed in small bands of fewer than 30, on brink of extinction (Horizon magazine)
In some cases, small bands of potentially as few as 20 to 30 people could have been moving over very large areas, over the whole of Europe as a single territory, according to Professor Ron Pinhasi, principal investigator on the EU-funded ADNABIOARC project.
This demographic model is based on new evidence that suggests populations were much smaller than is generally thought to be a stable size for healthy reproduction, usually around 500 people. Such small groupings may have led to reduced fitness and even extinctions.
‘As an archaeologist and anthropologist, I was quite shocked to see how limited, how small the population numbers were. You know, shockingly small,’ said Prof. Pinhasi, based at University College Dublin, Ireland.
…
Prof. Pinhasi’s team has found that the genomes sequenced from hunter-gatherers from Hungary and Switzerland between 14 000 to 7 500 years ago are very close to specimens from Denmark or Sweden from the same period.
These findings suggest that genetic diversity between inhabitants of most of western and central Europe after the ice age was very limited, indicating a major demographic bottleneck triggered by human isolation and extinction during the ice age.
‘We’re starting to be able to reconstruct the actual dynamics of migrations and colonisation of the continent by modern humans and that’s never been done before the genomic era,’ explained Prof. Pinhasi.
He believes that early humans crossed the continent in small groups that were cut off while the ice was at its peak, then successively dispersed and regrouped over thousands of years, with dwindling northern populations invigorated by humans arriving from the south, where the climate was better.
‘You see a real reduction in population numbers and diversity, so you see the few lineages that probably split or separated before the ice age, and then stayed isolated during the ice age,’ he said. ‘Some time after the ice age, they kind of re-emerge, or disperse, and get together, as we see new contributions to European lineages from Asia and in particular the Near East.’
Found
Prologue
I was cold. My knee hurt.
I heard an eagle cry, twice.
I woke. I was on a journey. The journey was long, many days, many, the people my people, the animals fierce, the mountains beautiful.
I left that place and lingered in haze, dark, nothing.
I could not see or hear. I could not think.
Then I was no longer cold, no longer in pain.
Later I was aware of noises, sounds.
Even later I woke to hear people speaking. At first I could not understand. I did not know where I was, or who I was. I opened my eyes. I could not recognize what my eyes saw. All was strange. I looked around. I did not know what I was seeing.
The three people before me were familiar. I knew them all but I did not know them. Someone gave me water. I drank. I listened.
Now I could understand.
“Dad, you’re awake.” This was my daughter. What was her name?
“I knew you would wake up.” The small girl speaking had the spirit of a great bear. This I knew. Who was she? I knew her name was Sarah. And this must be Tom, this tall thin man, smiling at me. My oldest friend.
“We found you, William,” Tom said. “Your lifeboat was cast ashore on Haida Gwaii.” As he spoke I remembered. I had gone for help with Anne, the third mate, and I had been injured. I sent her on, leaving me in snow beneath boughs. I had been born on Haida Gwaii 58 years earlier, and on those boughs I was sure I would die. “We came north and found you in December. It is now April. You have been in a coma for three months, William. You are in Port Angeles, the hospital. It’s good to see you awake.”
“Myra?” Myra, my daughter, my beautiful strong blood. “Myra?”
Now my life, here, with these people, rushed into me, real, as real as my dream.
I now understood where I was, what I was seeing. I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines. I was much thinner and surely weak. I looked at these people before me.
“I have been on a journey,” I said. My voice sounded as if I had not spoken for 10,000 years.
“Yes.” Myra was crying. She held my hand. She was a tall woman but her hand vanished in mine. “Your amazing journey, dad. The ship fire, drifting to Haida Gwaii, lost there, being found, being brought back here, yes.”
“Not that journey, Myra.”
Myra did not understand.
It came to me we had all planned to return to the park in June, visit the place we had seen the year before – Tom, Sarah, Myra and the Russian, Sergei.
I saw that my knee was tightly wrapped. I could move slightly without pain.
“I must go back,” I said.
“What, to work on the ship? Dad, you can’t go back to work.” Myra was frowning. “You’ve lost 70 pounds, and while you were always big that’s too much. Your knee has to recover. Something tore away half your ear up there, but that’s mostly healed.”
“Not work, Myra. Back to the park. Our trip. Sergei is coming over from Russia, isn’t he? In June? This is what we agreed last fall.”
Sarah was nodding.
“I will tell you of my journey when we are in the park,” I said.
“That’s soon, dad, maybe too soon.”
“I have two months to make myself ready, then.”
I closed my eyes.
