Warming Wednesdays: who are the climate change deniers?

Because I do politics, not science, my first thought on observing resistance to the findings of climate science is to ask "who benefits?" The evidence for global warming seems overwhelming and increasingly is presented in ways non-scientists can understand. So who are the deniers, who pays for their continual sniping at legitimate science, and what motivates them?

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, a couple of historians of science, answer these questions and more in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Their answer turns out to be pretty simple: a little coterie of cranky Cold Warriors, funded by industries and right wingers, are afraid that climate science will undermine their idol: unfettered free market capitalism. So they have been willing to scheme, to lie, and to smear in the interest of undercutting the legitimacy of all science. The only thing surprising about the tale is that these people were once legitimate scientists themselves, though not in fields relevant to those they target.

Here's the authors' summary:

In case after case, Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues. In the early years, much of the money for this effort came from the tobacco industry; in later years, it came from foundations, think tanks, and the fossil fuel industry. They claimed the link between smoking and cancer remained unproven. They insisted that scientists were mistaken about the risks and limitations of SDI [Reagan's Star Wars anti-missile boondoggle]. They argued that acid rain was caused by volcanoes, and so was the ozone hole. They charged that the Environmental Protection Agency had rigged the science surrounding secondhand smoke.

Most recently--over the course of nearly two decades and against the face of mounting evidence--they dismissed the reality of global warming. First they claimed there was none, then they claimed it was just natural variation, and then they claimed that even if it was happening and it was our fault, it didn't matter because we could just adapt to it. In case after case, they steadfastly denied the existence of scientific agreement, even though they, themselves, were pretty much the only ones who disagreed.

A handful of men would have had no impact if no one paid any attention, but people did pay attention. By virtue of their earlier work in the Cold War weapons programs, these men were well-known and highly respected in Washington, D.C., and had access to power all the way to the White House. ...

It wasn't just the Bush administration that took these claims seriously; the mass media did, too. Respected media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and many others repeated these claims as if they were a "side" in a scientific debate. Then the claims were repeated again and again and again--as in an echo chamber--by a wide range of people involved in public debate, from bloggers to members of the U.S. Senate, and even by the president and the vice president of the United States. In all of this, journalists and the public never understood that these were not scientific debates--taking place in the halls of science among active scientific researchers--but misinformation, part of a larger pattern that began with tobacco.

Oreskes and Conway document this process exhaustively. It's depressing; several generations of scientists have seen their conclusions challenged and distorted for reasons that have their origin not in the truth of their work, but because some powerful interest might have to sacrifice some profits for the common good.

What struck me about this book was the extent to which Oreskes and Conway had to explain over and over how science actually works. For a people who benefit everyday from antibiotics and the internet, we are frequently pretty oblivious to the system of knowledge that underlies our civilization. So we get reiterated elementary lessons here:

While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research--experiments, experience, and observation--research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process--or have gone through it and failed--are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate.

***Industry doubt-mongering worked in part because most of us don't really understand what it means to say something is a cause. We think it means that if A causes B, then if you do A, you will get B. If smoking causes cancer, then if you smoke, you will get cancer. But life is more complicated than that. In science, something can be a statistical cause, in the sense that that if you smoke, you are much more likely to get cancer. Something can also be a cause in the everyday sense of being an occasion for something--as in "the cause of the quarrel was jealousy." Jealousy does not always cause quarrels, but it very often does. Smoking does not kill everyone who smokes, but it does kill about half of them.***Doubt-mongering also works because we think science is about facts--cold, hard, definite facts. If someone tells us that things are uncertain, we think that means that the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a process of discovery. Scientists do not sit still once a question is answered; they immediately formulate the next one. If you ask them what they are doing, they wont tell you about the work they finished last week or last year, and certainly not what they did last decade. They will tell you about the new and uncertain things they are working on now. ... Doubt is crucial to science--in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism. It drives science forward--but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. ***Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It's science that is obviously fraudulent--when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked--when some data have been deliberately left out--or it's impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can't be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don't follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad--or at least weak--when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.

Oreskes and Conway conclude by calling for all of us to take responsibility for affirming enough scientific knowledge to get human beings on track to deal with the manifold damage our unsustainable release of carbon energy is inflicting on the planet, our island home. This isn't easy; there are loud, annoying and quite vicious opponents out there.

At a recent conference, a colleague told one of us that in IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] discussions, some scientists have been reluctant to make strong claims about the scientific evidence, lest contrarians "attack us." Another said that she'd rather err on the side of conservatism in her estimates, because then she feels more "secure." ....Intimidation works.

Perhaps the most forgivable reason why scientists have not gotten more involved is because they love science, and believe that truth wins out in the end. It is their job--their singular job--to figure out what that truth is. Someone else can best popularize it. Someone else can better communicate it. And if there's garbage being promoted somewhere, someone else can deal with it. ... Unfortunately, garbage doesn't just go away. Someone has to deal with it, and that someone is all of us: journalists who report scientific findings, specialist professional bodies who represent the scientific fields, and all of us as citizens.

My emphasis. We really have no choice. Scientists have made the survival of contemporary civilized life possible. We have to listen to them when they do science.

Is the internet changing your brain?

The shelves are multiplying in the lobby at my branch library. First there was a small bookcase in one corner. Then the shelves were extended along the wall. Now, rolling carts have occupied much of the floor space.

Why? Because the way many of us use the library has changed. Instead of consulting a catalog at the branch, whether in wooden drawers or at a computer, we select our books from the online catalog at home and put in an automated request. If the book is anywhere in the library system, they get it and deliver it to the local branch. The person making a request gets an email and the book goes on the lobby shelves awaiting pickup. You have 10 days to go get it.

"We can barely find enough space for all the requests," says the librarian at the desk

Aside from young people studying after school and homeless/poor people using the computers, the great hall where the permanent collection lives is no longer the central focus of the building. I haven't been up there in years. I haven't browsed the stacks in years.

