The new discovery of a much simpler way to calculate what is likely to happen when two ultra-miniscule particles interact across very small distances (quantum scale) is making the news today. There is a whole lot of misunderstanding about this news, so I thought I’d try to use an analogy to help folks understand what it means – assuming I’m reading it correctly (I could, of course, be wrong).

The amplitu-hedron is a graph of possible interactions among particles at a scale so small it’s hard to imagine.

Think of it as a chart of the potential outcomes of all the possible crash scenarios of every single car on a very crowded highway at one moment. (AKA, if car 1 hit car 2, it might spin this way or that way, and car 2 might accelerate or slow and spin yet another way, and car 3 ….).

Plot out all possible scenarios for car 1 (got a flat and swerved, vs rear-ended the car ahead, vs got rear-ended, vs got clipped by a car changing lanes, etc. Repeat them all taking into account situations whether the driver panics, remains calm, is on the phone, etc., etc., etc.).

The resulting graph for car 1 will show that certain interactions (like hitting car 2’s bumper) occur in many of the possible scenarios, and certain interactions happen in none, one, or few scenarios.

When a the probability of a particular interaction appears more frequently for a given car, the line on the graph will have a greater amplitude (be higher) at the spot for that interaction.

Now if you overlay all the graphs for every single car’s possible accident scenarios into a single huge graph, you’re going to see a geometric shape that illustrates which interactions among the various cars are likely happen more or less often than others.

This does not mean that any or all of those accidents will ever happen, or has ever happened. It means only that you might be able to make an educated guess of which crash scenarios are more likely for any pair of cars.

The amplitu-hedron is that same graph, but for possible particle interactions for particles interacting at quantum scale.

Some interesting things were discovered when they started playing around with this new charting method: they discovered that the reason no one could get the math to work for gravity at such small scales is because they were adding math for things that aren’t relevant at that scale: space and time.

It turns out, that particles at that scale can interact with each other – even if they’re not next to each other, and even if they exist at different times. It’s a possibility, but it’s only one possibility, and for the most part, it’s rare.

Everything we can see, hear, or otherwise experience arises from the combination of all the interactions that have taken place among the particles of everything around us. Since the vast majority of interactions do occur between particles that are adjacent to each other at a given moment, the world we experience out here at the “macro” level appears to be one in which time and space are very relevant. For example, you notice when the particles in your shin interact with the particles of the corner of the coffee table. You would not notice if one or two particles out of those millions of particles didn’t interact at quite the same moment as the rest of them.

Some people are interpreting the fact that some interactions could occur when particles are not next to each other (in space or time) to mean there’s no such thing as space and time. That’s a serious misinterpretation.

All it really means is that space and time are not relevant to the calculations when you’re doing the calculations for the probabilities of particle interactions at this scale, so you have to do a whole lot less math than people thought, but space and time still exist.

One other cool thing to arise from figuring this out: Until now, physicists thought that if you added up all the possible probabilities for interactions between a pair of particles, they’d have to add up to 100% (or a probability of 1). Turns out that’s not true.

My take on this is that sometimes there may be no result at all when two particles interact. That’s pretty cool!

Long ago, and not terribly far away, I worked for a company that made some pretty cool software. The software was so cool, it was appealing to certain organizations.

:: TIA ::

One of those organizations was headed by a fine, upstanding citizen named Poindexter, who was embarking on a new project that had been dubbed Total Information Awareness, TIA for short. It was run out of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office (DARPA = Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency):

When public outrage over the TIA project caused the Congress to eliminate the TIA budget, the scuttlebutt among the sales team implied that another funding source would likely be secured.  I was not privy to any information beyond generic lunch-room speculation, so cannot I say for certain what happened. I can, however, conjecture and make some educated guesses. The acronym for one of those educated guesses is RKF. More on that later.

Poindexter’s name remained in circulation, and Hicks & Associates, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, and SAIC, all contractors involved with TIA implementation, remained customers.

:: CIM ::

Before the funding cut, we were given a demo of an app by a small company that has since bought out by General Dynamics’ information systems division for a tidy $1.5 billion.