January 25, 2015
Adrift Chapters 2 and 3…..Dead of Winter Reading…..
2. Louise
Louise woke before dawn, furious. Larry slept beside her. He’d come in last night half lit, and said, “What the hell else is there to do? We don’t have any work.”
Louise had known what was going on for weeks, and she’d decided, thinking about it, that she was going to dump Larry’s ass as soon as she could. The trouble was, it wasn’t so easy. He owned half her share of the salvage tug business as her husband and right now they were on the edge of collapse anyway. If she threw him out, there’d be nothing left.
In the drawer on Louise’s side of the bed was a sharp jackknife, and she seriously considered sliding the drawer open, removing the knife, opening it silently, and cutting off his goddam cock. That’s what she wanted to do, though it had been at least a year since the two of them had had anything going in the bedroom. It had been all business all the time, that and being unable to have kids, then not wanting kids. The passion early on had faded with bills, breakdowns, and a lack of boat tows. But still, she had pride, and she was still a damn good-looking woman, if a little worn at the edges. Look at the way that cute kid Travis, the wire splicer, had lusted after her last year before he quit. He had the fire for her. Maybe she’d plan a revenge fuck with Travis, right on Larry’s desk above the workshop.
Louise liked the image. Then she imagined Larry all hot and sweaty with the puffy bimbo he’d met that Saturday in the casino. Hell, Louise had even been there that night, seen in an instant what was going to happen. She didn’t give a shit, not anymore, but still, it hurt. Now she smelled something in the air.
She got out of bed quietly so as not to wake her husband, padded over to the big window over the shop, and looked out at the harbor. The wind pushed billows of rain in a race across the water, stippling the surface. That’s what Louise had smelled, the wind. She always smelled the wind, had since she was a girl following her pop around. She had a nose for it, smelling the weather, knowing when the wind might bring them money.
The small radio on the counter sputtered faintly. Tuned to the Coast Guard distress signal, they’d hear any trouble at sea as it happened. Both she and Larry could sleep right through the radio chatter unless it was about trouble, then they woke right up.
Christ, they needed money. Louise had been here before, three times in the last six years. Each time the bank bridged them over. What choice did the bank have? No bank wanted an old wooden dock in the tiny harbor of Sol Duc, Washington, way out on the Olympic Peninsula. It wasn’t more than a tin shack with ancient cranes, and a barely floating salvage tug. Not only that, but it was on land next to an old lumberyard soon to be declared a Superfund cleanup site. Everyone knew the ground was filled with all sorts of bad stuff, and nobody wanted to open up that can of worms. They had three acres at the head of the small harbor, looking over at the Port dock, the one the mining company had leased. Their land might have been valuable if it wasn’t contaminated, but so long as they didn’t dig into it, they could carry on, at least for a while. But right now, the business felt more like a weight than an opportunity.
When Louise’s pop started the operation in the 1960s, they’d been closer than their rival salvage companies to the dangerous waters off British Columbia and Alaska. Even though old Warhorse, their tug, was slow, their strategic position along the Strait of Juan de Fuca meant she beat the bigger and faster tugs from Seattle and Vancouver rushing to meet foundering ships. In later years, the other tugs became faster and fewer ships foundered, and Louise and Larry were reduced to making difficult tows, sometimes cross-Pacific, babying Warhorse the whole way. Now even that had dried up. Still, Louise and Larry and her two brothers had been hanging on, keeping the business going, occasionally making some money. They’d been busy with a contract, scooping debris from the Elwha River as the dams were removed, but that work had ended when the rains began in October. And lately, there had been no work. Then Larry had the gall to start an affair. It was almost as if he didn’t really care whether she knew or not.
“We need a big claim,” Louise said to the black window, watching the wind. Once we earn some money I’ll throw Larry’s ass out.
“What?” Larry rolled over, half asleep. He’d brought Warhorse back from the repair yard at Lake Union the day before, accompanied by her two brothers, Leon and Vince. Leon served as engineer and Vince as assistant engineer. Warhorse was old, built in 1952, but built to last. The Seattle yard had billed them $23,000, money they absolutely didn’t have. But Bill from the bank rolled the charges and the loan payments another month, and he’d probably have to roll the charges until the cleanup work started the following spring.
The dark harbor gleamed beneath the rain and wind. Larry sat up, running his eyes.
“You smell something, darlin? Money?”
Louise turned around. The room was dark, but Larry’s big shoulders stood out against the headboard of the bed. He was still in damn decent shape for someone now 42. Had to be, horsing gear around on that big tug. Louise had liked it when she’d gone out on the boat with Larry—she had papers as a first mate– but then Larry’s mother had taken ill and needed care. His mother had been the bookkeeper and Louise had to take over that job, small as it was. And when she wasn’t in the office, she spent her time on the road around the Sound hustling work. She had to do a lot of hustling.
