Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

The Times article points out that legal and constitutional scholars are pretty much of the view that this is mostly a bunch of hot air. But that doesn’t seem to be deterring state lawmakers from shouting a lot. It turns out there’s something called The Patrick Henry caucus in the Utah legislature which, according to The Times, “formed last year and led the assault on federal legal barricades in the session that ended Thursday.” There’s also something called The Tenth Amendment Center, which prides itself on pushing this sort of thing, as if Article 6 of the Constitution didn’t exist. It’s worth a quick look just to see how bizarrely some of this stuff can be dressed up.

We’ve been here before, of course, as we noted in our comment on the secessionists last summer. And, once again, it’s useful to drag out that interesting data from The Tax Foundation on which states are Givers and which states are Takers. Givers, remember, are states whose federal tax payments exceed money received back from the federal government; Takers are states who get back more in federal taxes than they pay. This is actually a useful way to look at the world, because, as is often the case, when you follow the money (or lack of it), a different story emerges. We might think of giver states as, say, Parents, and taker states as, say, Deadbeat Offspring. All sorts of potentially colourful labels emerge, but we’ll leave it at that.

Because, once again, you have to wonder if anyone knows anything anymore. Let’s take that Patrick Henry group in Utah, who probably think they’re choosing between Liberty or Death. If we check the good old Tax Foundation data for 2005 (the most recent year for which they present data), it turns out that Utah is—yes!—a taker, getting back $1.07 in federal spending for every $1 in federal taxes paid. So, Utah—a deadbeat state. South Dakota–ditto. South Dakota gets back a whopping $1.53 for every $1 paid in federal taxes. That’s pretty impressive. Wyoming? Check—it gets back $1.11 for every $1 paid. Oklahoma—a state with lots of oil? Hey, look, Oklahoma gets back $1.36 for every $1 paid.

Most of this, according to The Times, is driven by conservative ideology:

“There’s a tsunami of interest in states’ rights and resistance to an overbearing federal government; that’s what all these measures indicate,” said Gary Marbut, the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, which led the drive last year for one of the first “firearms freedoms,” laws like the ones signed last week in South Dakota and Wyoming.

In most cases, conservative anxiety over federal authority is fueling the impulse, with the Tea Party movement or its members in the backdrop or forefront. Mr. Herrod in Utah said that he had spoken at Tea Party rallies, for example, but that his efforts, and those of the Patrick Henry Caucus, were not directly connected to the Tea Partiers.

But not all:

And in some cases, according to the Tenth Amendment Center, the politics of states’ rights are veering left. Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, for example — none of them known as conservative bastions — are considering bills that would authorize, or require, governors to recall or take control of National Guard troops, asserting that federal calls to active duty have exceeded federal authority.

Actually, this is potentially interesting—Vermont is a taker ($1.08), but Wisconsin is one of the 17 (yes, only 17) giver sates (at $0.86), and Rhode Island gets back exactly as much as it pays out. And Montana? Right, Montana gets back $1.47 for every buck it gives to the dreaded and overbearing federal government.

Really, the solution to this is pretty simple. Just pass a Constitutional Amendment that would prohibit states from receiving more in federal disbursements than it pays in federal taxes. If residents of Montana and Utah and the Old South (where secession talk has been cropping up more frequently) want to moan about the overbearance of the federal government, they should man up and agree not to take any more money from the federal government than they pay in. Gee, I wonder how that will turn out. Otherwise, let’s just laugh at them for being the hypocritical deadbeats that they are, and if we live in a Giver state, start leaning on our representatives about why we continue to subsidize these states whose legislatures clearly don’t appreciate it.

Part 2 of 2. (Read part 1…)

It’s Time to Separate Church and State, Once and for All

If you recall, anti-Catholic prejudice was once a problem for Catholic politicians in the US. John F. Kennedy went so far as to address the issue head-on in his 1960 campaign – probably because he didn’t feel he had much choice. Here’s what he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12 of that year:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.

He went on to assert his respect for the separation of church and state and vowed that Catholic officials would not dictate policy to him. As noted in part 1, the times, they have a-changed.

In 1960 it was “anti-Catholic prejudice.” In 2010 it’s “empirical evidence of improper behavior by the Roman Catholic Church.” And it’s time it stopped. Cold.

If I were a Congressman, I’d introduce a bill yesterday stripping all US operations of the Roman Catholic Church of their tax-exempt status. At the press conference announcing the move I’d also say something along these lines: “I won’t be running for re-election – what could possibly be the point? However, between now and the day I leave office, I’m going to raise hell 24/7/4ever over this issue. I know that I’ll probably never get my bill into a committee hearing, let alone get it out of committee, but if Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens can draw as much attention as they have, I feel certain that I, as a sitting member of the United States Congress, can get booked on every talk show in America. Rest assured, my fellow citizens, this is going to make for some epic television.”