The software was called the “CIM” – Critical Intent Modeler.

Let that name sink in for a bit…

.

.

.

The CIM’s purpose in the TIA context is described as follows:

“Understanding Intent represents the capability for analysts and decision-makers to develop an understanding of the intent of an individual or set of individuals with regards to a future action based on current understanding.”

Here’s a screenshot of the UI, based on a scenario of a suspect who might choose to weaponize a biological agent – it was their standard public demo:

It’s not secret software, you can find other references online, mostly via people’s resumés and consulting company portfolio pages.

The software was originally designed to “reverse-engineer” outcomes as a means of determining their likelihood and to identify those who might play a role in making them happen: start with an outcome (such as a terrorist releasing a weaponized biological agent), then list the criteria necessary to achieve that outcome, then feed in all sorts of data to find out which, if any, criteria have been met and by whom.  If a person or group of people meets enough criteria, those people become “persons of interest.”

However, in the way TIA seemed to be planning to use it, it would probably do the opposite – start with a demographic (such as all readers of a certain book), then for each person in that demographic, gather additional circumstantial information to “prove” whether or not the person could eventually pose some sort of threat (such as other books read, the type of work they do, dietary preferences, whether or not they are a Quaker, organizations to which they belong, political affiliations, and so on). If an individual had enough “check marks” in the criteria list, it could imply that at some time in the future that individual might think of some other activity that could be considered threatening (for example, reading Molly Ivens’ book “Shrub,” being a Quaker, and talking critically of the president at a peace gathering could be a gateway to taking some kind of action against the President in the future – maybe).  Or as Orwell might have described it, the system would identify those who may be in a stage of “pre-thought” regarding a “pre-crime.” In other words: You haven’t done anything, you haven’t even thought of doing anything, but you’ve got to be monitored, because you could think of something someday.

:: RKF ::

An educated guess on my part is that this is the current moniker for TIA. Again, I have no actual proof, other than my own conjecture based on what I knew of the companies working on the project and knowing about the existence of CIM. So, take it with a grain of salt the size of Utah.

So, what is RKF? It’s “Rapid Knowledge Formation.”

Rapid Knowledge Formation is a program run by DARPA (recognize that acronym?). Its goal is to create an automated system that uses templates to filter through massive amounts of data and determine whether a particular person’s data meets enough criteria to be worthy of scrutiny.

You can see the slides, presentations and more, on the RKF project in all sorts of places on the web:

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/…

http://www.ai.sri.com/…

http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/…

http://www.isi.edu/…

http://www.iet.webfactional.com/…

http://www.dtic.mil/…

(There are tons more, google Rapid Knowledge Formation to see a plethora.)

One of the key elements in RKF is … CIM.

In one of the earliest presentations (link to the IET RKF Kickoff slides), critical intent models are created and updated using Veridian’s CIM. The models are used as inputs for a knowledge base based. Knowledge workers (also called subject matter experts), use this knowledge base for their analysis.

Another place you’ll see CIM is in this document, the TIA Systems Description, on page 17.

In TIA, it’s used for building and updating models – coincidentally, the same thing it’s used for in RKF. Hmmm…

As with CIM, the RKF project’s public presentations focus on biological agent weaponization.

In other presentations, the model templates are referred to as “domain templates.” Biological weapons is one of the “domains” for which templates have been created. Others, exist.

Structured Argumentation represents the capability for analysts to use models, which capture expert knowledge, to reason about potential threats, intent, and the like.

CIMStructuredArgumentationImage

Could Paul Krugman’s take on the austerity promoter’s favorite (faked?) study hold a hint regarding the possible motivation for our Governor’s odd budget proposals (in bold):

What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to.

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.

Dare we hope the Governor will choose not to spend too much time wallowing in the ranks of the “usual suspects”?

Will he, instead, rejoin the reality-based community, in which it’s considered a bad thing to leave out all the numbers that inconveniently fail to support one’s desired conclusion?

Will he recognize the reality that supporting humans who need help makes the world a better place?

I guess we’ll find out.  