Does this new way of "doing library" change my interaction with books? I don't know; I do know I like the convenience.***Dr. Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University says that the internet is changing how we use our capacity to remember things. Google has won. We count on it and adjust how we interact with information accordingly.

Sparrow devised experiments to test whether the expectation of internet access changed what we remembered. It did.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

In [another] case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder.

“That kind of blew my mind,” Dr. Sparrow said in an interview.

She concluded:

...“Human memory,” she said, “is adapting to new communications technology.”

I have no doubt she's right. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Obviously many of us would be in deep doo-doo if we tried to perform some data-intensive task without internet access. But does this adaptation change or impair our experience of things that require something other than the internet -- such as trail running or listening to a familiar piece of music? The Tubes may make these pleasure easier to access (through route-finding or downloading), but the pleasure still resides elsewhere. The same goes for pains -- suppose I sprain my ankle on that trail. I still need to stagger home and in time do my physical therapy exercises, even if I can look up the condition online.

There are still physical limits to the alterations our technology can lead us into -- but for how long? I do wonder.

Responsibility meets conviction, births used dishwater

The shenanigans in Washington drag on. They look likely to both crash the economy again and deprive government of more of its capacity to promote the general welfare. Nobody is talking about what most everyone actually wants: jobs.

In this sad moment, George Packer has managed to say something meaningful:

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”—between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two. On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism.

Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad. ...

What does either side have to offer the tens of millions of Americans who have settled into a semi-permanent state of economic depression? Virtually nothing. ...

Huge, powerful countries can collapse when they rot from within. We've seen this in our lifetime. Must we live it here?

How to save Social Security and Medicare

To my boomer age group and my elders: if you want to keep your Social Security and Medicare, get on board with sensible immigration reform. Making it easier for eager workers -- highly skilled most obviously, but also lower-skilled -- to enter the U.S. legally would be in the best interests of the aging population. The welfare state works best when the economy is growing. Only when we lose our spunk and can-do spirit, when we accept decline as the new normal, does it begin to look impossible to sustain our benefits.

This country's prosperity has long been built on a great sucking sound: we've long attracted people with gumption, entrepreneurial spirit, and sheer willingness to work for a better future from all over the world. And that's great, because oftentimes those of us who've been here awhile need their energy.

Right now, old people (over 65) are about 12.5 percent of the population; in 2050 (when I don't expect to be around) elders will be 20 percent. It will be immigrant workers, a first generation in this country busting their butts to give their kids a chance, who are going to take care of all those old people. They'll be the folks paying taxes and FICA -- we need them.

You don't have to believe me about this. Listen to Fareed Zakaria, a journalist, editor at large at Time magazine, and a citizen-immigrant himself.

I think there is a certain kind of closing of the American spirit. And here's the tragedy, if you look at one of the absolute crucial strengths the United States has going forward, it is immigration. Why do I say that? If you look at every industrialized country in the world, we all have the same problems. We've got a welfare state. We've got too many people who are going to get old. We have health care costs rising. And, you know, those are things you can fix. They're difficult, but you can fix them. The one thing you cannot fix, you cannot change really is demographics. Every rich country in the world is going to have fewer and fewer people.

The problem that Japan has, which is so much part of its 20-year decline, is that it is simply losing people. Italy will be next. Germany will be after that. One big exception: the United States. We are the only industrialized country in the world, the only rich country that will actually gain in people. By 2050 the United States will have 400 million people, which is why you talk to any CEO who understands these trends and they will tell you America remains a powerful, powerful economic dynamo because it's going to have more young workers who are entrepreneurs, inventors, producers and taxpayers. So that means that the United States is going to be vibrant economically, demographically - and this is all because of immigration.

The only difference between us and all these other rich countries is that we take in, legally, every year, more people than the rest of the world put together. And this is our extraordinary advantage. We take them in. We assimilate them. We know how to do it. We're the envy of the world with regard to this stuff, and yet, what we are doing is we are now trying to copy the immigration practices of France and Germany, which have utterly failed to assimilate their populations. We are adopting this churlish, hostile attitude towards immigrants.

Fresh Air, 6/30/11

Zakaria is unafraid; he looks at the genius of his new country and sees successful generosity. What's the matter with so many of us, especially older people?

Why some people hate Darwin

Mark Sumner writes on the front page at Daily Kos, the contentious, fractious and occasionally illuminating site for progressive Democratic Party bloggers. But this is a guy who, long before jumping into that mosh pit, wrote 32 books mostly in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. He's thoughtful himself and he induces thinking.

His The Evolution of Everything: How Selection Shapes Culture, Commerce, and Nature, is a non-fiction exposition of how the mechanisms of evolution which Darwin described have analogies throughout societies.

According to Sumner, Darwin was an egalitarian revolutionary.

Darwin's ideas were dangerous. They were dangerous not just to those who counted on a rigid understanding of theology to give them purpose, but dangerous to the whole social order. It wasn't that Darwin's ideas promised to drive mankind along a path toward some dystopian ideal -- it was that he threatened to topple the social pyramid. Darwin revealed that the emperor was indeed just as naked as the rest of us apes. His ideas run counter to philosophies that predate Plato and traditions older than the Christian church. His ideas were, and are, the greatest threat to the system since a Jewish healer and rabbi preached an upending of the social order in first-century Palestine. Members of the aristocracy of Darwin's day -- and of ours -- were aghast at his ideas not because he left out God, but because he left out them.

He describes Herbert Spencer's corruption of how evolution works -- the caricature encapsulated in the muscularly imperialist phrase "survival of the fittest" -- as the ruling elite's riposte to Darwin's democratic insight:

In a neat example of literary adaptation, [Herbert] Spencer took Darwin's terminology, made it his own, and then proceeded to ignore the actual ideas at the heart of Darwin's work. Spencer's editing of Darwin turned evolution into a mishmash of Lamarckian mechanisms and natural selection catch phrases. Accuracy gave way to popularity and the perpetuation of classism and racism. ...