Dammit. Larry still looked good, and that was a problem.
“Something woke me up,” Louise said.
Now wasn’t the time to get into a fight, and besides, Louise felt something in her bones. A metal pulley rattled against a post on one of the boats in the small marina next to the port dock.
“Warhorse all tuned up, then?” she asked.
“Pushed us out of the yard before they really got into the shaft coupling repair, but I think we’re OK. They rebuilt the winches, the big towing bit. New wire, too.”
“Yeah, that’s where eight of the 23 grand went. Hell.”
“We need good wire, Louise, if we hope to snag anything.”
Louise was facing Larry. If I wasn’t so pissed at him, we could….
She heard something on the radio.
“Wait.”
She turned up the volume. It was a local channel. She’d set up the receiver to scan all the distress channels, plus a couple of others that companies used to send messages among themselves. Now she had picked up a transmission from Buckhorn headquarters to their big tugs down in Bremerton, west of Seattle. Louise prided herself on knowing what the competition did, and she knew the Buckhorn tugs had just hauled a decommissioned sub into the Bremerton Naval Yard where they were going to cut out the hot reactor core. The tugs were way down in the Sound, at least eight hours from Port Angeles, where they were usually based.
“Listen.”
“Sector Six. Open contract tow. Cast that sub after she’s moored and get going. Yes, abandoned. Fire.”
“There’s something out there and Buckhorn’s sending the big tugs for it.” Louise was grinning.
“Sector Six, that’s out in the Gulf of Alaska, west of the Charlottes,” said Larry, turning on a light and examining a chart in the wall of their bedroom.
“They said fire, right?”
“I heard abandoned.” Larry looked more closely at the chart.
“That’s a long ways, Larry.” It was 500 miles to Sector Six. “We’ll have to pass outside the island, it’s faster but more exposed.”
“It’ll be plenty exposed out in Sector Six.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Ship. Something big, for them to send their tugs like that. Maybe one of their ships.”
“Maybe the Express, Larry?”
“Could be.”
Larry pulled on his pants. “I’ll call your brothers, see if we can get their cousins, too. We’ll need 10, 12 guys, if we try this. I think you’re gonna have to come, too. I need another mate, someone who can help Nelson handle the tug when I take the gang aboard the ship.”
“That’s if you can get on the ship. It’s been a while, Larry.”
“What else is there to do? You going to sit here and wait? Get Leon’s wife to monitor the chatter. Have her find out where the ship was, where the Buckhorn tugs are. You don’t need to be here. Right now we got to load up on a ton of food and get going.”
“You have fuel? You’ll need a lot of fuel. We’ll need a lot of fuel.”
“She’s full. Been full too long, Louise.”
“Gonna be a rough trip, Larry.”
“Warhorse is built for it.”
“It’s not Warhorse I’m thinking about. It’s you, my brothers and cousins. It’s me.”
“We’ll be careful. I’ll make the calls. You and your brothers, get food. Is the Walmart open this early? I’ll call the rest of the gang, plus get some others. ”
“What? Who you going to get?”
“Dark Cloud’s crew. They’ll come, their tug’s in the yard. They have no work either.”
“They’re crazy.”
“Yeah, but they can work. Dark Cloud, too, he’s coming.”
Louise didn’t like Dark Cloud. He was sneaky, she thought. And what was it with his name, anyway? He was about as Native American as Louise was. But he knew what he was doing on a tug and they needed people who knew what they were doing. Larry went on, “I’ll even call Travis, bring him.”
“He’s reporter now, Larry, for the Peninsula News; has been for a year.”
“Best kid splicing wire I ever saw, Louise.”
“Lotta food, Larry. Ten, 12 people.”
Outside, the black night seemed lighter. Rain ran down the windows.
“Are we broke, Louise?” Larry asked, pulling on his boots.
“Broke as can be.”
“Well, then. We want to be there first, we gotta get outa here, fast. Every hour here those big tugs are closer, and they’re a little faster than Warhorse, but not by much.”
“What about the Canadian companies?” Louise knew Larry carefully watched what the Canadian salvors were doing.
“They’ll be nosing around, but this time of year they’re usually off in Asia working over there. Risk we must take. It’s those Buckhorn tugs I’m worried about. If that’s the Express caught fire and was abandoned, that’s a Buckhorn’s ship and they’ll want to grab her under their contract to avoid a big claim.”
“It’ll be a race, Larry.”