Of course, I’m not Congressional material. If you want to know what Congressional material is, recognize that representatives of a foreign theocracy are inside Congress shaping policy … and not a damned one of the spineless sacred whores on Capitol Hill has uttered a fucking syllable in protest.

Did I miss something?

“America is a Christian nation.” It certainly is. Sort of. It’s a Christian nation in the same way that it’s a white nation, a heterosexual nation, a right-handed nation and a nation with brown hair. That is, “Christian” is the majority position. Boy howdy, is it the majority position, with a majority of the population saying it believes angels and demons are active in the world and 80% saying they believe in miracles. Hell, even our atheists and agnostics sound a little religious. A snapshot of American religious affiliation that I offered up back in 2007 is instructive:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

There’s no denying that we’re a Christian culture – in many ways, that’s a simple math question and it’s about as controversial as noting that whites of European descent are the racial majority. But Christian culture and Christian government aren’t the same thing, and the United States is most emphatically not a Christian state. Not yet, anyway.

Reflecting back on my “if I were a Congressman” fantasy from above, I suppose I’d spend the remainder of my time in office asking the audiences of those TV shows to think about a proposition: to wit, while most Americans are Christian, “Christian” describes a lot of different things and not one unitary thing. Dr. Sid’s “modest proposal” from a couple of months back was more about provoking than persuading, but at its core there’s an important question. If you’re a Christian, you may want to see a more Christian government. But if you’re a Baptist, do you want to see a more Catholic government? If you’re Catholic, how are you going to react when the Texas School Board is co-opted by Mormons and all of a sudden the nation’s textbooks are filled with lessons that transform the hallucinations visions of The Prophets into stone cold fact? If you’re a member of the Foursquare Bible Congregation in Smallpond, Alabama, you probably agree with the Stupakers on abortion, but how do you feel about the idea that your duly elected representatives are keeping counsel with that German eunuch in the pointy hat?

Think about it, Christian supermajority. Think hard.

Crawling Toward a More Rational Future

Evidence suggests that there may be hope in the long run.

From USA Today:

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

From FutureMajority:

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) also found that a movement towards claiming no religious affiliation is “a general trend among younger white American.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported “people not affiliated with any particular religion stand out for their relative youth compared with other religious traditions.”
…
The National Journal profiles a growing faction of non-religious youth – the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). Their motto is “Mobilizing Students for a New Enlightenment.” The SSA’s chapters have grown from 42 in 2003 to 129 this year and they currently have a network of over 14,000 students. Their mission is “to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics.”

From AlterNet:

We are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

So perhaps in the 2020s and beyond the Bible-thumping Jesus Jihadi yahoo will be a thing of the past – or at least, his inexplicable influence on the course of government will be. But that’s of little comfort today. Just because the good guys win the war eventually doesn’t mean they don’t lose battles along the way, and lost battles mean casualties, measured in lasting damage to real human lives. Even if it’s just ten years until we’re free of these crusaders, understand that a lot of mischief can be done in a decade. If I might put it in more meaningful terms, remember how long George Bush was in office? Add two years to that.

Not that it will do any good, but your Senators and representatives need to hear from you that it is not acceptable for the Catholic Bishops to be meddling in the people’s business. Separation of church and state. Today.

When Jesus attacks, the proper course of action is to smack him in the nose with a crowbar. It says so, right there in the Constitution.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Reactions have been all over the place, but there’s been strong suspicion of the findings from both “liberal” and “conservative” corners (especially conservative, as you’d expect). Which is good. These kinds of results may tell us something important, but we’re always advised to proceed cautiously and critically, especially when the findings of science are reported in the popular media. And double-dog especially when that popular media outlet is FOX or  CNN. Understand – their criteria for reporting on research (there are thousands of studies published each month, and if you’re not an academic you hear about maybe three of them) have nothing to do with the social value of the research itself and everything to do with whether or not they think you might click on the link (and perhaps even on one of the ads on the page).

So, the critical reader should automatically pause and consider the following with respect to this story:

• Who is the researcher? What’s his expertise? Is he a pure academic or does he receive funding from sources with an axe to grind? Has his past research been unduly driven by concerns that appear, to the informed observer, to be more ideological than scientific? And so on.
• Is the story written by a reporter who understands science and research and statistics? (The answer here is usually no.) If not, then we need to find the actual study and see what it really says.
• Further, has the reporter bothered to ask him or herself any of the questions in that first bullet point? (Again, the answer is almost always no.) If not, what does it mean for the story (and the reader’s understanding of it) that the reporter can’t tell the difference between a Nobel laureate and a corporate PR hack?
• In this case, the story addresses IQ, but what does this really tell us? IQ is not a comprehensive measure of intelligence. It tells us some things (and these are important things) but it comes nowhere near telling us everything that we’d want to know when considering the “intelligence” of an individual or population.
• The definitions used here are beyond useless. “Conservative” and “liberal” are as artificial as labels come, for starters (the Political Compass test illustrates a small part of the problem), and when you add in the fact that the study probably relied on self-identification (hardly the most objective measure in the world) there is every reason to be cautious about the very way in which the two groups were constructed. What would it mean for the results if we learned that a good number of the liberals were gun owners or that a significant portion of the conservative group had serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s pro-torture activities?

