www.dylansuggests.com is the learning site for my nephew Dylan. We’re just getting started on it, but hopefully we will put more stuff on it.

Google, meet Dylansuggests.com

Here is a website about Jack Matthews.  I’m writing a book on the writings of Jack Matthews, and I’ll be publishing essays there, providing news & updates and collecting secondary material about his works. I’ll probably cross-post longer stuff here and on ghostlypopulations, so you won’t miss anything by looking here.

A few minutes ago I posted video links to the 2010 Sea Level Rise conference.  I love the fact that I had listen/watch video lectures and panels which previously were never available. We are lucky to live in such an age of easy availability.

But….

Why do these embedded video players for viewing these lectures never seem to have the ability to fast forward to a later part of the lecture? Not having this feature makes it almost impossible to plan time for these things.

For example, the first talk is 90 minutes long. Suppose I want to listen only to 30 minutes now and listen to the rest later. The way the player streams the content makes that impossible. This seems like such an obvious feature to ask for, and yet it’s surprising how few recorded video players have it.

It’s interesting how often the format/presentation prevents you from viewing or reading something. Most scientific papers are produced as PDF papers. For the most part I never read PDF documents; I’m more used to reading on the web; reading a PDF is painful. Actually that problem has been solved recently with the ipad. now reading PDFs on the ipad are a delight. So much so that I now use the pdf annotation program iAnnotate to mark up my draft PDFs. Over the last week I have marked up a PDF for a technical book while in bed, on an airplane, in an airport, at a restaurant. I am so used to editing directly to the computer screen that I forgot how relaxing it is to edit something without a computer fan whirring in the background.

And if you wonder whether I am annoyed at the thought of having to type/edit this blog post directly on my monitor, you would be right. 

You have to applaud how packed this chart is with information. But doesn’t  it scare you to death? To think, that the goal of all the nations is to limit the temperature increase to 2 degrees Centigrade by 2050.  There seems to be a lot of gloominess about whether that is achievable given the political climate.

What would happen if human civilization became dysfunctional with as much as a 1 degree Centigrade increase?

On a positive note, though, humanity is better able to adapt to temperature variations now than they were 500 years ago. Or perhaps not. Sure, we can build more efficient air conditioners and grow crops more efficiently, but these are two activities that further require carbon, amplifying the problem even further. Increased population also places limits on the ability of technology improvements to offset  our per capita carbon impact.

John Hondren wrote:

We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.

Joe Romm offers more detail:

Here’s another chart on ice mass.

Chris Mooney describes what PIOMAS is:

There is no long-term record of the total volume of ice because we have only patchy data; ICESat was launched in 2003 and failed earlier this year. The nearest thing we have are estimates from PIOMAS, developed by Jinlun Zhang and his colleagues at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center in Seattle. Actual satellite measurements of sea ice concentration since 1978 are fed into a computer model of the growth, melting and motion of sea ice to produce an estimate of ice volume. PIOMAS’s results correspond well with independent measurements by submarines and by ICESat.

According to PIOMAS estimates supplied to New Scientist by Zhang, the average volume of Arctic ice between July and September has fallen from 21,000 cubic kilometres in 1979 to 8000 cubic kilometres in 2009. That is a 55 per cent fall compared with the 1979 to 2000 average. "The loss of ice volume is faster than the loss of ice extent," says Zhang. His model suggests that not only has the total volume of Arctic ice continued to decline since 2007, but that the rate of loss is accelerating (see "Going, going…").

 

(From Robert: extent refers to sea ice surface area)

Finally, I’m going to summarize with a list of Texas Resources about climate change impact:

• Climate Abyss, a science blog run by Texas climatologist John Nielson-Gammon
• Here are videos from a 2010 Corpus Christi conference about climate change and sea level rise. I haven’t watched these yet.
• Here’s a book about climate change and Texas. You can download PDFs of individual chapters.
• Only In It for the Gold, by Michael Tobis. A UT/Austin geophysicist.
• Texas VOX, a Public Citizen activist blog.
• Texas Climate  News, a roundup of Texas climate change news.

I am exhausted. No time to write except the small amount of time before my salmon dinner is ready.

Sorry I haven’t been blogging.

The last week has been both wonderful and exhausting.

I’ll explain later.

This list is ongoing. I’ll be adding to it over time.

Ethics/Character

1. Rick Perry was ranked as one of the worst governors by a national ethics watchdog group.  The Houston Chronicle summarizes: the group said that the governor "allegedly disregarded campaign finance laws and aided a business that was especially generous to his campaign" and "accepted travel and campaign donations from a business that received benefits from his official actions."  The group also accused Perry of rejected federal economic stimulus money "in a manner that appeared to put partisan politics ahead of the interests of the citizens of Texas" and "has perpetuated the revolving door between government and special interests."  (Source)
2. Vile political campaigns. In the 2002 governor’s race against Rick Sanchez, Perry used a negative campaign ad which implied that Sanchez was involved with Mexican drug smugglers (More).  Even though there was no evidence linking Sanchez to this charge and the ad was widely condemned, Perry used this to sow doubt in the minds of white Texas voters.  “What the ads did not mention is that Sanchez helped federal authorities bust the bad guys, and earned the praise of the Reagan Justice Department. In fact, when the ads ran, David Almaraz, the DOJ official who handled the investigation, denounced them, saying, "Perry’s claim is absolutely preposterous and completely false, without any foundation and fact."(more). Perry also had to settle a lawsuit over possibly illegal campaign contributions during the 2006 campaign (source).   
3. Irresponsible political rhetoric. Perry has  talked of secession several times  and when speaking before  a  Tea Party group, called them a group of patriots, “not right-wing extremists.”  (Source).
4. Rick Perry has avoided scheduled debates for gubernatorial candidates. Instead, he has opted to get his message out by press conferences and political ads, things which by definition avoid public scrutiny. The refusal/inability to engage in a public debate with your opponent is a sign of political ineffectiveness and a contempt for the everyday voter  (not to mention cowardice).