But you can't shake an idea that clicks. Spencer's theory was much more palatable for those who were used to the Great Chain of Being. It retained the order, the drive, and the neat location of man on top and apart from the "lower" animals. Darwin's views on natural selection proved right; Spencer's ideas on Lamarckian inheritance proved wrong. But you wouldn't know it from the influence each man had on society. ...

Spencer's ideas stick because they fit the built-in prejudices and concerns that the well off have always had about immigrants and the poor. In his writing, he managed to invent Social Darwinism before there was such a thing as Darwinism, so it seems only appropriate that among Spencer's followers was The Time Machine author, H. G. Wells. Wells based his vision of future society on Spencer's work: the childlike Eloi and the trollish Morlocks were the end results of Spencer's division of labor driving humanity into separate species.

I can't claim Sumner's little book on evolution entirely worked for me. Some of his contemporary social analogies to Darwinian processes seem a stretch, even if happy ones. Here's an example of one that works -- one I think plausible, though audacious.

Wal-Mart itself is undergoing a kind of phyletic gradualism, growing from merely Brobdingnagian to an absolutely Galacticusian scale. Maybe that change will serve to keep the giant ahead of the circling Davids, but I wouldn't place a bet on it. Over the long term, evolution is particularly unkind to giants. Only 27 years after their discovery, someone ate the last Steller's sea cow. No matter how powerful it appears at the moment, it would be risky to bet that any retail giant would survive much longer. ...

I like the idea, but millions of thoughtful people who have staked their thoughts and even their lives on the inability of sclerotic regimes to adapt have been dumbfounded by the flexibility of apparent dinosaurs. But then, sometimes they do disintegrate.

This book is great fun, even if every line of it doesn't entirely hold up. Enjoy.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Crater Lake, Oregon

Just a few shots from the snowy National Park taken last month. If the small slide show doesn't work, try this.

Today I had expected to be in Yosemite National Park at Tuolumne Meadows, but the residue of the season's long winter intervened. The leach fields around the tent cabins where we stay are still so saturated from by snow melt run off, that the area remains closed.

It could be worse. One of these days a heavy Sierra snow pack is going to melt quickly in the spring and inundate Sacramento.

Blogging will resume when this stomach bug departs my innards

That may not be today.

People will migrate if survival depends on it

As the NATO/US Libyan adventure goes sour, with charges of rebel responsibility for civilian casualties, I want to return to something I've written about before: for European nations, the problematic Libyan war aims to create a bulwark state that will inhibit the flow of climate change refugees from Africa to their continent.

The current drought in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya provides a preview of the migration that increasing desertification caused by human-induced warming is likely to set off. This is only the beginning. Here's al Jazeera's report.



Meanwhile, people suffer and aid agencies are doing what they can. Here's Oxfam America's drought appeal.

H/t International Relations.

Unhappy and mean

This local urban street art feels appropriate to this summer of discontent and general meanness. Knowing the neighborhood, I do not doubt that people do sometimes involuntarily sleep in that doorway.

Meanwhile our overlords in Washington play politics with the U.S. economy. Some Republicans are willing to crash the whole thing for short term political gain. Our purported Democratic defenders of government for the general welfare seem mesmerized by the prospect of appearing statesmanlike by giving away the fruit of a century of people's struggle for social equity.

Like the idiotic wars of choice of the '00s, this crazed and self-defeating behavior seems incomprehensible to a mere citizen. Perhaps a people who have enjoyed the security of living for half a century in a unchallenged world-dominating power are driven slightly mad when that power ebbs.

Madness in the powerful is dangerous to us and to the world. It's a mean season.

Democracy, Brit style

As Josh Marshall at TPM points out, you have to appreciate "the weird mix of high dudgeon and understatement that is the hallmark of British public politics" to properly enjoy this. But enjoy it you will, for about 11 minutes. (Some of the tangled background here.)

The Murdoch media scandal they are chewing over of course has implications for this side of the Atlantic. The bullying billionaire rightwinger owns the Fox media empire as well as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Harper Collins publishing. Every British politician of all parties for the last generation has had to come to some kind of accommodation with Murdoch's thuggish outlets, as ours do with Fox.

People familiar with the debates in the British House of Commons often mourn that few of our politicians could survive if this kind of unscripted verbal fluency were required of them. On the other hand, their pols are seldom nearly so practiced at glad-handing folks at church picnics. Different skills for different continents.

Warming Wednesdays: human inventiveness makes optimism possible

Andrew Revkin writes the Dot Earth blog tracking climate change and our responses for the New York Times. He's a charming, cheerful guy ...

Engagement ... is step one ... we have a stunning capacity to dis-invent and invent resources ...we can surprise ourselves.

we have been in a bi-partisan slumber party for decades ... if we get that back into gear, then I have a lot of confidence ...

Watch this. It will do your heart good. Then remember that to be human is to be an animal that makes its destiny. We can confront the challenges of the Anthropocene, if we dare to engage.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of that inconvenient truth.

Morning rant

The social safety net is not Barack Obama's to give away.

There's a 14 minute video of Larry O'Donnell (who is a blond MSNBC talking head, if like me, you don't follow these guys) that several progressive sites have posted in the last 24 hours praising President Obama's strategy in the debt ceiling talks with the Republicans. The current top diary at Daily Kos gushes over it. I'm not going to give it any more circulation, but here's a sample of what folks are so excited about:

What you are now witnessing is the most masterful rope-a-dope ever performed by a president against an opposition party in Congress. It began months ago... Biden and House Democrats ... rope-a-doped the Republicans into weeks of discussions over trillions of dollars of spending cuts. And during that time, Democrats appeared to be increasingly willing to go along with trillions of dollars of spending cuts -- possibly as much as three trillion. Then Biden and the President insisted that there be at least a trillion in tax revenue increases and Republican Eric Cantor fell for the Obama ultimatum and walked out of the talks doing exactly what the President wanted him to do because Cantor was thereby proving to the country once again that President Obama was willing to be much more flexible and reasonable in these negotiations and compromises with Republicans than Republicans were willing to be with the President. Specific policy issues aside, President Obama has already won the public contest of who appears to be more reasonable and he won that weeks ago.