Louise knew the Buckhorn people. Their tug operation was big and they thought they were the best. The Buckhorn captains looked down their noses at Larry and his crew, and they thought Warhorse was an ancient, useless scow. They even called Louise “Tugboat Annie” behind her back, but she was actually proud of that. Over the years, Warhorse had brought in more prizes than any other two tugs in the United States, and her engines were still sound and her steel good.
As they talked, they dressed. Larry threw clothing into a bag for the tug and called the brothers, while Louise made coffee and then started the car just as Leon and Vince appeared.
“What is it?” Leon looked half asleep. He was rubbing his eyes.
“Don’t know. Maybe the Express. Up off the Charlottes.”
“Jesus.”
No money in the bank, broke, string nearly run out. If they steamed north 500 miles and missed the ship, or if it was taken by the Buckhorn tugs, or if it sank, Warhorse and crew would be out of fuel, out of money, and out of a future. If they somehow got a line on the ship first, claimed her, and brought her to a dock, they’d have a solid claim.
Louise knew she was going to get seasick from the incoming seas once they got into the middle of the Strait. She always got seasick after spending months ashore. This time it had been years. She hoped Larry had kept all the gear and equipment up to standard–they were going to need it all to corral a drifting ship. First they had to find her. Then they had to get aboard. That was going to be the trickiest part, finding a way to get aboard a derelict vessel, dead in the water, almost certainly without a gangway or rope ladder down the side. If the ship sank before they got there, they were shit out of luck. If the ship sank after they grabbed her, they were shit out of luck. If by some miracle they towed the ship to the port dock here, then maybe they’d get a claim.
“We sure about this?” Larry asked at the front door. “All we heard was that one transmission about the tugs, and the abandonment. If the captain’s still aboard her we can’t claim her by law.”
“Risk we gotta take, Larry,” said Louise. “If she is really abandoned and is still afloat when you get there, you’ll never have a head start like this one again, because those tugs are usually at Port Angeles.”
“Gonna be a nasty trip up there.”
“We’ll keep the stoves going. We’ll stay warm.”
Louise got into her van with the brothers to get groceries. Larry got in some oilskins and headed down to the dock and the tug after calling the others to make a full crew.
The rain fell. The day was brightening. The wind was blowing and it was cold.
Damn. She’d smelled the money again.
Now they had to close the deal. Then she’d make sure this cocksucker she was married to would suffer.
3. Travis
Travis, topside after stowing his shit in the cabin, stood quietly aft, in the shadows. When he’d heard the phone this morning, and then Leon’s voice, his heart leapt, and he hadn’t thought twice about joining them. He’d called Judy, his editor, and left her a message saying he was going with the Warhorse crew on a rescue mission and would have a good story when he returned.
He guessed that no matter what, he’d be fired when he got back. He’d made the mistake of dating Judy’s younger sister, Dale, on Judy’s insistence, and that hadn’t worked out well at all. Last night he’d met with Dale again, and explained to her, again, that they were not going to be a couple, in as nice a way as he could. But it wasn’t nice enough. Travis knew he’d hear about this from Judy when he returned to work.
He hadn’t liked Judy much anyway, let alone the paper, which seemed afraid to cover anything serious for fear of losing advertisers. Right now that meant Buckhorn, whose advertising was carrying the whole operation. Travis couldn’t convince Judy to let him do a deep background story on the whole Buckhorn mining operation. The paper wanted no such story, not right now. Now, standing at the back of the wheelhouse as they left the harbor, he felt right at home. It was as if the year hadn’t passed, as if he’d never gone ashore to work as a reporter.
Warhorse eased from the harbor. The morning was still dark, and the lights along the shore blurred against the rain-covered wheelhouse windows. Travis heard the fans, the clicking steering mechanism, the mutter of radios turned down low, and the deep throbbing of the engine below. The big tug leaned as they made their way from the narrow harbor among the buoys.
Larry steered. Nelson adjusted the sea return on the radar. He usually served as first mate, but was second mate on this trip because of Louise, who sat in the big chair to port, feet on the rail. Travis was a little surprised to see her aboard. She’d come ashore before Travis started with the company. The green scope glowed. Travis recognized the passing shore in the outline of the land. They were passing the Port of Sol Duc dock, where tribal fishing boats usually tied up, except they’d been kicked out to make way for the Buckhorn mining project. A long dark line of black tightly set wooden posts extended in the gloom, each covered with barnacles and seaweed.