Education

1. Perry misused federal education grants that were earmarked  to hire more teachers and instead used them to reduce taxes. As a result of protests by 40 school district superintendents in Texas,  the US congress had to add a special  provision to ensure that Perry would never do such a thing again (More).
2. In the middle of a $11 billion budget shortfall,  Perry’s administration spent $888 million on new ideologically-pure textbooks that has quickly made Texas the butt of late-night TV (Source). This action led political commentator to call Rick Perry “the worst person of the world.”
3. The Perry Administration refused even to apply for the $700 million in federal funds for the “Race for the Top” school improvement grant program. (Source).  Houston ISD superintendent said “I’m disappointed. It was potentially a lot of money for our state. I’m not one to sell my soul for money, but I have 100,000 kids in Houston who don’t read at grade level, and I don’t agree with people who say resources don’t make a difference.”  Debra Kerner, trustee of the Harris County Department of Education criticizes Perry’s rationale  for not applying. “Perry attempts to justify his decision not to sign on to the national education standards by saying that our standards are already high. Again, I ask: If our standards are so high, why do we rank so low?Also according to the comptroller’s Web site, “Texas was the only state in the nation to cut average per pupil expenditures in fiscal year 2005, resulting in a ranking of 40th nationally; down from 25th in fiscal year 1999. Texas is sixth in the nation in student growth. The general student population in Texas public schools grew by 11.1 percent between school years 1999 and 2005, with the largest percentage of growth seen among low-income and minority children. Perry is cutting education funding while our school population is growing. He is playing politics with our schoolchildren, and it is costing our state millions of dollars.”

Business/Economy

1. Rick Perry has been the primary supporter of the Texas Enterprise Fund, a public fund to give cash to companies to create jobs. After Texas distributed $363 million to various companies,  the number of jobs created was disappointing, so much so that Rick Perry’s  office had to amend the original contracts and according to one study, “quietly redefine success.”
2. 20 of the 55 companies to receive funds from the Texas Enterprise Fund were contributors to the Rick Perry campaign (Source).  In addition, there are allegations that companies made donations to the Republican Governors’ Association – which in turn made campaign contributions to Perry’s campaign.
3. Amazingly, one beneficiary of the Texas Enterprise Fund was Countrywide Financial who received $20 million from the State of Texas before going bankrupt under allegations of fraud. Not only did Perry approve of giving funds to Countrywide, he actually made a point to give a speech touting it as the fund’s “crowning jewel” (Source). Countrywide later became known for being a primary cause of the subprime loan mortgage meltdown and “has become synonymous with the excesses that led to the housing bubble.”
4. Rick Perry rejected $556 million in federal unemployment stimulus dollars. (More).  He did it because he felt the fed dollars came with too many strings attached. But that is not the point. The purpose of this stimulus money was to maintain consumer spending in the Texas economy.  The end result is that unemployment taxes were doubled on Texas businesses.
5. Rick Perry solicited a $250,00 donation from BP to help restore the governor’s mansion. (Source). Later after the BP spill he described the spill as an “act of God” and said that the company  “historically had a very good safety record from my perspective” despite the fact that BP’s violation of safety standards at the Texas City refineries were numerous and well known.  (Source)

Law Enforcement/Justice System

1. Death Penalty. Rick Perry has mishandled several death penalty cases, but the most egregious is the Cameron Todd Willingham case which many claim is the first recorded case of an innocent man being wrongly executed (See this investigative report). Perry’s job was to make sure due process has been done for these kinds of cases and to handle last minute appeals.  On the day of the scheduled execution, Perry had received a clear and persuasive report by one of the nation’s leading arson investigators that poked serious holes in the original arson report and suggested the original conclusion was invalid. Rather than order a delay  to consider the matter, Perry decided to ignore the report and let the presumed innocent man be killed. 
2. On the same death penalty case, Perry manipulated the schedule of a scientific review purely for political  purposes. He fired the head of the commission which had the result of delaying their conclusions from being published before the 2010 election. Many commentators say Perry he did this to avoid political cowardice before the election (More).
3. Wildly unpopular fees on drivers.  As a way to raise revenues, Rick Perry supported the Driver Responsibility Program.  “Under the program, exorbitant state surcharges are attached to citations like speeding, driving without insurance, driving without a license and driving while intoxicated. In addition to paying the fines and court costs associated with the ticket, drivers must pay an annual surcharge ranging from $100 to $2,000 or their license is suspended.” (Source) By all measures the program has been a failure. Texas Tribune reports, “More than 60 percent of $1.8 billion DPS has billed in surcharges has gone uncollected. And some 1.2 million Texans have had their licenses suspended. Many continue driving anyway, without licenses and without auto insurance.”