I watched the whole thing. O'Donnell makes not one mention of what the proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would do the the millions of people who need those programs. Who cares? Obama's fancy footwork is all that counts in Partisan Pundit World.

Now I don't know how all this is going to come out. But unlike either Larry O'Donnell or politicians in Washington, most of us live in the real world where government programs make the difference between a modest life, anxiety and misery, and sometimes death. The so-called "entitlements," the modest government insurance programs that ensure care for the disabled and a decent old age, came into being as the product of decades of struggle by people who came before us and sacrificed to make this a more equal, more equitable country.

Barack Obama has no right to play games with the security of millions so he gets another round in that lovely Washington mansion.

When you boil these thing down, there are two possible core messages for high profile candidates running for office. You can inspire hope -- that was Obama's pitch in 2008 and the nation believed him. Or you can inspire fear of the other guys -- that's the pitch that the "rope-a-dope" Larry O'Donnell and fans think is so awesome: Republicans are crazy nuts -- vote for the grown-up.

The fear pitch leads to weak victories. You don't win office because anyone likes or trusts you; you don't have any real friends; you're just the "least worst" option in the words of some first graders I respect. In California we have lived through a nasty illustration of how damaged such lesser evil elections can leave an incumbent: Democratic Governor Gray Davis never in a long career managed to make a case for himself as anything but the lesser evil -- but hey, he got to be governor twice. That is, until a cartoon character named Schwarzenegger came along and easily knocked him off in a recall. It turned out that when push came to shove, Gray had no real friends.

Given the lunacy of the Republicans, Obama's "last responsible man" strategy might even work. But if he trades away the accomplishments of decades of Democratic politicians to win an election after which he confronts a hostile Congress without a friend in the world, will most people in this country be better off? It becomes harder and harder to answer that question.

Remembering the 1990s Bosnian massacres

Vermonters fill cups with coffee in artist Aida Sehovic's project “Sto te nema” which translates as “where are you?” in memory of more then 8,000 killed in Srebrenica. In this video, her father remembers. "You watch people killed on TV and you change the channel. You don't know til they come to your door ..."

Produced by Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for the Burlington Free Press.

Your blogger is pooped

Blogging will be scant today. I need to recover from and digest an intensive weekend retreat focusing on what people can do within the real life context of our divided and anxious country to reduce militarism and our rulers' enthusiasms for wars without end.


A highlight was Hany Khalil's report on his recent visit to Egypt to visit family and see firsthand where the Egyptian revolution for democracy was trending. As soon as we can get it, his multimedia presentation will be posted in full at WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras.

One of the topics of the retreat was why the once seemingly bright prospects of the Obama administration seem to have dissolved for many people, leaving cynicism, demobilization and even despair. On this topic, the morning's New York Times brings some insights within an interview reporter Joe Nocera conducted with the outgoing head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair. Here's a tidbit to tease the piece; go read the whole thing.

“I think the president’s heart is in the right place,” Bair told me. “I absolutely do. But the dichotomy between who he selected to run his economic team and what he personally would like them to be doing — I think those are two very different things.” What particularly galls her is that Treasury under both Paulson and Geithner has been willing to take all sorts of criticism to help the banks. But it has been utterly unwilling to take any political heat to help homeowners.

1000 too many

U.S. deaths in Afghanistan under President Obama hit 1000 on July 7 according to iCasualties. That's nearly twice as many under the new guy as under the old guy, a toll reached in less than half as many years years of war. Neither Bush now Obama has been able to lay out a plausible explanation for the seemingly endless war.

After the initial assault that drove al Qaida to Pakistan and the Taliban rulers from power, it has never been clear what U.S. troops were supposed to accomplish. Were they hunting down terrorists (but the bad guys had decamped) or propping up a government (the one in Kabul seldom seemed to control little more than the capital, if that) or installing good governance (Afghanistan remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world) or training a local army (after nearly ten years the Afghan army has only 600 soldiers thought ready to fight)? Who knows? All the war has been good for has been killing Afghans, U.S. soldiers, and allied NATO troops. Oh, any enriching military contracting companies.

The Obama administration is dragging its heals about getting out. They clearly know and intend that the U.S. will leave. But they proceed by baby steps.

While the Administration has publicly conceded that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, and claimed that it supports 'Afghan-led reconciliation', its policy on the ground is marked by a refusal to establish a timetable for full military withdrawal.

Just Foreign Policy

There is no reason for more killing in Afghanistan by our troops and no reason to continue to waste the lives of our forces. That unfortunate country needs to heal itself and run its own affairs. Enough is enough.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Oregon road trip curiosities

When we arrived at Crater Lake on one of the most beautiful days I've ever seen, this group of young Amish women was getting a picture taken. They seemed to be on a kind of wanderjahr, a van trip around the country after which they'd presumably be better able to make the decision whether to return to their community as adult members. They were clearly having a wonderful time. It was a pleasure to be near them.


This very modest bear is a representative specimen of the decor at a Black Bear Diner, a handy small chain restaurant in that part of the world, a step up from Denny's.


This dive in coastal Langlois is definitely one of a kind. We ate breakfast there and appreciated the simple, no-nonsense food.


This ten-foot high gentleman dominates the north entrance to the town of Grants Pass. He turns out to be the totem of a city booster club. A sign explains:

The Cavemen, dressed in animal skins, wearing horsehair wigs, buck teeth and "big horns" run rampant in parades and gatherings of the public ... Their main purpose is to publicize Grants Pass ...

Whatever. We enjoyed the road; you never know what you'll come upon next.