Travis watched Louise hitch herself in the chair and lean back. The chairs were bolted to the deck. The wheelhouse was one two deck above the main weather deck. Warhorse was a low, old-style, deep-sea tug, wide and squat, with a mostly open rear deck and huge winches. She carried enormous amounts of fuel and was able to pull entire ships with her huge brass propeller below, now throbbing turn by turn as they headed for the Strait. Forward, below the curving windows overlooking the bow, Travis saw the worn brass handrails, nearly white with the years, and beyond them the wide shelf running just beneath the windows. Warhorse still carried a traditional compass on that shelf, but these days they used an electronic charting system and autopilot. The helm was no longer the huge five-foot diameter spoke wheel Warhorse had come with when new in 1952. Instead, a small dial the size of a dinner plate stood against a console behind which sat or stood the steersman, now Jules, who had taken over from Larry. Travis thought Jules might be Leon’s cousin.
Nelson straightened up from adjusting the radar scope and peered forward. Ahead stood two can buoys and then the Strait of Juan de Fuca, dark in the rain and gloom. Even from here in the channel, they could see the swells. Sol Duc lay 40 miles east of the entrance to the strait, but even in here the big Pacific rollers marched.
“Is this wise?” said Nelson, half smiling. “I mean, it’s two days to get up there.“
Travis, back in the gloom, knew Nelson had sailed first and second mate on big ships for years. After a divorce, he moved to Sol Duc and began to serve as relief crew on the tug. He’d taught Travis how to navigate during one long tow across the Pacific, and for a few weeks, Travis had dreamed of going to school and becoming a mate.
“Wind’s behind us once we get outside. It won’t be so bad,” said Larry.
Even in the dark wheelhouse, Travis realized Louise was staring at her husband with cold eyes. Larry and Louise always spat like cats while together. She was way too old for Travis, but still, he thought, Louise was a good-looking woman. He braced his feet as the tug rose into the first swell passing the buoys.
Larry had been writing in a small notebook. Now he looked up, saw his wife staring, and looked away. He saw Travis in the corner.
“You find your bunk?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’re all settled.”
Travis had taken the upper bunk in the port cabin just ahead of the engine room. It was noisy but warm. He was in with Dark Cloud and Billie and Stretch. Dark Cloud had grabbed the lower bunk furthest from the door, pulled out a small flask, drank, and then lay down, pulling a blanket over himself.
They really weren’t all settled. Billie and Stretch were obviously hung over, and Travis had a small headache from drinking the night before. Dark Cloud was on a tear, and probably had been for who knows how many days. The upper bunk on the port side was the only one left when Travis came aboard. The tug was full; there must be over 10 people aboard.
In the galley, Gary and Peter frantically tried to stow all the groceries before the tug began rolling. It seemed an enormous amount of food when Travis had come below and seen the endless bags and boxes, but all these people and a week or more at sea required a lot of food, and Travis now wondered if they had enough for the whole job, assuming they snagged the abandoned ship.
“Well, we better get done what we can before we leave the Strait.”
Larry folded the notebook and shoved it in a pocket. “Make sure the new wire’s on right, all the fittings and seals good. When was the last time we checked the hydraulics?”
“Leon did it already,” Nelson said. “First thing when he got aboard.”
“We have enough survival suits?” asked Louise, staring forward.
“A dozen.”
“Checked?”
“At the yard this time. We oughta be OK.” Larry stretched. He pulled out his notebook, opened it, and peered inside. Then he grabbed a sheet of paper from the chart table and wrote names and watches, taping it to the console beside the helm. “We’ll do a drill, check all the suits, today at four. Okay?”
Travis scratched his neck. The day was brightening and the rain was heavy. The big rollers in the Strait rose and fell and the tug began to wallow. There was nothing else out on the water. The radar scope was empty.
The water outside was dark gray, streaked with foam. Forward, the bow pushed huge walls of water aside as it rose into coming seas. The big tug shuddered as it plowed ahead.
“Damn.” Louise stood from the chair, went to the leeward door, opened it and threw up over the wing. Larry chuckled, but he didn’t look too good himself. He held on to the brass rail.
“Travis, if you’re settled, we’re gonna need three big wire loops, a couple double ended loops with plenty of feet between ‘em. There’s wire down in the workshop. You get a couple guys to help you, try to splice ‘em up, okay?”
The workshop was located just forward of the engine room, below decks. It was loud but warm, and reasonably dry.
“I mean, Travis, you’re the wire man, right?” Larry started to laugh. “Your hands are gonna bleed, though, after a year off scribbling stories about garden parties and weddings.”
Travis’s decision to leave the tug and work as a reporter had been supported by Larry, but now Travis knew Larry had missed him. Larry was no good splicing wire; not many were. For some reason Travis had the gift. But he knew his hands were going to suffer.