Environment

1. Rick Perry falsely claimed that climate change legislation would cost the typical Texas household $1200 per year. In fact, CBO and EIA estimate the cost to taxpayers at $180 per household (and potential economics  benefits to Texans run to about $100 per household. (More).  He directed his Attorney General to sue the US government for its EPA CO2  endangerment finding – even though  the climate expert Perry appointed strongly objected to this action. (I’ve read the Petition (PDF)  to the EPA; its scientific basis is laughable).
2. Rick Perry, in refusing to implement any state plan to regulate greenhouse gases, has prevented Texas from getting early credit for 42 million tons of emission credits resulting from renewable energy.  Because Texas did not provide a plan when EPA asked for one,  future EPA rules may not take this into account. One environmental group claims that this delay in coming up with a plan may cost Texans billions of dollars  (Source).

Social Services/Welfare/Civil Rights

1. Perry has argued  against health care reform, arguing that emergency room access is sufficient for those without insurance. In fact, when uninsured people go to the emergency room, they are 21% more likely to die. (More) . It also ends up increasing the cost to taxpayers.
2. Civil Rights. When the abolish gay marriage referendum passed in 2005, Rick Perry had wholeheartedly endorsed it.  Not only was this referendum challenged in the courts, legal experts are predicting that the US Supreme Court will soon  prevent bans on gay marriage in every state. If this happens, then Perry would have endorsed a position that is legally and politically backwards.. that catered to people’s prejudices. It sends a strong signal of intolerance to people inside Texans and outside it. Related: the Texas Republican party platform supports criminalization of gays and even re-enacting an  anti-sodomy law which the US Supreme Court has already forbidden  (More). Although Perry hasn’t  embraced these extreme viewpoints of the Republican party, it’s worth asking whether a party that  embraces such bigoted positions deserve our vote for anything. 

Reasons why Texans need to vote for Bill White

1. He’s not Rick Perry.

(More seriously, I haven’t had time to write that part).

A request to potential commenters: If you are going to make a comment, please restrict your remarks to the claims made above. For example, if you think that “Bill White is bad because X,” your point may very well be valid and interesting, but it is not relevant to this particular post. Over the next few weeks I will try to add positive reasons why I think Bill White is the better candidate of the two.

Another request: If anyone has any funny Rick Perry political cartoons, be sure to forward them to me!

10 Indicators of a Human Footprint for Global Warming.

Two great videos from the 2010 Net Roots nation conference about climate change. See the  79 minute video about Copenhagen and international agreements and how the failure of climate change in USA implies the need for better grass roots organizing (75 minutes).

Here’s a report suggesting that the massive decrease in phytoplankton can be traced to global warming.

NDRC report suggests that Harris County and Bexar County may face extreme risk to their water supply in 2050 as a result of global warming.

Here’s an interview with Katharine Hayhoe about the regional impacts of climate change. (She’s also written a book about climate change for the faith-based community).  This comes from Climate Abyss, a Houston Chronicle blog about climate change maintained by climatologist John Nielsen-Grammon.

I’ve been using my ipad to store all those gigantic government climate change reports!

Lester Brown on how climate change is aggravating food crises:

The rule of thumb used by crop ecologists is that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent.

Tom Vanderbilt on how not having a car become a Hollywood stereotype for loser.

1979 Video of a talk by climatologist Stephen Schneider:

We’re insulting our global environment at a faster rate than we’re understanding it. And the best we can do, in all honesty, is say: look out, there’s a chance of potentially irreversible change at the global scale, based on the benefits of the use of energy. And it’s very tough for us to know whether those benefits o…f energy today are worth the potential risks of environmental change for our children.

Here’s a 3 page interview Schneider did in 2009 (he died in 2010). He made a key point about models:

There is always uncertainty as well, but as scientists we’re always trying to move the needle toward more confidence. More confidence does not mean 100 percent confidence. The only thing the IPCC ever said it was 100 percent confident in was that it has been warming over the last 150 years. Some try to frame climate change by saying that as long as there remain open elements, it isn’t "proved." That’s a fraudulent frame. Nobody in this world–in medicine, investment banking, military security, environment–is ever 100 percent sure of anything in a complex system.

When I’m asked, "What is the probability that the Greenland ice sheet will melt if temperatures rise X degrees?," I speak in percentages. My very good friend and colleague Jim Hansen says, "One degree." I don’t think Jim knows that. I don’t think I know that. The problem is too complicated for us to know that, so I frame it as a risk management problem: One degree? 25 percent chance. Two degrees? 60 percent chance. Three degrees? 90 percent chance. Is that the truth? Of course not. That’s as honest as I can be based on my subjective reading of the evidence. However, just so you don’t think I’m an optimist relative to Jim, I also think there’s a 5 percent chance that it’s already too late.

…

You talk about subjectivity, but isn’t science supposed to be objective?

No. Science is truthful, which doesn’t necessarily mean objective. How can science be objective about the future? How much data do we have for 2100? Try zero. We have data for 2009 and previous years. We take that data, analyze where we think it’s high quality, analyze where we’re not so sure of the quality, show how well the data explains multiple phenomena from the past, and ask how closely related those phenomena are to the future.