I like juries

Until the world erupted in horror at her acquittal, I'd never heard of Casey Anthony. Once I did figure out what her case was about, I was glad I'd missed it.

But I'm glad I didn't miss this yesterday:

“I did not say she was innocent,” said Ms. Ford, who was juror No. 3. “I just said there was not enough evidence. If you cannot prove what the crime was, you cannot determine what the punishment should be.”

...“We were crying, and not just the women,” she added. “It was emotional, and we weren’t ready. We wanted to do it with integrity and not contribute to the sensationalism of the trial.”

I like juries for the same reason I applauded the New York City DA whose case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn has collapsed. It's really amazing how often, once pulled into their unfamiliar, ritualized task, jurors do a good job of making the law work the way it is supposed to.

These jurors sent an important reminder to prosecutors: sometimes you can't get away with just proving the accused is loathsome -- you have to prove commission of the charged crime.***
Meanwhile it looks as if the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have forgotten what their job is. Starting under Bush and continuing merrily on under Obama, they apparently decided to give a "get out of jail free" card to those nice, cooperative Wall Street firms that 'fessed up to finagling the financial system. Why go through the bother of prosecuting?

From today's New York Times:

“If you do not punish crimes, there’s really no reason they won’t happen again,” said Mary Ramirez, a professor at Washburn University School of Law and a former assistant United States attorney. “I worry and so do a lot of economists that we have created no disincentives for committing fraud or white-collar crime, in particular in the financial space.”

I suspect juries might not have felt so kindly toward financial crooks if prosecutors bothered to bring a case.

Friday cat blogging

Five weeks ago I blogged that the vet had told us that our ancient cat was ready to go. When I asked how long, she said "days, not weeks." Lots of readers wrote condolences and offered good advice.

In particular, Rain offered this:

If they are suffering, then it's to the vet for the mercy shot. If they continue to eat and get around but are just shriveling, we let them go through the process until we see a sign of misery.

That seemed right and we decided to wait and see.

Evidently, the vet had neglected to consult Frisker about whether she intended to stick around a bit longer. The cat has shown no sign of pain or willingness to give up. She limps around, demands food, and still bites if you approach her wrong. If anything, she's more mobile and more herself than a month ago. Maybe cats do have nine lives and we just don't know where they are in working their way through them.


Here she is, being decorative in her sunbeam. Her friend Jane came to visit and took the picture at the head of this post. She didn't bite Jane.


She's never liked us to see her drinking, but since she sits down to do it now, she has a hard time avoiding us.

How long this can go, we can't know. But the cat doesn't seem ready to leave this plane, so we go on together.

Who was it that won the wars?

This graphic representation of what the U.S. enthusiasm for wars in the '00s cost in the federal budget reminded me of a passage from David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? Fromkin is describing the milieu of political and national antagonism that made space for a little band of student aspirant killers to fix on shooting an Austrian archduke and thus create a pretext for a world war.

What distinguished terrorists from ordinary assassins was that they did not necessarily desire the immediate consequences of their violence. ... Their unique strategy -- the strategy of terrorism -- was to frighten society into doing something that the terrorists wanted society to do. An ordinary assassin shoots John Doe because he wants John Doe dead. A terrorist assassin shoots John Doe, whose life or death may be a matter of indifference to him, because he wants the authorities to react in a certain way to the killing.

Osama bin Laden is dead, but he and his little band sure knew how to goad dumb leadership in Washington into spilling blood and treasure on a grand scale. Neither the Eastern or the Western set of arrogant fanatics cared much about who died.

Steve Clemons, who thought up the graphic, pointed out:

The US has spent cumulatively $2.263 trillion more than the FY2011 baseline. ... The other interesting take-away is that $2.263 trillion [in unanticipated spending for war after 9/11] roughly equates to about 7 million sustained jobs in the private U.S. economy, sustained over these entire ten years.

Instead our rulers debate in Washington which poor people will pay for the war binge touched off by the embrace of retaliatory and gratuitous violence -- will it be the sick? the disabled? the elders? the students? all of these?

It seems pretty clear that bin Laden got what he wanted. Can we imagine how to get what most of us want -- a country that values peace over power, a political system that works for the non-rich majority, a better future for coming generations?

Voting suppression: different partisan styles

Republicans all over the country are stirring up fear of voting fraud in order to enact procedures that make it harder for the poor, the young and the marginalized to vote. That's what tougher voter ID requirements, more difficult registration hurdles, and reduced early voting periods accomplish. The Brennan Center tracks this effort. It's proceeding rapidly in Republican controlled states, rolling back many of the gains of the civil rights era.

Democrats, in particular the President, are also doing their best to depress the proportion of the population that votes. They do it by running as defenders of the poor, the young and the marginalized -- not mention as protectors of Social Security and Medicare for elders -- then adopting the policies of Republicans that crush these constituencies.

No wonder more and more people stop believing it makes much difference which set of our rulers gets to dicker in Washington. The trouble is, it probably does matter.

But choosing between the vicious and the vacuous is not hope inspiring.

Look who gets married ...

It's the women, naturally. The media is noting that when enough data begins to accumulate on who gets married once marriage is legalized for same sex couples, lesbians outnumber gay men by a lot.

In Connecticut, 3,252 lesbian couples have been married since 2008, compared to 2,053 male couples. In Massachusetts, 8,404 female couples, 4,911 male. In New Hampshire, 1,113 pairs of women, 411 pairs of men. In Iowa, 1,376 lesbian marriages, 772 gay male marriages. In Vermont, 1,157 to 597.

This doesn't surprise me at all. Women's first thought is often about coupling up; guys' ideas are more often about getting laid. I don't believe this is genetic, but it sure is what society teaches us from childhood. Actually, the stats are probably more equal than they would have been before contemporary feminism -- less women feel the need to marry right away and more guys have an inkling of the joys of reliable partnership than did 30 years ago.