This last point is crucial, because while self-report in studies like this tends to problematic under the best of circumstances, your margin for error explodes when the researchers and the participants don’t agree on the terminology.

The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines “liberal” in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. It does not look at other factors that play into American political beliefs, such as abortion, gun control and gay rights.

“Liberals are more likely to be concerned about total strangers; conservatives are likely to be concerned with people they associate with,” he said.

Now, is that what you think of when someone asks you if you’re conservative or liberal? Do a less educated and a more educated subject define those terms for themselves in the same way? Even if you explain what you mean by the term, do they each process it and respond the same way (after all, regardless of whether they’re conservative, liberal, libertarian, green or fascist, a less educated respondent is less likely to have the sophistication needed to parse a definition that’s not really like any they’ve encountered before).

Not to belabor the point, but we’re talking to Americans here, and we’re trying to exclude abortion, gun control and gay rights from how these respondents evaluate whether they’re conservative or liberal? Seriously? I’d argue that for huge portions of the population, abortion, gun control and gay rights are what the words liberal and conservative mean.

Hopefully by now it’s clear that I have significant reservations about the actual study and that I don’t trust the CNN story to get the story right, regardless of the actual findings of the study or the actual objective reality that the study may or may not have accurately described. As it turns out, my hesitation may be justified.

As I snooped around some other commentary on the study, I came across further reason for skepticism (interestingly enough, from an apparently “liberal” source that was linked by another liberal source). Dr. PZ Myers, a bio professor in the Minnesota system, stomps a mudhole in Kanazawa and walks it dry.

And then look at the source: Satoshi Kanazawa, the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology, the professional fantasist of Psychology Today. He’s like the poster boy for the stupidity and groundlessness of freakishly fact-free evolutionary psychology. Just ignore anything with Kanazawa’s name on it.

By all means, click on the links Myers embeds in that passage at his site, because he’s just getting warmed up. I don’t know much about Myers as a source himself, but he’s an academic, he’s a self-described agnostic and he links to the Richard Dawkins network (Dawkins being the Great Liberal Evolutionist Atheist Satan from Hell), so we might at least view his assault on Kanazawa as worth exploring, being as neither is exactly coming off as a conservative apologist.

So, to the question: are liberals smarter than conservatives (or vice versa)? Somewhere out there is an answer, and I for one would love to know what it is. I have my suspicions, based on my own experiences, but those suspicions are hardly science. If I’m right, I’d welcome the support of hard research, and if I’m wrong I’d like to know so I can reevaluate and get my opinions more in line with the facts. Hopefully you feel the same way.

In order to find that answer, though, we’re going to need a better study than Kanazawa’s (which seems horribly flawed, although I won’t know for sure just how much so until I see the actual study). Here’s what I think a more conclusive study would look like.

• For starters, it would need a more comprehensive measure of intelligence. IQ is a piece of the puzzle, but we’d also want to factor in creativity, associative thinking, critical thinking and problem solving. We’d like to be clear about the importance of memory vs. processing power in the equation, and before we get started we’ll want to decide whether to integrate newer concerns like “social intelligence” or whether social skills are better classified as something other than intelligence.
• We’ll want a much better handle on that whole conservative vs. liberal quagmire. Doing the study so as to render a verdict on those two categories is useless. We’d be better served by evaluating intelligence according to which political party people identify with, and even this would be problematic (what do you do with all those independents who are independent for wildly divergent reasons, for instance). I don’t have a satisfying frame in mind right now, but unless we can get to some meaningful definitions about political beliefs (definitions that make sense to the participants as well as the researchers) we’re wasting our time and money.
• It needs to be longitudinal and will ideally have mechanisms for evaluating how perspectives shift over time. More to the point, it would be important to know what factors shift those positions. Does education make you more X? If so, are there certain kinds of education that do so?
• It would be nice to know how these factors vary according to demographic variables. Are you more prone to the liberalizing effects of education if you’re working class from the South than if you’re middle class from the Upper Midwest?
• This study needs to be funded by a non-partisan entity of some sort and should be conducted by researchers with no particular ideological master. Under no circumstances should it receive funds from corporate sources. Whether there’s any actual biasing effect or not (and by the way, there is – research most often serves the interests of those writing the check), the value of such a study would be badly kneecapped by the appearance that its results were bought. It goes without saying that the study should be headed by a person or team with a track record that makes clear their commitment to academic rigor and uncompromising ethics.
• Methodologically, the study should employ both quantitative and qualitative instruments. You’ll obviously need the quant to generate a broad statistical basis, but this should be augmented by interview and observation phases to add depth and texture to the findings.
• For fun, it would be nice if there were an intercultural component. Is what we see happening in the US like what happens in other countries? If not, how are we different and what factors seem to account for the variance?