Then we build a model. It could just be a set of rules between how many watts of energy per square meter of heating we get between winter and summer and how much the temperature differs between winter and summer. That’s a model. Then we use it to predict how many watts per square meter from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Now, this model is not very good. We know enough to know it’s not very good. But that’s how you start thinking.

We then codify our knowledge in terms of the equations that best describe our understanding of each subsystem–atmosphere, oceans, chemistry, ecosystems, demography, economics, technology, etc. Every time we add a model, we add more uncertainty. This is called ‘theory,’ and everybody does theory, even data people. Then we create a super model, what we call an integrated system. None of the factors is known perfectly. But if we plot it as a bell curve we can bracket the answers. That’s why the IPCC says, "One to five degrees warming [by 2100]" for example. That is an expert judgment; it’s subjective, but built on objective modeling and data.

Our job is to examine our knowledge of the system and then make a diagnosis based on the way our models have predicted past events. If the models have done really well, we have more confidence. If they’ve done badly, we have low confidence. The models have done really well on temperature over a long time period so we trust that. They’ve done really badly on precipitation in the short run. We don’t trust that. So, we order the relative degree of credibility–not just in the model itself but in what the particular model predicts.

Therefore, the IPCC can say with very high confidence that we’re going to warm up a lot, and that warming will create fires and rising sea levels. Yet it has very low confidence in which year the fires will start to take off, where they will happen, and how severe they will be. But those are not inconsistent.

Once we build our climate models, we must always make a subjective judgment, because it is going to be a prediction outside the realm of direct verifiability. We have to be able to predict whether this is a potential catastrophe for humanity. We can’t just hang around and wait.

Here’s a prediction: once global warming becomes conventional wisdom, every natural disaster will be blamed  on it – whether or not global warming had anything to do with it. It’s going to become the perfect scapegoat for politicians.

Someone figured out that energy production is a better predictor of where you will vote on climate change than party affiliation:

The top 10 fossil fuel producing States account for 79.78% of the country’s CO2 potential while representing only 18.39% of the country’s population; the top 20 account for 97.59% of the CO2 potential with only 49.33% of the population…. Of the top 10 emitting States, every single Senator (100%), regardless of party affiliation, is opposed to climate change legislation.

Here’s a video that summarizes with the aid of charts all the evidence for global warming. Well-made generally, but I have to ask: why can’t  skeptics  simply  read an article and become informed? Multimedia is good about explaining charts, but time-consuming to absorb. (The Climate crock of the week videos are better than most though).

David Roberts discusses whether higher gas prices in Europe led to innovation or simply a change in lifestyle.

Crap, I just realized that about half of my links for this linkdump were lost when my computer crashed.

Austin scientist Michael Tobis criticizes Roger Pielke’s model for scientists to be the “honest broker” (providing options rather than recommendations).  Stand-up economist asks legitimate question about Pielke’s presentation at a recent speech:

The hypothetical above about the planet exploding if we hit 450ppm makes it clear by Roger’s story is incomplete from an economics perspective. An analogy will help explain other limitations of his approach: Let’s say we’re talking about global populations of tuna, and that scientists are telling us that tuna are being caught at an unsustainable rate and that we need to cut the number of tuna we catch by 20% by 2020 in order to maintain a stable tuna population. Then Roger comes over and tells us that what we really ought to be looking at is not the number of tuna being caught every year but the consumption of tuna per capita in different countries around the world. Then Roger shows us graphs about rising populations in the developing world and the rising consumption of tuna per capita all over the world and tells us how difficult it will be to reverse this trend: how many more chickens we’d need to raise, etc. Finally, Roger comes to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the number of tuna being caught every year is going to keep on rising. Anybody with half a brain can see that there is something missing from this story: What happens if there are biological limits to how many tuna we can catch? Anybody with a full brain should see that this analogy casts doubts on the value of Roger’s approach to climate change: What happens if there are physical limits in terms of the quantity of fossil fuels we can consume? What happens if there are biogeochemical limits in terms of the quantity of fossil fuels we can consume before blowing up the planet? This is not the time to pass judgment on these questions—for myself, I worry about the second question but not the first one—but it is the time to be concerned about the fact that these kinds of questions don’t even come up in Roger’s analysis.

A comment I made about a Naomi Oreskes article about denialism:

I have to confront deniers everywhere and all the time. I am just a layman (and btw, Crock of the Week and Skeptical Science are helpful, not to mention CP), but I never cease to be surprised at 1)the number of lefty people who think it’s all a right-wing conspiracy to profit from carbon trading, 2)the number of highly educated people in oil and gas who haven’t updated their knowledge for over a decade and 3)the number of Republicans who almost seem to take pride in conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels and unsustainable lifestyles.

Also, I live in Houston; yes, I realize that it’s the headquarters for a lot of fossil fuel companies, but I am amazed at the number of people have no idea how the consequences might affect a coastal city like Houston. The extent of their knowledge is that global warming might produce inconvenient weather on occasion. I am also amazed at the number of people who are ignorant about how electricity is generated or the source of their own energy. I once interviewed someone in public affairs for a major web hosting company who had no idea what their carbon footprint was or what the fuel mix of their utility was. (I had to tell him after examining several reports).

I’m glad that Oreskes has traced the origins of denialism, but the cognitive dissonance of many Americans is often self-inflicted.