What's interesting is that I don't think that it has been women who were the gay movement leaders who made marriage the central demand in the struggle for gay equality. That impetus came first from the lawyers because, better than most of us, they understood what material hits our partnerships were taking because we didn't enjoy the legal benefits of marriage -- all the 1138 federal benefits that we still lack, for example. Of course some of the lawyers were women; of the current crop, Kate Kendall from the National Center for Lesbian Rights comes to mind.

But some of the sharpest lawyers doing the strategic thinking about how to win gay equality were always gay men. I think of Matt Coles who wrote San Francisco's first Domestic Partnership law and who went on to be director of the national ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and AIDS Project. Many of the leaders of the DC advocacy outfits, notably the oh-so-Beltway HRC, have been guys, as have the leaders of Equality California and Marriage Equality New York This is not to say that women didn't and don't work in these advocacy and ballot measure campaigns, but when it comes to political maneuvering, men often still push out front. Look at Congress: still only 16 percent of members are women. Women are still more likely to be doing grunt work than thinking up the strategies.

The strategy that came from these male lawyers has proved not only successful legally -- with lots more to come -- but also tremendously appealing to mainstream straight folks. A couple of decades of work now has yielded majorities believing something like "oh -- they want to live the way we claim to think is good. They love each other. They're really not so different from us after all. It's only fair ...."

This has the advantage of being true, always good in a campaign message. The lawyers have put us in a position to erase many of our differences from straight folks.

But I still find it incongruous and maybe a little sad that it is gay men and lawyers who are leading us beyond the multiple injuries of exclusion and social derision. It took gender-bending fags and uncompromising feminist dykes to break the closet. But once our existence was shoved out into the open, it was some of those who needed liberation least who set the direction for trying to get it -- and are winning something the masses of gay folks seldom dreamed of.

All very curious ...

Photo of Lorri L. Jean and Gina Calvelli demonstrating for marriage equality. REUTERS/Phil McCarten

Warming Wednesdays: a lot depends on how we frame it

Since Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, he's had reason to think a lot about the politics of climate science. The British university was the place where climate change skeptics hacked scientists' emails and charged, inaccurately, that data was being hidden or fabricated. If you tend to believe in science and get your information from sources that also do, this story was just the usual wackdoodle background noise. This was a very big deal if you got your news from places like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal where Upton Sinclair's theorem holds sway:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Hulme has offered a thoughtful typology at the Australian online publication, The Conversation of six ways that climate change can be framed and their implications. I found this very much worth thinking about.

Framing climate change as market failure draws attention to a particular set of policy interventions: those which seek to “correct” the market by introducing pricing mechanisms for greenhouse gases.

Climate change when framed as a “manufactured risk” focuses on the inadvertent downsides of our ubiquitous fossil-energy based technologies. It lends itself to a policy agenda which promotes technology innovation as the solution to climate change.

Radically different, however, is the frame of global injustice. Here, climate change is presented as the result of historical and structural inequalities in access to wealth and power and hence unequal life chances. Climate change is all about the rich and privileged exploiting the poor and disadvantaged. Any solutions to climate change that fail to tackle that underlying “fact” are doomed to fail.

A related frame, but one with a different emphasis, is climate change as the result of overconsumption: too many (rich) people consuming too many (material) things. If this is the case then policy interventions need to be much more radical than simply putting a price on carbon or promoting new clean energy technologies. The focus should be on dematerialising economies or else on promoting fertility management.

A fifth frame would offer climate change as being mostly natural. Human influences on the global climate system can only be small relative to nature and so the emphasis should be less on carbon and energy policy and more about adaptation: enabling societies to cope with climate hazards irrespective of cause.

Last is the frame of planetary “tipping points” which has arisen since 2005. Climate change carries with it the attendant dangers of pushing the planetary system into radically different states. Such “tipping points” may be reached well before carbon markets, clean energy or economic de-growth will be attained and so new large-scale climate intervention technologies – a so-called Plan B – need to be developed and put on stand-by.

My emphasis added to pull out Hulme's bullet points.

As a person of leftist inclinations, I gravitate naturally to “manufactured risk” with a heavy dose of global injustice. I tend to think we humans shouldn't kick ourselves for striving to make life less brutish and short through our technological prowess, though we've done a damn poor job of ensuring that everyone gets their share of our improved well-being. I therefore conclude that we should use our very powerful brains to solve and mitigate the mess we're making of the planet, and spread the benefits more fairly. It's hard for me to take market failure seriously; tinkering at the edges of a rapacious capitalism isn't likely to help much. This perspective seems however to be the best our current political systems can accommodate; since I'm sure the dangers are serious, I'll take what I can get and push for more.

But I know mine is not the only way to look at climate change -- the overconsumption paradigm places the human animal in our rightful place, as a bumptious burden the rest of planet's life forms. The mostly natural frame seems too passive to me -- but I can imagine smart well-balanced people who can adopt it without despair. The planetary “tipping points” frame would require me to pretend to understand half-understood data that I know I don't master; so it can scare me, but it's not something that makes sense for me to dwell within. If we are hitting a terrible tipping point, we'll know when we crash across it. Meanwhile, we need to do what we can within the other paradigms -- doing what we can makes us the good human animals we are.

Any reader want to play? Which of Hulme's frames do you use to think about climate change? Or do you use something else? Can you bear to think about it at all?

64

Several friends have kindly reminded me on Facebook that I have a birthday today. That's what I get for sharing in a profile. I'll share some ancient history here: I first saw this film in 1968 -- on mescaline. Those were the days. Nowadays (and for the last 40 years or so) I can't imagine having the energy to trip in a theater.

The Yellow Submarine still sails in San Francisco in a mural on a public restroom near Ocean Beach.

French elites have it wrong this time

They were right about Iraq in 2003, but their current complaints are off target.

Joe Nocera admirably sums up what went right in the fizzling Strauss-Kahn rape case.