And a bit of humor:

Sad news from Florida: A man with more money than he knew what to do with has made the tragic mistake of becoming an “enabler” of the poor.

We all know, at least if we listen to the same sources as our Governor, that giving money or any other kind of aid to poor people will only “enable” them in their addiction to being takers of the fruits of other people’s labor:

There is a thin line between being compassionate and enabling people.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I share the terrible news from Florida, where a certain Mr. Harris Rosen has tragically stepped over the enablement line:

Twenty years ago, having amassed a fortune, Rosen decided to give back. He targeted the Orlando neighborhood of Tangelo Park — a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street and the high school graduation rate was 25 percent.

The first thing he did was provide day care for every parent. Next, he offered to pay the Florida state college tuition for any student from his adopted community of 2500 residents.

The poor, poor deluded man!  How could he visit such a cruel “kindness” upon the people of Tangelo Park? Didn’t he know what would happen? Didn’t he know about the cycle of poverty he was about to create? Didn’t he know that the ungrateful, lazy, shiftless takers of that run down neighborhood would do nothing but turn his money into drugs, violence, and decay?

Alas, no. In his haste to be “nice” to the unworthy recipients of his largesse, he blindly went forward with his ill-fated plan, and ruined the neighborhood, permanently entrenching horrors such as:

… the crime rate has been cut in half and the graduation rate is near one hundred percent.

“When people have the resources to go and succeed, there’s a ripple effect,” said one high school senior who was part of the first pre-K class in the Tangelo Park Program. “It becomes generational. No one in my family ever went to college before, but now, my baby sister can’t even picture a life without college. My mother even went back and got her degree. I showed her that she could do it.”

Oh the horror! The horror!  Please, Governor, please prevent Vermont from doing anything so foolhardy! Please keep the wealthy job creators in our state from repeating Mr. Rosen’s folly. Please don’t “enable” our state’s “takers,” I beg of you!

——–

In all seriousness: Governor Shumlin, the policies you are promoting will have the effect of destroying families and seriously harming our state’s economy. Your proposal to protect the wealthy from sharing in the support of our state’s well-being, while slicing more out of the hides of those already in need is – to put it kindly – stupid.

Here’s a number to remember:

2.2%

I’ll come back to that later – it’s a very important number. And now back to our story:

A paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has been floating around, supporting the idea that austerity (aka: cut, cut, cut) is the only way to ensure growth when the debt is high.

This paper has been promoted all around the world as the holy grail of budgeting truth. It’s being touted by all the “serious people” inside and outside of the Washington, DC beltway. It’s being used in budget discussions at all levels of government, from the smallest towns to the largest nations. It’s being used to convince the people all over the planet that cuts are the necessary bitter medicine for their own future good – a bit of pain now to prevent more pain later.

It is also 100% wrong.

That is the reason NO ONE has been able to reproduce their results.

There isn’t one fatal flaw, there are three. And they are whoppers. More below the fold…

First off, the researchers made a major error in their Excel spreadsheet’s formula: they skipped 5 rows of data. Oops.

Second, they inexplicably (or maybe intentionally – no explanation has been presented) excluded post-WWII data for countries whose growth was positive while debt was above 90% of GDP from the spreadsheet.

Third, if a country had positive growth for multiple years while debt was above 90% of GDP, they averaged all those positive years together into a single number, then gave the multi-year aggregate result the exact same weight as a single year from a country that had negative growth.

The flawed (faked?) study concluded that economic growth in countries with debt greater than 90% of GDP is always negative at -0.1%.

But if you include the data that was left out of the spreadsheet, add in the rows of data that were skipped, and give each year’s data the same weight, the actual historic growth rate when the debt exceeds 90% of GDP is 2.2%.

Remember that number: 2.2%

What that number means is that harming people in order to “fix” the debt is nothing more than pointless cruelty.

For a more in-depth numbers-wonk breakdown, see this story.

From RT.com

Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 barrels had been lost, amounting to almost 30,000 gallons of crude oil.

I’ve been looking for more info. My favorite tidbit, so far comes from this Reuters article:

Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, said inspectors have found “no evidence” of a crude oil leak from a pipeline west of Houston that was shut on Friday after alarms indicated a possible breach, a spokeswoman said on Monday.