By the way, I am reading a great book by Greg Craven, What’s the Worst that Could Happen? (inspired by the video he made on Youtube which became famous). Craven is a clear-headed high school science teacher. Instead of tackling the climate change question directly, he tackles the question of logic and how we arrive at scientific conclusions. Fascinating read, especially the parts about confirmation bias. 

Here’s two other arguments to give to a denialist who tries to deny the  existence of climate change or the human connection):  You are not only talking about risk to YOU, but RISKS to me as well. Sure, you may not believe that AGW is true, but yet you are insisting on the right to expose all of us to risk on the basis of your minority position. Please explain why you have this right to continue imposing this risk on all of us! Maybe I could hold a gun at your head and say, "No, this bullet will not injure you one bit!" My stubborn belief that firing the gun will not damage your brain will not give me the right to do it.. or make it right.

I posted that belated wrapup of  Robert Flynn links as a result of receiving an email from my writing  teacher which mentioned (among other things) that his Last Klick novel is now an ebook.  It sells for the very affordable price of $1.99. 

I’ve read a few novels and short story collections by Robert Flynn. All interesting and thought-provoking, with some religious themes.  I have not read Last Klick before (although I heard him read a chapter from it at a Houston  bookstore  a decade ago).  It’s a fictional perspective of the Vietnam war as told by a journalist. Frankly it’s a departure from some of his other works (which are more about life in small town Texas and the clash between Texas provincialism and the cosmopolitanism of city life). But  Flynn actually did some Vietnam reporting and served as a soldier during the Korean conflict.

Ironically I still have not read Flynn’s first work, North to Yesterday, which (as I understand it) was a comic cowboy/western novel.  It also received a degree of commercial success when it was published in the Sixties.

I should mention that I did an audio interview with Flynn a few years ago about the craft of writing. I still haven’t gotten around to putting it online. But I will. I will.

I just read two blurbs on the back cover of my personal copy:

I’ve read many books about the Great War and about Stalingrad and the other horrors of World War Two, but THE LAST KLICK, because it comes out of a contemporary sensibility, presents a greater challenge to the feelings. The madness of jungle warfare is matched moreover by the wicken idiocy of press and television. The United States seen from Vietnam is even more distorting than the experiences of combat. Written with passion and great skill.

Saul Bellow.

20 odd years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few days travelling around Vietnam with Robert Flynn who was then a freelance correspondent for True Magazine. Now after finishing THE LAST KLICK, I know what he was really up to. He has done a wonderful job of recreating the sights and sounds and smells of Vietnam, and he has captured the ambitions, pretensions and cynicism of the international press corps that covered the war.

Steve Croft, CBS 60 Minutes

See also: my book review of Robert Flynn’s recent Tie-Fast Country  and my linkdump of Flynn essays about various topics.

My old writing teacher Robert Flynn has a blog.   Oddly, the blogging platform he uses (blogster) doesn’t really let you download RSS feeds, (although it has some social community features). I tried to organize the links a little better, but put it off and then lost the links I was going to organize. (Sigh!) Here’s what I had so far.

Literature Left or Right

I have written about war but there are no anti-war novels. I read Johnny Got His Gun, that was intended to be a war novel. I think most young men who read the book felt challenged as I did to endure such loss of everything but thought, and to believe that we could prevail. War is the ultimate human experience because it changes nothing yet changes everything.

Here’s an interview with Robert Flynn.

Garden of the Priest and Scientist (an alternate creation story with a serpent and an eagle).  The Curse of the Luddite God (allegory based on the Prometheus theme). Swallow the Dollar (odd encounter with Satan), Sex Life of the Pharisee (pharisee who experiences the most unusual temptation), True Story of Postmodern Job (where Job is a CEO with stock options), Legend of Bob the Good (a man who does good deeds for the wrong reasons).

Slouching Toward Zion: Part 1,  Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4 .  Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting at the Baptist Church, John Wayne Must Die, Sister Constant Attention (sketch of an unusual nun), Singing Soprano in the Cowgirl Church of God (amusing story about a Texas cowboy who prays to god for a great singing voice), No Clergy Women (by a backwards-looking  man who can’t understand why women would ever want to seek the pulpit):

Man has won his laurels rescuing her from her own folly, from doing things that God never intended she should do and leaving undone her divinely appointed task of serving her husband.  Since the days of Adam and Eve woman has offered man an apple and given him a lemon.

Woman has always been the first to kneel at the feet of false gods; she is the slave of custom, the victim of sentiment and the prey of fashion.  Does she not seek to intensify the figure God gave her? to augment her beauty? to enhance her charm?  There is more power in her smile than in the pulpit.  It is she who is at fault for sin in this world.  Why does she not arrest the glance of the seductress? retard the saunter of the wanton? neutralize the smile of the harlot?  Why does she not save homes from the peril of the male’s wandering eye?  Why does she not bring up the child in the way it should go?  Why does she not prepare a meal devoid of French cuisine?  Let woman solve her own problems before invading the potent pulpit.

Various Essays about Religion and Society: For the Love of Agape or Eros without Error, a religious sex shop,.