“Two double loops?”
“Yeah. We have one short one aboard but we need more, made with three-eighths wire, 50 feet between loops. We’ll need ‘em to pass things to the ship, once we get aboard her.”
“What’s the plan?” Nelson lit a cigarette. Travis knew Larry and Louise didn’t care if people smoked.
“Same as ever: a blind grab.” Larry leaned back, reviewing his watch list. “If we get the prize, the boat gets half and we share up the rest, just like always. Plus once we reach the dock it could be some of us on the clock watching the ship pending the Coast Guard hearing. Could be weeks of pay.”
“Not if we go to Sol Duc,” said Nelson. “We’ll need another tug to make the channel and that’s Buckhorn’s dock anyway. They’ll watch the ship.”
“Still, we get her to the channel there, hand her over, it’s our claim, and a big one,” said Larry. “Was she in danger? No question. She was burning. Was it unsafe and dangerous to take her? Absolutely. If we hadn’t grabbed her, would she be a total loss? Probably.”
“Buckhorn will argue their tugs coulda gotten the ship if we didn’t.”
“They’ll try, but we’ll have a good claim.”
“Our guys gotta help bring her to the dock.” said Nelson
Louise laughed.
“Little ahead of yourself, don’t you think? Who knows if we’ll be first? We don’t even know if the ship’s still gonna be afloat when we reach her. Lotta wood to cut before we start arguing about the claim, and how to hand the ship off down in Sol Duc.
“Could be months, waiting for the claim,” Jules muttered. He was a short man with a huge head and eyes so far apart he looked like a cow.
“Years,” Nelson said.
“You guys knew the risks. I didn’t shanghai you.”
“No, Larry,” said Nelson. “What I meant is…what’s the plan for taking the ship? Assuming we find it.”
“We’ll find it.”
Travis had noticed, when driving by the docks, how Warhorse needed paint. For the last year, she looked shabby, and always seemed to be tied at the dock instead of working. He figured Louise and Larry were out of money and desperate. What the hell was wrong with him? The reporter job was decent, even if the pay sucked. At least it was pay, and besides, he worked in an office and got to watch the occasional beautiful woman come in for an interview or to try to sell them something. Yet he’d chucked it all to head out on this wild goose chase. Jesus. Even if they found the ship and snagged it, they had to get it to shore, and then wait for the hearing, deal with the lawyers. It would be months and months. Travis knew the market for stories about old tugs and burnt-out ships wasn’t very large, if it existed at all.
Louise came back in the wheelhouse, shivering and wiping her jaw. She looked better. Larry ignored her and kept talking.
“First we got to get aboard her. Maybe the crew threw over a Jacobs’s ladder before they abandoned ship, but I doubt it. Probably have to get aboard over the stern; that’ll be the lowest place.”
Louise retook her chair.
“We’ll put five or six people on her, see if we can get one of her engines running for power, hydraulics, the winches. Probably can’t, but it’s worth a try. We’ll run a line from the tug up through the chocks, back down to the tug, then use that to pull the big wire aboard and attach it. We’ll need the pieces you’re making, Travis, in case there isn’t wire on the ship. Then we tow her back here.”
“Who’s gonna go aboard?” Louise asked.
“Me, Travis here, Vince, Dark Cloud and Billie and Stretch. Rest of you guys will stay here. Nelson will be in charge. You help, Louise.”
Louise said nothing. Travis knew it had been years since she’d been offshore.
“We better rig up some nets then, to ferry over survival suits and food and such,” said Jules, wiping off the compass forward. “You could be on that dead ship a few days and the food over there will have probably gone bad.”
“Just so long as there’s water, we’ll be OK.”
“And what about those Buckhorn tugs? If they left from the bottom of the Sound the same time we did, we only have eight hours on them, and in two days of steaming we might lose most of our lead.” Nelson was looking through the windows at the water. “They’ll really want that ship, Larry. If there’s two of them they might try to cut off our tow, claim it’s an accident.”
“All the more reason to get up there and grab that ship and tie in good.”
Travis looked at his soft, pale hands. He sighed.
“Well, I better get started on that wire, then,” he said, and started below.
January 3, 2015
Baltimore
These are the roro ships Gilliland and Gordon berthed in Baltimore. Skeleton staffed and in a 96 hour ready to sail status. These are part of the US Navy military sealift command fleet. The crew keeps the machinery running and performs maintenance and other projects. This is home for the next few months. I will try to keep this blog updated using my phone links as we don’t have WiFi here. Unlike the earlier trips to Singapore which left no time for scribbling stories, here there may be time to start with this tale I’ve been pondering ever since finishing Adrift last summer.