For the life of me, though, I can’t see what [District Attorney Cyrus R.] Vance did wrong. Quite the contrary. The woman alleged rape, for crying out loud, which was backed up by physical (and other) evidence. She had no criminal record. Her employer vouched for her. The quick decision to indict made a lot of sense, both for legal and practical reasons. Then, as the victim’s credibility crumbled, Vance didn’t try to pretend that he still had a slam dunk, something far too many prosecutors do. He acknowledged the problems.

[French intellectual blowhard Bernard-Henri] Lévy, himself a member of the French elite, seems particularly incensed that Vance wouldn’t automatically give Strauss-Kahn a pass, given his extraordinary social status. Especially since his accuser had no status at all.

But that is exactly why Vance should be applauded: a woman with no power made a credible accusation against a man with enormous power. He acted without fear or favor. To have done otherwise would have been to violate everything we believe in this country about no one being above the law.

The amazing thing about this case is that Vance apparently did what we expect a responsible prosecutor to do -- and that he will probably be punished for scrupulously following the law he is sworn to uphold. His job is elective. Doing his job embarrassed the kind of people that pay for campaigns and vote in elections. He's probably in trouble.

Was he supposed to ignore a credible accusation of rape? Was he supposed to help the woman make up stuff in order to save his own ass? Or to conceal information from the investigation?

Vance deserves credit, not blame. It wasn't his job to help a French political party win a presidential election. (This is certainly part of the French distress over the case, in addition to their racial and economic elitism.) It was Vance's job to follow up on a plausible suspicion that a crime had been committed. He did.

Maybe he's been watching too many TV dramatic heroes who end up doing the right thing after much soul searching, instead of caving to "reality." Maybe we all should be taking those values more to heart.

Signs of summer in San Francisco

It must be summer, because the San Francisco Mime Troupe launched its annual show in Dolores Park this weekend. Fortunately, it was the rare July weekend when sun won out over fog.

Best news first: 2012 - The Musical! is the most entertaining show I've seen by the company in years. It weaves together leftist disappointment with the Obama presidency, apocalyptic Mayan prophecies, the terror of ecological and social collapse and familiar political and social villains in a happy, nutty, potpourri. If you are in the Bay Area this summer, catch it. Free shows will continue in the parks through Labor Day and then the troupe goes on the road for theatre performances.


In deference to the troupe's request, I took no photos of the actual performance. I did however catch this shot of a couple of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence offering an "invocation" before the play. They provided the only bad moment of the afternoon -- their brief appearance flunked drollery; instead we got self-centered, dumb and dull. I was surprised.


If I sometimes greet the arrival of Mime Troupe season with some dismay, it's because some years I've put in too many hours at the shows working the ready-made crowd in support of good causes. That's not something I'm doing this year, but lots of good people were on the job. This woman was registering voters and collecting signatures for a state level proposition to force corporate donors to disclose their political contributions. The idea is important. No company that spends a lot on advertising wants its brand undermined by revelations about which politicians it is buying. Let's hope we can win this one.


As he has been for years, Dan Bechler was on hand for Single Payer Now. If we ever get to a sensible "medicare for all" system in California, Dan will deserve big props. Our local reps already know what's good for them on these votes. Single payer has gotten through the legislature twice, but not past any governor yet. It is not as far away as we might sometimes think however.


This union member was collecting signatures for an initiative to tax oil production in the state. If it makes the ballot, oil companies will pour out money like water to try to drown it. Last time we voted on this, they prevailed.


Only two of San Francisco's dozens of mayoral candidates had a presence. The election is this fall. Perennial Green candidate Terry Baum had an active crew.


Meanwhile a supporter of contender Supervisor John Avalos patiently hunted for registered San Francisco voters who could sign her guy's petitions. Candidates save money and build support by collecting signatures instead of just paying a fee to get on the ballot. She reported that a high proportion of the crowd came from outside the city and consequently weren't her target.


As we left the performance, we came across this fellow who had been collecting signatures by going door to door for a measure to overturn a private development plan for the Park Merced housing complex. Tenants say the project is just a scam to evade rent controls and replace elderly tenants. He might have done better at the Mime Troupe, though he would have had to work to explain to most San Franciscans where the remote oceanside development is located.

Yup -- it's summer. The Mime Troupe is out and so are the folks who practice democratic action on the streets and in the parks. A good time was had by many.

The state of the nation on our 235th birthday

H/t Balloon Juice -- Anne Laurie credits "Tony Auth via GoComics.com."

Independence Day treats

Now there's a celebratory notion.


I can't remember where I was offered these mints, but I can guess in what month.

Hope everyone enjoys the holiday!

Patriotism

I'm not good at patriotism -- at least I don't think I am.

Partly it's the word; somehow I just don't warm to the -ism of the fathers. I mean, I liked my father, but I sure didn't idolize him. He was just a guy, doing his best. I don't turn instinctively to fathers for enlightenment.

Partly it's the equation of "patriotism" with "nationalism." I really love the land in the country I was born in. But I'm more a "Song of Peace" (set to Sibelius' Finlandia in the United Methodist hymn) sort of person:

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Here, I'll say it: I just can't get my mind around the notion that we're so exceptional.

Oh yes, maybe we were once. Reading 19th and early 20th century European history, as I'm doing a lot these days, I'm reminded we sloughed off the divine right of kings as a governing philosophy well in advance of a lot of people. At the turn of the last century, only one hundred years ago, in much of the developed world, kings still mattered. What a thought! I've written recently about how Eric Foner's book on Lincoln and slavery helped me understand what a radical innovation the idea of constitutional, democratic government under law once seemed. This country was founded in blood and theft, but it was once also new, exciting, innovative, maybe even exceptional.