Politics and Religion: Deadbeat Patriots , A War Profiteer (George W. and 9/11) , Imaginary Interview with Pastor John Hagee, The Best Known Christian is …? ,  Christianity and Reason, Call It Appeasement (interesting piece on Bin Laden and Bush), Obama’s Pastor, Weak on Security (a historical look at how the Republican party advances their agenda by accusing liberals of being weak on security—never mind that being strong costs a lot of money and sacrifice). When you read the sequence of right-wing accusations against every administration, you see how  powerful this banal  “weak on security” accusation is:

Like Eisenhower, Carter saw the danger of the military/industrial complex that co-opted corporations, contractors, small businesses, schools, cities, churches. He inherited Eisenhower’s blunder–overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran and putting the tyrannical Shah in power. During the OPEC oil embargo America got most of its oil from Iran until the Shah was overthrown. Ayatollah Khomeini became the leader, held American hostages and stopped oil sales to the US. Carter kept the US out of war and substantially increased US military spending but was never forgiven for saying that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism." His attempt to rescue the hostages failed. “Free the hostages” became the slogan for the next election.

The day Reagan was inaugurated the hostages were freed, Reagan released frozen Iranian assets, and lifted the arms embargo for Israel so they could ship weapons to Iranian terrorists. The US replaced the Israeli weapons. The Iranians took more hostages, blew up two US embassies and a barracks killing 241 Marines but nothing stopped the arms sale until Israel sent Iran missiles that didn’t work. Reagan began direct sales to Iran but because he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, he also sent weapons, intelligence and agents necessary for the production of WMD to assist Saddam Hussein in his war on Iran.

Here’s a satirical piece about McCain’s involvement with Communists:

Forget Professor Ayers. Professors are not that scary. I’ve known professors. I’ve been a professor. No one was afraid of me. John McCain is no professor. Sarah Palin had rather bag a professor than bag a moose.

Also, forget Charles Keating. He was just trying to live the American dream of fooling enough fellow citizens to become fabulously rich. That’s what America means. It’s unfortunate that laws and regulations stand in the way or all of us would do it. Fortunately, Keating had a good buddy who palled around with him on free vacations, free plane rides, free baby care. But John McCain was younger then.

What’s frightening about McCain is that he was tied up with people who hated America. They didn’t just sit at an antiaircraft gun, they shot down American planes. They killed Americans. And McCain was no eight-year-old kid. He was a grown man. Married. Children of his own. He was wearing American clothes made in America. (It was a long time ago.) In the heart of that dark place there is a monument and it doesn’t depict Hanoi Jane but Hanoi John.

He had a close personal relationship with lots of people who hated America. For five and a half years he slept in their beds. He ate their food. He listened to anti-America ranting. He listened to Communist propaganda. There are photographs of America-haters with their arms around John McCain.

Here’s a long article by Flynn about whether faith-based communities really consider life to be sacred. This is a damning indictment of the Bush Administration and its lax enforcement of environmental regulations. Some examples:

The US ranks last among industrial nations in avoiding death by preventable disease. (Democracy Now 1-9-08) A twelve-year-old died of a toothache. An $80 tooth extraction might have saved him if his family had not lost its Medicaid. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care at a cost of more than $250,000 the boy died.

Is such neglect of public welfare benign or malignant? EPA has dropped or delayed more than 400 cases of suspected violations of the law such as illegal industrial discharges. (NYTimes 8-18-08) EPA has overstated the purity of the nation’s drinking water for four years leaving millions of people at risk. (Washington Post 3-12-04) At least 46 million Americans are affected by trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in drinking water, up from 41 million people in six months. Chicago found a cholesterol medication and a nicotine derivative. Many cities found an anti-convulsant. Colorado Springs found five pharmaceuticals, including a tranquilizer and a hormone. Even in extremely diluted concentrations pharmaceutical residues harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species in the wild and impair the workings of human cells in the laboratory. The overwhelming majority of U.S. communities have yet to test drinking water. (AP 9-12-08)

(Here’s another article which enumerates the ways in which the Bush Administration ignored the health and safety concerns of soldiers and civilians in Iraq). These two articles are a year old, but it’s importantly to understand exactly how much happened (or didn’t happen) during the Bush Administration.  In a piece examining the “courage” of WH spokesman Scott McClellan, Flynn points out:

Veterans for Common Sense (veteransforcommonsense.org) has discovered that more than 43,000 soldiers declared “medically unfit” for combat by doctors have been sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan. More than 58,300 soldiers are involuntarily enlisted because of stop-loss; 500,000 have been deployed twice or more into combat, which increases the risk of PTSD by 50%. About one half of one percent of Americans have served in Bush’s war on terror, yet, Bush was reelected in 2004 by those who approved of the war. How can you, like Bush and Cheney, support a war and refuse to fight in it or pay for it? No reporter has asked Bush why his family, including his daughters, or the family members of those in his administration and congress and family members of the millions who supported his war on Iraq refuse to serve in it. Is it because he and Cheney are their role models? No reporter has askedwhy the US paid $135 million to soldiers of other nations who either willingly or unwillingly fight the war that not even Bush’s daughters believe is as important as shopping.

I’d like to ask members of the media, especially the corporate moguls who control the media outlets, why do you claim 30,000 US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan when Veterans for Common Sense forced the Pentagon to reveal that there are more than 72,000 casualties, 300,000 have been treated at VA hospitals, 288,000 have filed claims for military-related disabilities? Why do you claim there may be as many as 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq when two years ago a study that the British government reluctantly accepted reported more than 500,0000 and a recent UN survey of Iraqis reported more than a million. Okay, let’s say it’s wrong by 50%, 75% and only 250,000 civilians have been killed. Is that old news?