We’re tied to a Berth and a warehouse with holes in the roof behind a fence and security gate somewhere in industrial waterfront Baltimore. It’s a ten minute hike to a few stores for supplies and sundries. Baltimore is way up at the north end of Chesapeake Bay but there are a dozen ships I can see, mostly small break bulk and auto carriers.
Last time I was in Baltimore was 1993 with some people from APL looking at the on dock rail system at Baltimore’s container terminal before we built one in Seattle. Since then container trade up here has dropped because its a long way up here and Norfolk out at the mouth of the bay has become one of the biggest east coast ports anywhere and snaked away cargo from Baltimore.
December 5, 2014
A Very Big Idea…..
From Tony’s posting in his blog Real Economics:
You want a program? How about this: to stop global climate change and switch the world economy from its dependence on burning fossil fuels, to totally sustainable renewable energies, we need a crash program of $100 trillion in new construction of
3.8 million 5-Mega-Watt wind turbines;
49,000 300-Mega-Watt concentrated solar plants;
40,000 300-Mega-Watt solar power plants;
1.7 billion 3-kilo-Watt rooftop photvoltaic (PV) systems;
5,350 100-Mega-Watt geothermal power plants;
270 new 1,300-Mega-Watt hydroelectric power plants;
720,000 0.75-Mega-Watt wave devices; and
490,000 1-Mega-Watt tidal turbines.
$100 trillion may sound like a lot of money. It really isn’t. It’s about how much is traded in three weeks in US financial markets: stocks, bonds, futures, options, and other derivatives.
In November 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, at the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis, had an article in Scientific American that surveyed what was required to end the era of burning fossil fuels. In 2011, they posted two pdf files providing heavily footnoted details of their 2009 Scientific American article; the pdfs provide all the details you could want, including discussion of critical material shortages, such as rare earth elements, for a mass, crash program.
Here are some excerpts from the Scientific American article:
Today the maximum power consumed worldwide at any given moment is about 12.5 trillion watts (terawatts, or TW), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency projects that in 2030 the world will require 16.9 TW of power as global population and living standards rise, with about 2.8 TW in the U.S. The mix of sources is similar to today’s, heavily dependent on fossil fuels. If, however, the planet were powered entirely by WWS [wind, water, solar], with no fossil-fuel or biomass combustion, an intriguing savings would occur. Global power demand would be only 11.5 TW, and U.S. demand would be 1.8 TW. That decline occurs because, in most cases, electrification is a more efficient way to use energy. For example, only 17 to 20 percent of the energy in gasoline is used to move a vehicle (the rest is wasted as heat), whereas 75 to 86 percent of the electricity delivered to an electric vehicle goes into motion.
Even if demand did rise to 16.9 TW, WWS sources could provide far more power. Detailed studies by us and others indicate that energy from the wind, worldwide, is about 1,700 TW. Solar, alone, offers 6,500 TW. Of course, wind and sun out in the open seas, over high mountains and across protected regions would not be available. If we subtract these and low-wind areas not likely to be developed, we are still left with 40 to 85 TW for wind and 580 TW for solar, each far beyond future human demand. Yet currently we generate only 0.02 TW of wind power and 0.008 TW of solar. These sources hold an incredible amount of untapped potential.
SNIP
Overall construction cost for a WWS system might be on the order of $100 trillion worldwide, over 20 years, not including transmission. But this is not money handed out by governments or consumers. It is investment that is paid back through the sale of electricity and energy. And again, relying on traditional sources would raise output from 12.5 to 16.9 TW, requiring thousands more of those plants, costing roughly $10 trillion, not to mention tens of trillions of dollars more in health, environmental and security costs. The WWS plan gives the world a new, clean, efficient energy system rather than an old, dirty, inefficient one.
This may be hard to wrap your mind around, but this program actually isn’t that big. It most definitely is not overwhelming. For example: 3.8 million large wind turbines sounds like a lot, right? But Jacobson and Delucchi counter by noting that the world produces over 70 million cars and trucks each year. Did you even know that’s how many cars and trucks are produced each year?
What about the $100 trillion price tag? Sure seems staggering at first. But only because we have internalized the decades of propaganda promoting neo-liberalism by the one percent and the banksters. It is actually well within our capability: the entire world economy produces $71 trillion in goods and services each year (of which the U.S. economy produces around $16 trillion). $100 trillion over 15 years is just under $7 trillion a year. That’s just a ten percent increase in world output, right now! Less than ten percent with a 20 or 35 year program. That would make for the longest sustained world economic boom since the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after World War Two.