Question:

Does the oil industry hire blind inspectors with no sinuses?

The Kalamazoo rupture, which has left more than 30 miles of a major river polluted, wiped out 150 homes, and destroyed countless wildlife, was another instance of inspectors finding no leak. If one is blind and has no sense of smell, I can see missing the masses of thick black goo and its acrid stench. Anyone else, however, should notice, yes?

When I ask myself, which waterways and communities should we poison with a VT pipeline leak, I keep answering:

“Are you stupid? None of them.”

(Apparently, I have a very cynical and sarcastic inner voice.)

So, um, why does ANYONE consider pipelines to be a “good” idea in our state? I mean, besides those who profit directly from said oil – they’re obvious? Oh, and politicians whose political life’s blood comes from IV infusions of lobbyist cashola?

:: Previously ::

A few years ago, while the press was providing non-stop coverage of the devastating explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a less “exciting” pipeline spill happened in Michigan, garnering almost no coverage at all. The spill occurred in a stretch of pipeline that was first installed in 1950, which had previously run incident-free:

… At least 1 million gallons of oil blackened more than two miles of Talmadge Creek and almost 36 miles of the Kalamazoo River, and oil is still showing up 23 months later, as the cleanup continues. About 150 families have been permanently relocated and most of the tainted stretch of river between Marshall and Kalamazoo remained closed to the public until June 21.

The accident was triggered by a six-and-a-half foot tear in 6B, a 30-inch carbon steel pipeline operated by Enbridge Energy Partners…

…

The monitors detected benzene levels that ranged from below 50 parts per billion (ppb) to as high as 200 ppb. Some alarming spikes-6,250 ppb and even 10,000 ppb-showed up over patches of oil on the water and away from homes.

In that particular spill, Enbridge did not follow the protocols that were in place for spill response. When certain alarms sounded, they were supposed to stop the flow of oil in the line. Unfortunately, those alarms tend to sound fairly frequently, because a spill is not the only possible trigger – an air bubble in the pipe can also trigger the alarms. Since air bubbles are fairly common, the crews are accustomed to doing the exact opposite of what should be done in a spill: pump extra oil at higher pressure to try to push the bubble out of the line. You can guess what happens when you push extra oil at higher pressure into a pipe that has a 6 foot hole in it. If you’re having trouble picturing it, there are 150 families in Michigan can tell you from personal experience; or perhaps this photo of the Kalamazoo river will help:

photo: (c) MIoilspill

That was in 2010, and they’re still cleaning up the spill. 150 families lost their homes, animals are still being killed in certain areas by the thick “oil,” and they are still trying to figure out how to remove the glop from the river bed. Unlike actual oil, the “oil” in a tar sands pipeline is actually “diluted bitumen” (more on that classification later), and diluted bitumen sinks. Oil floats. The equipment that exists for cleaning up oil spills is designed to deal with a substance that floats. It is useless against a substance that sinks.

:: More after the jump ::

:: Currently ::

But there are more recent examples. The past week has provided a tidy trio of oil spill news.

First, a train carrying tar sands “oil” derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 – 30,000 gallons of the stuff (reports vary).

That spill gave encouragement to pipeline promoters, who claimed no such thing could happen with a pipeline, so KXL should be built post-haste!  

Alas, a couple of days later, a stretch of Exxon’s Mayflower pipeline burst under a residential neighborhood in Arkansas, dumping 10,000 barrels (42,000 gallons) into back yards, basements, storm drains, and now the local lake, once again putting the lie to the claims that long-extant pipelines are hazard-free.

In between last week’s episodes of tar sands fun, Exxon Mobil was hit with a $1.7 million fine for having failed to shut down a pipeline near the Yellowstone river during a major flood event in 2011, despite government warnings that the severe flooding put the pipeline at risk of rupture. Exxon’s decision resulted in 42,000 gallons of oil being dumped into the pristine (formerly, anyway) Yellowstone river when the raging flood waters caused the pipeline to break.

There are three key elements to note about pipelines and tar sands:

1) Pipelines work great until the moment they fail.