Did it seem ethical to you that NBC and MSNBC advocated war when their corporate owner, General Electric, is a major defense contractor? Was it patriotism that motivated you to prop up George Bush when you saw his inadequacy, incompetence and inability to act that was a precursor of Katrina? Did you really believe that the heroes who fought in World War II, stood by their guns during the Cold War, and fought the hot wars of Korea and Vietnam were terrified by nineteen hijackers or was it only the chicken vultures in the White House and Pentagon? Did you really believe they were afraid of Saddam Hussein who had no air force, no navy and a degraded army with obsolete equipment or was it only Bush and Cheney and perhaps yourselves.

General Politics and History: Rethinking Vietnam,

Interviews: with historical fiction writer Linda Ballou:

Q-I have heard that to know a place you need to live there a week or a lifetime. In a week you know the differences between this place and "home. In a lifetime you know why there are differences. Do you agree?

A- You can’t know a place in a week like someone who lives there; however, I can capture the essence of a place better than someone who does. I research before arriving, have an eye trained for telling detail, and I am objective about what I see and experience. People living in a place know it at a deeper level but often they can’t see themselves as clearly as an outsider. Travel writers can get a sharp snapshot of a place in a short time, and therefore serve a distinct purpose in society.

Here’s an interview with a noted rabbi:

Q: Did you really say, “Those who advocate abstinence-only sex education have blood on their hands?”

Rabbi Block:Yes.They assure the ignorance of kids who could protect themselves from HIV/AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, or unwanted pregnancy, on the disproven theory that, if you don’t teach kids that condoms provide protection, they won’t have sex. Yes, we want all teens to abstain. On the other hand, we know that intended abstinence fails more frequently than any other contraceptive measure. When abstinence fails, the kids who’ve had "abstinence only sex education" have 0% protection against potentially life-threatening sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention unplanned pregnancy.

Pieces on 9/11 and Bush: The Only 9/11 Conspiracy, 9/11 Official Co-Conspirators, 9/11 Conspiracy Conclusion

“Deadbeat patriots” wear flags made in China on their lapel, buy gas from countries that support terrorism, and approve any war as long as they and theirs don’t have to to risk death, physical, mental injury, or criminal charges for it. They support dropping bombs on women and children, kicking in doors, invading homes, imprisoning and torturing civilians to give them democracy as long as the cost in blood, treasure and conscience is paid by others.

Clever politicians have learned that they can legally bribe freeloaders by promising them tax cuts. Let someone else pay for it, they say. So far someone else always has.  And some of those are caught in stop-loss hell because others think buying a yellow ribbon is all the support troops need. (Deadbeat Patriots )

Miscellaneous  things: Hunting Camp Pranks, and Eating Tamales for Christmas

Photos: Here’s a photo of me with Robert Flynn in 2008.

Update: Apparently Robert Flynn’s novel LAST KLICK (about a Vietnam war reporter) is available as a Kindle ebook for $1.99.

I responded to various climate change posts over the last few days.

Before I mention them, let me mention Dave Robert’s astute political analysis. He pins the blame on the broken political processes in the Senate:

The U.S. Senate is already an unrepresentative institution: Wyoming’s two senators each represent 272,000 people; California’s two senators each represent 18,481,000 people. On top of this undemocratic structure is a series of rules that have been abused with increasing frequency.

The main one, of course, is the default supermajority requirement that’s been imposed by abuse of the filibuster. I’ll have much more to say on this soon, but suffice to say, the supermajority requirement has perverse, deleterious consequences that extend much farther than most progressives seem to understand.

For a complex, contentious, and regionally charged issue like climate change, the supermajority requirement presents a virtually insuperable barrier to action. I don’t think we would have the climate bill of our dreams if only 51 votes were required, but I’m fairly sure something along the lines of Waxman-Markey or stronger could have made it over the finish line.

The rest of the articles are about political realities and thus kind of boring. The key thing is that the US is not working towards any kind of consensus.. despite the increasing need to do so. I hate to get all partisan, but Republican obstructionism seems to be the primary cause of it. That leaves the EPA’s power  to regulate CO2 emissions. Obama and the EPA said they preferred a legislative (not an executive) solution, but do we have any other choice now?

Responding to a Douthat post about climate change and conservatism, Matt Yglesias made an outstanding post about climate change and the right:

if Republican members of congress looked at ACES and thought “nice try, but too many side deals” they were, of course, free at any time to introduce an alternative piece of legislation. They did not. And you can tell by the rhetoric of the broader conservative movement (”cap and tax,” “job-killing energy tax,” etc.) that there was no openness to this kind of effort to find more optimal ways of pursuing environmental goals. On the contrary, every move congressional Republicans have made—from adopting a House posture that made it necessary to forge costly side-deals with coal belt Democrats to adopting a Senate posture that ensures carbon regulation will be left primarily to the EPA—has tended to simultaneously undermine the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while also making the economic impact of the regulations more costly.

I made this comment:

Sorry, guys, I hate to break the news.

China is number 1 in carbon emissions only because they manufacture a lot of products to import to Walmarts in the West. Taking that into account would absolutely make US the largest carbon emitter still.

Right now, the percent of carbon footprint for China which comes from manufacturing is huge. All western countries have done is to export their dirty carbon to factories in China.