But where do we get $100 trillion? Well, the financial markets in the USA alone trade over $5 trillion each and every day in stocks. bonds, options, futures, swaps, and other derivatives. And, there is over $50 trillion sitting around in the world’s offshore hot money centers, which the one percent are hiding from tax authorities. To fund $100 trillion in new infrastructure we can either take that money away from the one percent, or take away their control over the creation and allocation of new money and credit, which they are misusing for speculation and usury. We can just create the money needed out of thin air. That is, in fact, the way money has always been created.
We have the technology. We have the means. We have people desperate for good jobs. What we don’t have is a financial and monetary system that will provide financing to do what we have to do. So, the real fight is to destroy the political power of Wall Street and the one percent, so we can get on with the task of financing a real economic recovery. In Britain, according to PositiveMoney.org,
…between 2000 and 2008, the amount of money and debt in the UK economy doubled as a result of money creation by bank lending. This created the debt fueled boom that ultimately led to the financial crisis. From 2011 to 2014 just 8% of new loans were made to businesses. The majority of new loans are directed to financial markets and mortgage lending.
I would be very, very surprised – shocked even – if the statistics in the USA did not also show a similar skewing of lending toward financial markets and real estate speculation.
The need for $100 trillion in investments to totally transform the world economy is why it is so important to back Senator Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss, the head of investment banking for Lazard, for the senior post of Under-Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance. It is very unlikely that anyone who has been a “success” in banking and finance the past few decades has the understanding, willingness, and integrity to help lead the nation in the radical transformation of the financial and monetary system we require. I don’t think even Senator Warren is as fully aware of what is at stake as you, dear reader, are, now that you have read about the $100 trillion program to build an entirely sustainable economy. Senator Warren is merely saying there are too many Wall Streeters in positions of power right now. I’m saying even one Wall Streeter is one too many.
That, of course, is a stretch. Of course we need people with experience in the banking and financial system to help achieve the dramatic shift we need. But, if you really are truly concerned about the future, this is the hard core attitude you need to take to anyone with a background in banking and finance at this point. In a post at Hullabaloo, Gaius Publius writes that there are already signs that exactly such a hard core faction is emerging in the Democratic Party. Gaius Publius calls it the “Hell No” caucus. Gaius goes directly to the central issue by posing the question that a lot of rank and file Dems are already pondering: In opposing the President’s nomination,
“Has Warren joined the nominal enemy (Republicans), or has she taken the fight to the real enemy that controls both parties — the “billionaire class“?
Gaius Publius posits that what position Democrats in Congress take on the Weiss nomination will be crucial test of the “Hell No” insurgency. Another important test will be “what Harry Reid does.” A third test will be the nomination of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General. She may be the first African-American women nominated for the position, but she is entirely cut from the same mold as Eric Holder, so it is extremely doubtful she will abandon “Too Big to Jail” and actually start to go after the criminals at the top of our banking and financial institutions. You really need to go read the entire post because it is the clearest statement yet of the possible paths the Democratic Party can take after the 2014 electoral defeat. There are also a large number of links to important articles and postings throughout. If you are blessed with an extended holiday this weekend, you should spend at least an hour or two reading this material. Please trust me, it’s worth it.
“$100 trillion to build a new economy” will be another test, but one that we need to impose over the coming two years. It can completely transform what issues are defined, and how, for the 2016 election. We need to get general public awareness of the need for “$100 trillion to build a new economy” – and how doable it actually is. Once we do that, it will be a relatively simple matter to determine if someone is serious about solving the problems we face. The next time we meet someone who is a leader in the Democratic Party, mention the fact that we need “$100 trillion to build a new economy” and watch carefully how they react. If they are hopeless neo-liberal water carriers for our would-be corporatist overlords, they will recoil in horror, or try to argue that such a huge amount is simply preposterous. Anyone who is stuck talking about programs of a few billion, or even a few hundred billion dollars, is simply completely uninformed about the problems we face – or just not willing to face reality – because reality is that we can no longer afford to let Wall Street play funny money games. We must figure out how to impose new laws and regulations that force banking and finance serve the general welfare, not just private gain.
Remember, $100 trillion really isn’t too much to wrap your mind around: it’s less than ten percent of world economic activity each year over the next 15 years. And, it’s less money than Wall Street and the Chicago futures market shuffle around every month. Wall Street and the Chicago futures market are not doing anything socially useful with all that money. We have much better uses for it. So give me $100 trillion.
Besides, we can create money out of thin air any time we want. That’s what the real fight is about: Who controls, and who benefits, from the creation and allocation of new money and credit?