2) Tar sands spills are much more destructive and much harder to clean up than conventional oil.

3) Oil companies don’t always do what they’re supposed to do. Just for fun, here’s another example.

This brings us to:

:: Today ::

There’s nothing like ignorance when it comes to energy policy. And there’s nothing like the Caledonian Record for providing examples.

In this morning’s paper, the editor, Todd Smith, had these words of wisdom, regarding S.58, a bill passed by the Senate to require Act 250 review for new pipelines or changes to existing pipelines (other than repairs):

The bill targets an oil pipeline that has run quietly, since the 1940s, through a corner of the Northeast Kingdom. Theoretically it could be used to move Canadian tar sand oil but there are no plans, by anyone, to do so.

ed. note: no plans, sort of…

…

To be clear, the NEK pipeline has zero negative impact on Vermont and never will.

Those are Smith’s actual words – “never will.” He’s clearly a brilliant logician, saying, essentially:

Since nothing has gone wrong yet, nothing can ever go wrong.

Wow, that’s awesome! I’m wondering if he might swing by my house and apply his “never go wrong” magic to my cars. I’ve had terrible luck – they’ll run great for years, and then, one day, things start breaking and I find myself financing a new boat for my mechanic, until I reach the point where I’m either getting a new car, or the mechanic is upgrading to a yacht.

Besides the obvious logical fallacy in Smith’s premise, there’s another reason a shift to tar sands is riskier than continuing to run processed liquid heating oil through the pipes:

Tar sands “oil” isn’t oil. We use the word oil as a shortcut reference to the eventual end product. However, before it’s processed, it is actually a thick tar that can’t flow on its own, called “bitumen.” In order to flow, it has to be thinned. What runs through the pipes is “diluted bitumen.”

One of the primary thinning agents is benzene. From OSHA [emphasis mine]:

Benzene can affect your health if you inhale it, or if it comes in contact with your skin or eyes. Benzene is also harmful if you happen to swallow it.

…

If you are overexposed to high concentrations of benzene … you may feel breathless, irritable, euphoric, or giddy; you may experience irritation in eyes, nose, and respiratory tract. You may develop a headache, feel dizzy, nauseated, or intoxicated. Severe exposures may lead to convulsions and loss of consciousness.

…

Repeated or prolonged exposure to benzene, even at relatively low concentrations, may result in various blood disorders, ranging from anemia to leukemia, an irreversible, fatal disease. Many blood disorders associated with benzene exposure may occur without symptoms.

The EPA is required to set two types of contamination levels for pollutants in water. One of those, the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) indicates the maximum amount of the contaminant that can be present in water before it affects your health.

The MCLG for Benzene:

The MCLG for benzene is zero. EPA has set this level of protection based on the best available science to prevent potential health problems.

The EPA also has an “Enforceable Regulation” level, called the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL). If this much benzene is found in water, the source must be found and eliminated, and, the water cannot be used for drinking and should not be used for bathing:

0.005 mg/L or 5 parts per billion.

To give you a sense of what this means: one single drop of benzene makes 75,000 gallons of water unsafe.

Remember the benzene levels found in the air in the Michigan spill? No? They’re in the first quote block at the beginning of this post – scroll on up and take a look, then come on back and think about those numbers in context.

There are some estimates on how much airborne benzene may or may not cause lasting harm to people who breathe such concentrations, but unfortunately, those estimates were of no help to the health department in Kalamazoo, because they’re designed based on certain types of industrial exposures. There is no information for the exposures that occurred in Michigan, and there were no measurements taken in most homes (except a few private measurements taken by Enbridge, the results of which they refuse to release) in the area, so even if there were health estimates, no one knows what kinds of exposures were experienced for what durations by the affected families.

So, tar sands “oil” not only presents much more significant cleanup issues, it also presents health risks of unknown severity.

Good thing the pipeline “never will” pose any kind of risk!

But, wait! There’s more from Mr. Smith’s editorial:

At almost exactly the same time the Senate refused Act 250 environmental oversight for new industrial wind projects, as had been proposed in S.30. The bill was intended to protect our mountains and forests from the well-documented destruction done to them by industrial development.