Here in the US most of our carbon footprints come from transportation and our residences. It is totally different in China where manufacturing comprise the bulk of the carbon footprint. If I recall correctly, in US, it was something like 1/3 transportation, 1/3 home energy, 1/3 manufacturing. In China it was like 70-5% manufacturing, home energy 20% and transportation 5% (I don’t remember where I found these figures, but the relative ratios are right).

I don’t deny that over time China and India will be responsible for a larger percentage of carbon, but it is naive to point to China as the bad guys here. Ultimately the responsibility for these carbon emissions rests with the multinationals which feel no public accountability for their manufacturing methods. China’s proper response is to impose tougher environmental regulations. Let’s hope that there is enough political will in China to overrule the corporate influence of multinationals on policy.

Tyler Cowen responds to the same Douthat article, saying:

The bill seems to bureaucratize the energy sector, forgo most of the revenue opportunities, produce massive time consistency problems (postpone real adjustment and then give out more permits over time), and all without getting public buy-in to the idea of higher carbon prices (my emphasis).

I commented:

I don’t see how you can regard it as a libertarian rights violation issue, given the fact that the harms may not become apparent for a few decades after there is no time to reverse it(the same is true for tobacco, nitrates, etc). Sure, the transnational lawsuits may provide a kind of after-the-fact compensation for the (former) residents of Tuvalu and Bangladesh (see this Mother Jones article which states “the world’s 3,000 biggest public companies could be on the hook for $2.2 trillion—more than 30 percent of their profits—if they were made to pay for the fallout of their carbon emissions.” Even if compensation came, it would be too little, too late.

I have no love for cap and trade (although Stavins and Schmalensee seem to find it more palatable . But cap and trade was an attempt to deal with political realities (which have now collapsed).

What’s this about “might lead to a new green technology?” Innovation is happening all the time (even at BP and Exxon). Joe Romm has often said that existing green tech could go a long way towards our 2050 goal without having to gamble on carbon sequestration.

Who is saying that we ought to spend 1% of GDP? The estimates I’ve seen are a lot more modest (in the 100-200$ per year range, not including the social & economic benefits). Douthat/Manzi both present a false choice here.

Behind this statement is a feeling of hopelessness; Many people involved in climate change succumb at times to it; But it is not a valid excuse for inaction; we are still at the stage where we can make concrete changes and still have options. Saying that the burden of ecologists is to show a return on investment for energy technology misses the point; We are talking risk mitigation, not profit maximization; if anything fossil fuel industries should have the burden to demonstrate why their industry won’t contribute to further climate change.

The American political system is in denial about many things: the cost of war, the burden of fossil fuels, the cost of federal programs, American exceptionalism. One thing you mentioned was the need to get Americans to buy in to a solution. That is interesting; if it cannot happen post-oil spill under Obama and a congress controlled by Democrats, it’s hard to imagine it ever happening.

Speaking as an ecologist and not as an economist, I don’t care how carbon is reduced, just that it gets done and is effectively monitored and controlled. If the EPA announces that all coal plans are to be closed in 6 months, I would be fine with that (even though I recognize its disruptive effects on our political system). We are focused on outcomes, not process. We can’t understand why you policymaking and economics wonks/nitwits have such a hard time settling on a workable and politically viable solution.

I personally would be fine with an end to oil subsidies, tougher renewable energy portfolio standards, tougher CAFE standards and funds for infrastructure improvements to our grid.. but only if the plan provided reasonable certainty that carbon reduction targets could be met and continue to be met. Also, I’d like to see better disclosure about the carbon footprint of our manufacturing sector. A large percentage of Chinese’s carbon emissions are to produce the junk that ends up in US Walmart stores.

I can’t say where the political pressure to enact carbon reductions will come from. Up until now, it hasn’t come from our scientists.

To this post about  defending cap and trade, I responded:

As much as I like the idea of “market-based solutions,” there were a lot of concessions made to coal power plants and a lot of things put off the table (like agriculture) and probably other loopholes we never found out about.

I don’t deny the general point being made in the article, but cap-and-trade doesn’t seem intuitively appealing the way that across the board taxes or cap and dividend does. At least people understand what a tax is. (Mencken’s maxim that for every problem there is a solution that is neat, plausible and wrong may apply here, but he didn’t have to worry about getting things passed in the Senate).

I for one wish the rallying cry could be remove subsidies for the oil industry. I was shocked to hear on a podcast last week that the Senate opposition to a measure to remove oil subsidies was in the 2 to 1 range.  The fact that oil subsidies seem here to stay just amazes me.

I see good old-fashioned anti-corporatism playing a role here. Why can’t we fashion boycotts against the most egregious carbon emitters or put political pressure on university endowment funds to divest from dirty carbon companies? In Houston, one issue is charities and arts organizations accepting oil philanthropy money. We need to stop it because it gives us a stake in protecting our friends the Chevrons/Exxons/Halliburtons.

On the other hand, the fossil fuels are a very tough industry to beat; maybe some visible victories in smaller industries might establish a string of victories. Why aren’t we boycotting hamburger restaurants? Why aren’t we boycotting bottled water? Right now, there is no sense that the environmental movement is a force to be reckoned with. Right now there is no people power…just a bunch of lone crazies shouting and complaining. That needs to change.