Andy Wallis/Flickr

It sounded good: build a high-tech array of cameras, sensors, and other gear to monitor the Mexico-US border. Boeing, the contractor the federal government hired to build the ‘virtual fence’, promised it would be a cheaper and more efficient way to catch smugglers and illegal immigrants than flooding the zone with Border Patrol agents. But three years later, the government is conceding what critics predicted all along: the thing doesn’t work. They’re defunding the project. As the LA Times reports, “the result, after an investment of more than $1 billion, may be a system with only 53 miles of unreliable coverage along the nearly 2,000-mile border.”

When the border project was just getting going,  I wrote this piece in Mother Jones headlined: “A proposed $2 billion high-tech fence on the U.S.-Mexico border is likely to be virtually useless.” Maybe the Department of Homeland Security oughtta subscribe.

With methamphetamine use soaring in Montana in the early ’00s, a group called the Montana Meth Project tried to fight back with a series of TV, radio and print ads depicting the damage the drug can cause. Montanans were bombarded with images of adolescent prostitutes and vicious criminals – and in recent years, meth use has apparently declined in the Big Sky state. Success, right?

Actually, probably not. A recent University of Washington study found meth use was already dropping – as it was in neighboring states – and that the ads had “no discernible impact on meth use.” (As the invaluable StopTheDrugWar.org sums up.) That should come as no surprise. As I reported a while back, even the federal government’s many lavishly-funded anti-drug ad campaigns have been found to accomplish essentially nothing.

Photo via Flickr

It’s going to be (almost) all sunshine for a US Marine company currently gearing up to deploy in Afghanistan. In a historic first, they’ll be powering much of their gear with solar energy, which could cut their fuel consumption in half, reports Wired’s Danger Room. Seems the brass was pleased with the results of a test this summer where the unit ran much of a mock Forward Operating Base on sunbeams.

It’s not that the Pentagon has gone all tree-huggy. Their very practical motivation is cutting costs and saving lives. Each soldier in Afghanistan uses 22 gallons of fuel a day, and delivering each gallon to the war zone costs between $300 and $400. And those convoys make great target practice for the Taliban. Plus, it’ll help the Pentagon beat Pepsi and Intel in the race to America’s top user of renewable energy.

Jenin's Homegrown Heroes

I reported a while back on how the West Bank city of Jenin, once a  hotbed of Palestinian radicalism, is now being touted as a model of Israel-Palestinian cooperation – but that the progress there could easily collapse if Palestinians don’t start seeing some tangible benefits. The world’s greatest news magazine, The Economist, has a more recent dispatch from Jenin in their current issue, which reports some encouraging updates.

To wit: “Israel now lets cars as well as people go through the Jalameh terminal, the gateway between Jenin and the Galilee district of northern Israel …  Hundreds of Israeli Arabs drive across every day, ending Israel’s economic boycott. Around Jenin Israel has lightened its footprint; many checkpoints are unmanned. On a good day you can drive from Jenin to Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, without a single Israeli soldier demanding papers.” There’s even a new outdoor movie theater.

But things are still might dicey. The economy is still feeble, and a promised joint Israeli-Palestinian industrial park unbuilt. There’s still plenty of loathing for Israel, too: Locals cheered when Hamas terrorists killed four Israelis at the start of the latest peace talks. And I can’t say I hold out much hope that those talks are going to produce any real results – make that ANY results. But at least they’re talking instead of shooting.

Who does US food aid help most?

Here’s another one for the annals of pseudo-altruistic aid: turns out that for every dollar of US taxpayer money spent on food aid for Africa, a dollar goes into the pockets of the American shipping companies that take it there. That’s the finding of a new study from Cornell University as reported by IRIN News.

In a nutshell,  75 percent of US food aid is required to be shipped on privately owned, US registered vessels, even if they do not offer the most competitive rates. Result: lots of cash wasted to subsidize the American shipping industry.

“About 20 years ago the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent investigative arm of Congress, looked at the costs of shipping food aid in US-flag vessels rather than using cheaper foreign ships, and estimated that it cost $150 million each year. Another report in 1994 put the cost as high as $200 million a year”, adds IRIN. And how much more might they save by buying food from closer-by sources, rather than shlepping our surplus stuff halfway across the world?

Read all about it in less time than it takes to trigger a landmine:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/pl_motor_assaultbreacher/

Grabbez-vous un bike!

So elegant and practical they made me want to weep for joy on a recent trip: these are the public bicycles of Montreal.  Available to everyone, any time. You find one of the many stations around town where the bikes are kept, swipe a credit card and for less than the price of a bus ride you’re off on a merry two-wheeled ride. When you get to where you’re going, you just park the bike at another station and forget about it.

Bike-sharing is such an obviously good idea that even in carjacked America, more and more cities are starting similar programs. Minneapolis just launched theirs last week, and Washington DC is set to increase the size of theirs by a factor of nine. They’re not necessarily easy to do right, though. The New York Times reports that 80 per cent of the bikes in Paris’ fleet of 20,000 have been stolen. Montreal’s Bixi system seems to have figured out a better way, though. Minneapolis and DC are using the Canadian-designed bikes and parking apparatus. Because who knows more about bicycling than people who live in a country that’s 90 per cent frozen tundra?

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