I could link to all the stories from right here on GMD that illustrate that the “destruction” is seriously overstated and something entirely other than “well-documented” but it would take up lots of space – just use the search mechanism.

There’s a different point I’d like to address in the above quote:

Smith implies that wind development is harmful because it’s “industrial development,” which is why he opposes it. (For those in need of remedial grammar: “implies” means “to involve or indicate by inference, association, or necessary consequence rather than by direct statement.”)  

If Smith feels that is the case, then why did his paper glowingly name Bill Stenger the Northeast Kingdom’s “man of the year,” for Stenger’s promised Northeast Kingdom Economic Development Initiative? The description of the planned development indicates massive amounts of exactly the kind of “destruction” Smith decries, and worse [emphasis mine]:

• New ski resort hotels and facilities at both ski areas
• A window manufacturing plant
• Research and manufacturing plant of artificial organs and supplies
• Clean rooms to attract hundreds of researchers and hire local technicians
• A waterfront hotel and conference center on Lake Memphremagog
• Expanding the Newport State Airport in Coventry
• Warehouse space
• A Walmart store

The story closes with:

Suddenly, the fear and the thrill is for the exciting unknown, where a Walmart store – which local leaders say will come – is just a small development compared to Stenger’s projects.

For the hope and the excitement he has created, coupled with the belief that he is a man who carries through on promises, Bill Stenger has to be the 2012 man of the year for the Northeast Kingdom.

Smith ends today’s editorial with this coup de grace:

Industrial wind projects rape the environment and have no impact on Vermont’s carbon footprint.

Mandating environmental review for the (harmless) former but preventing it for the (destructive) latter is pure ideological hypocrisy.

There is so much in those tiny sentences. Let’s start with carbon footprint:

Vermont’s carbon footprint is only part of the pollution picture. What will change, immediately, is the amount of coal burned to power the ISO New England Grid, which directly impacts Vermont’s air quality, in a good way.

As to hypocrisy: please see the Caledonian Record’s glowing praise of Stenger’s development initiative. There’s definitely hypocrisy afoot, but it’s not in the legislature.

As to the “(harmless) former” – well, this entire post has been about the “harmless” pipelines that have turned out to be anything but “harmless.”

And lastly, I respectfully refer Mr. Smith to yesterday’s Dear Joe post. Though, in case he doesn’t want to actually bother clicking a link:

Putting up windmills has nothing to do with sexual assault – which is why comparing the windmills to sexual assault (aka: rape) is so offensive to those who have suffered deep and lasting trauma.

There’s one more tidbit, that should be of interest to those wondering why the folks in Maine would even consider taking on the increased risk of pumping tar sands bitumen through their aging pipeline:?

A 1980 law ensures that diluted bitumen is not classified as oil, and companies transporting it in pipelines do not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. Other conventional crude producers pay 8 cents a barrel to ensure the fund has resources to help clean up some of the 54,000 barrels of pipeline oil that spilled 364 times last year.

This means that the companies who could wreck our region with their thick, heavy, carcinogenic, “black gold,” do not have to clean up after themselves, should a pipeline function in a manner other than “as designed.”

The taxpayers and traditional oil companies get to have all the costly “fun,” while the bitumen pumpers laugh all the way to the offshore bank.  I bet our friends at the Portland Pipe Line Corporation are practically drooling at the prospect of eliminating those cleanup fund payments.

Sure, the reversal of flow and change in content is “not planned,” but looking at the PPLC’s statements regarding what they may want to do with the pipeline, the planning stage probably isn’t far behind.

(Edit: this post is a response to an opinion piece by Sen. Joe Benning which was posted today on VTDigger.)

As a lawyer, I’d expect you to have a better grasp of the details of grammatical meaning – since knowing those details is such an important element of legal work.

Despoil: To steal or violently remove valuable or attractive possessions from; plunder: “a church despoiled of its icons.”

Senator Benning is trying to excuse his callous use of the word “rape” in reference to the Lowell wind project by insisting that he meant something other than what he said, while helpfully implying that victims of violent assault have no right to feel offended at his word choice.