Thanks to Ian Reifowitz at History Network News, I recently became aware that President Obama has a written children's book exploring patriotism: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters. Reifowitz compares this volume to America: A Patriotic Primer published in 2002 by Lynne Cheney. (Yes -- that's the Dick's wife. She's also a conservative activist in her own right and a former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Reifowitz drew this conclusion:

Ultimately, Cheney wants to strengthen the bond between Americans and their country as an institution. Obama wants to do this as well, but he also seeks to strengthen the ties that bind Americans to one another. One emphasizes national greatness, the other national unity. This distinction reflects the essential difference between the conservative and liberal understanding of Americanness.

No surprise: I'm a liberal. What I like about this country is how many different people have, fractiously and imperfectly, struggled to make it better. Over time, we've advanced toward a more equal and more caring society that better balances individual fulfillment and collective well-being. The history of this country is mostly an "it gets better" story, at least so far.

Outside of that history of democratic struggle, I don't see much but an inflated military, mutilated mined hills, poisoned water, and too many strip malls and Walmarts. But heroic people have made that long struggle. I have to remember that.

The painting in the photo, "The Price of War," is hanging in a window on Valencia Street in San Francisco. Read artist Ruben Morancy's explanation here.

Some beers from Northern California and Oregon

This amber brew from the Dunsmuir Brewery Works was pretty good. Unfortunately, the accompanying food -- this seems more a restaurant than a true brewery -- was undistinguished and over-priced.


The Black Bear Diner in Klamath Falls wanted to serve me a Budweiser, so I settled for this from a large Portland brewer. Not bad for a blonde beer.


This Ninkasi IPA from Eugene Oregon was superb. Unexpectedly, the Spinner's Seafood, Steak and Chop House in Gold Beach where I encountered it is a high quality restaurant, serving fresh fish and even decent veggies.


This Shastafarian Porter from the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company in Weed, CA was uninteresting -- surprisingly tasteless. But you gotta love what they are doing with the bottle caps. Apparently the big manufacturers who supply these things didn't like their message; then the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms got into the disapproving act. But since the brewery rallied citizen support -- and they are after all located in the town of Weed -- WEED FOUGHT THE LAW AND WEED WON!

Cory Maye to be released from prison

In 2001, this man, Cory Maye of Prentiss, Mississippi, put his 18 month old daughter to bed and sat down to watch TV. When an armed SWAT team began to break down his door, he fired three bullets from the gun he kept for self-defense. The cop in the lead, the Chief of Police's son, fell dead. He was white; as you can see, Maye was not.

Neither Maye nor his girlfriend were the people the cops were looking for. They'd broken down the wrong door. But a white cop had died and Maye was charged with capital murder. Like a lot of poor people, he was not well served by the lawyer his family managed to hire and in 2004 was convicted and sentenced to die.

The blogger and journalist Radley Balko spread the story of the innocent man on death row for defending his home across the internet. Many of us wrote about the case. Legal maneuvers by pro-bono lawyers continued. Today Balko reports that Maye has been allowed to plead to the crime he did commit -- manslaughter -- and will be released after credit for the ten years he has served. Every so often, some justice is done. Balko deserves a lot of credit for creating the buzz that made this possible.

Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, and a local alternative to gesture politics

In the wake of the legalization of gay marriage in New York, we are having an Andrew Cuomo boomlet. Could the New York governor, whose deft leadership of that fight stands in such contrast to our pleasant but too-reserved President, be the great Democratic hope of 2016? Apparently not, if we are to believe Eric Alterman at the Nation. In his home state, Cuomo is known for tax breaks for the rich and cuts in vital services for the poor and middle class; he's just another governor in the current Republican mode, regardless of his nominal party affiliation.

National pundits should consult San Franciscans about this sort of political slight of hand. We've just survived seven years of a mayor, Gavin Newsom, whose sole achievement was grasping the symbolic torch for gay equality in 2004, allowing the city to issue marriage licenses while the state still banned same-sex marriage. This blowhard gesture was swept away by the courts and Californians remain in a long tough slog that will eventually overcome opposition to legal equality for LGBT people. But Newsom's gesture disarmed opposition to him from more gullible liberals and gave him a reputation that survived a subsequent administration that was

• mean -- grounded in beating up on homeless people;

• petulant -- the guy wouldn't talk to a critical Board of Supervisors, the city's legislative body;

• and disengaged -- Newsom was too busy bedding his political consultant's wife and going to alcohol rehab to attend to the city.

Naturally he thought this record of sterling accomplishment qualified him to be governor of the state until blown away by our growling but tough retread, Jerry Brown. Newsom has ended (and I do hope this is the end for this empty suit) in the meaningless Lt. Governor slot in Sacramento, pulled in by the Democratic sweep last November.

But Newsom's still a "liberal" in good standing for dummies, credited with support for gay rights. Let's make sure we don't give Andrew Cuomo this kind of pass. We need Democrats who use political power to level the playing field for the majority, not to pamper their rich backers. Gestures shouldn't cut it.

***


Meanwhile, Newsom's welcome departure to a dusty attic leaves San Francisco with an interesting mayor's race, as the New York Times has gotten around to noticing. Unfortunately, like most of the media, the newspaper is fixated on an incumbent acting mayor who is not going to run and on the big money ConservaDem candidates.

The article barely mention the real progressive in the race, Supervisor John Avalos, who goes into this wide open election with the strong support of most of the city's tenant and progressive base -- a solid 30 percent. How the race plays out will be interesting: it's genuinely hard to predict, we have good campaign finance provisions that help equalize the playing field, and we vote using a ranked choice system, so our lesser evil picks can matter. I'm doing all I can to help this tough progressive win; it would be a novel experience to have a mayor I could believe in.

Friday cat blogging: Portland

My friend Sandra introduced me to two fabulous cats this week in Portland. (All cats are fabulous of course, but I digress.)


She's visiting Sampson's home this week. She has a sore paw. Sampson is oblivious. Like all cats, he has his own agenda.


Stanton lives with Sandra and expects to be combed. He's a Maine Coon cat.


He can look fierce, but he's actually a sweetie.