Rape: “The act or an instance of robbing or despoiling: violent seizure.”

But, see, “despoiling” and “spoiling” have two vastly different meanings – violence is not part of “spoiling.”

If he feels that the wind project spoiled the area, he should say so. But, the Lowell mountain wind project was a development project that followed the laws of the state. The project owners bought land, filed the paperwork, did studies, and built their project – just like every hotel developer, condo developer, strip mall developer, etc. in the state.

If this project were a hotel or a mall, the project would have required the exact same types of work – blasting out ledge, building a road, etc. The only difference between this kind of project and a more typical development is that (a) it won’t involve dozens of cars per day trekking up the mountain to buy cheap crap from China, to slide down snow on little sticks while decked out in the latest winter fashions, or to roll little white balls into cups and (b), it doesn’t involve acre upon acre of impermeable paved surface that will result in massive water runoff issues.

I do not believe I’ve ever heard Senator Benning, or any other elected official refer to more conventional building projects – with higher impact on their local environments – using the same offensive language, so I have to wonder if the Senator’s hyperbolic “concern” is more for the environment, or for the Senator’s personal sense of aesthetics.

To make things worse, Senator Benning has decided that, since he’s worked with people who have been raped, he has the right to throw the word around casually (after condescendingly insisting that the word isn’t really what it is, because the law currently uses another, broader, term), without concern for those who might find the word used in a casual manner to be hurtful – such as, say, rape victims suffering from PTSD.

Ms. Barnes, as a lawyer I’m well aware of the impacts of “sexual assault,” the term that long ago replaced the word “rape” in our criminal statutes. I represented one of the first altar boy plaintiffs molested by a priest. I’ve lost count of the number of sexual assault victims I’ve represented in juvenile and divorce proceedings. I’ve served on the Caledonia County Task Force on Domestic Violence and as chair of Vermont’s Human Rights Commission.

Senator, that’s no different from a person using an ethnic slur because they know someone from the ethnic category. (Would you claim that your community has been “gypped” out of the financial benefits of the project, Sir?)

I’m not insensitive to the tragedy of sexual assault, but raping a pristine ecosystem has nothing to do with sexual assault.

Senator, your are correct that putting up windmills has nothing to do with sexual assault – which is why comparing the windmills to sexual assault (aka: rape) is so offensive to those who have suffered deep and lasting trauma.

Ask the victims who are out here, reading your remarks – seeing their experiences belittled by comparison to a construction project – whether you are being insensitive. I’d wager many will answer a resounding yes. Some will even say your remarks, and your defense thereof, are deeply offensive.

You may have learned this in law school, but perhaps not, so I’ll provide a gentle reminder: the offender does not get to decide on behalf of the “offendee” whether or not something was offensive.

Claiming “I was only [being hyperbolic/joking/using words for effect/etc.]” doesn’t fly.

With all due respect, your demand for an apology is unwarranted.

I love the use of “with all due respect.” Nice touch.

For those not “in the know” – that particular turn of phrase is used to give the speaker an “out” for being disrespectful. It’s frequently used by subordinates in the military to insinuate a complete lack of respect for the superior to whom the phrase is uttered – since the subordinate does not feel any respect is due. The superior, however, cannot punish the subordinate for insubordination, since he/she cannot prove the intent behind the word “due.”

Thank you Senator, your message has been received: you neither respect us, nor care about any pain you may have caused.  

The press has been kept largely out of the neighborhood with the oil pipeline leak in Arkansas, so locals are being their own press via social media.

Here’s one photo of a back yard – not quite as unimpressive as the narrow channel of oil in the press is showing in street, is it?

Having been in a house where the oil tank dripped a little, but didn’t burst before it could be replaced, I can tell you the smell of that oil has to be horrendous. The homes on this block will probably be irreparable – the oil will soak into the ground, into the concrete of the basements, etc., and make the homes permanently uninhabitable.

Ready to stop Keystone XL, yet?

Photo source: AJ Zolten, Little Rock, AR

I disagree with those people. No KXL.