There are probably more issues we’d want to see addressed, but these represent at least a decent foundation for discussion. If we conduct such a study, and if it produces results similar to those reported by Kanazawa, then we’ll have something interesting to factor into our policy making.

One note, though. Let me call your attention to this passage from the CNN story:

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say.

This is among the most ludicrous statements I’ve heard in some time. Assume we were to find that intelligence between two political groups varied by as much as 10 points, and assume that these findings were significant at the .95 level (and assume for the heck of it that the qualitative segments of the study supported the findings and provided richer insights into them) – you’re going to suggest that an overall intelligence difference of 10%, considered across a population of 300 million, isn’t stunning? I beg to differ. A variance of that magnitude would be positively staggering.

A difference of 10% between individuals is the difference between an A and a B, a B and a C. It’s the difference, in many cases, between the guy you want operating on your child and a guy you wouldn’t let anywhere near your child. In a financial advisor it could be the difference between comfort and borderline insolvency. If you’d like your teenager to go to the best school possible, it’s the difference between a highly ranked national university and a good, but not spectacular state system school.

What if half the population suddenly became 10% smarter? When you think about highly competitive business deals, for instance, deals where one company gets the contract by a hair’s breadth, would you take a 10% boost?

Make no mistake, the degree of difference we’re talking about here, even if it’s at the low end of the variance instead of the high end, is massively significant when we’re talking about the collective intelligence of a society the size of the United States.

In the end, I don’t know what, if anything, we really learn from Kanazawa’s study. But it’s an interesting question, and knowing the actual answer could do us a lot of good. It’s just a shame that we can’t count on our intrepid press to get the damned story right, if and when it ever happens.

If Watts were correct, this would be a major problem. If the entire US temperature record was unreliable, then conclusions drawn from the temperature record could also be similarly flawed. At a minimum, the scientific papers using the temperature record would have to be revisited. So a thorough investigation of Watts’ conclusion by scientists was warranted. And now a new peer-reviewed paper by scientists at the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) have analyzed the temperature record and found that Watts’ conclusion of a flawed temperature record runs contrary to the actual data.

Let’s start by looking a little closer at how Watts’ reached his conclusion that the US temperature data was unreliable.

According to Watt’s white paper, 89% of the surveyed temperature stations in the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) do not meet new NOAA standards for proximity to heat sources, location away from shade and the crest of hills, and so on. Watts chose a station in Bainbridge, Georgia, as his main example (pictured at right). It shows that the thermometer is located about 9 feet from an air conditioning unit and in the shade rather than the desired 100 meters from any heat sources. Furthermore, the original thermometer enclosure can be seen just above “14.3′” distance indicator in a much better, but still not ideal location. Given the photographic evidence, it’s impossible to claim that the new thermometer location is ideal. As Watts points out, “the new station may report higher temperatures than the old station even if ambient temperatures remain unchanged.”

But this statement presents a problem. Watts says that the new station “may” report higher temperatures. But do we know for certain that it will? Determining what effect the AC unit and shade tree have on the temperature measurement requires an actual analysis of the temperature data from the new thermometer and location. Watts’ white paper has no such analysis. In fact, in the entire paper, Watts presents a brief analysis of only a single station’s temperature record, and it’s not this station. One station out of a total 865 stations that had been surveyed at the time of the white paper’s publication, and out of a total of 1221 USHCN stations in the continental United States, is not enough to cast doubt on the entire network no matter how bad the analysis turned out.

Watts uses words like “may” and “likely” and “could have” throughout his white paper. In fact, just about the only firm conclusion that Watts reaches is that the temperature record is unreliable. But he’s based that conclusion entirely on qualitative information known as “metadata” (information that may or may not affect the accuracy of a measurement) rather than on quantitative (mathematical) data analysis. With respect to thermometer measurements, the proximity of the thermometer to a heat source like an AC unit or an electrical transformer is metadata. So is the type of thermometer used. And the time of day that the temperature measurement was taken. And the color and composition of the thermometer enclosure. And whether or not the thermometer moved from one place to another. And so on.

The problem is that metadata is a tool to determine if there might be a problem in the real data, but it takes actual data analysis to establish if there’s a problem. And analyzing a single station (Watts used Lampasas, Texas) isn’t enough to draw any statistically valid conclusions, such as reliability or unreliablility, about any other station or about the temperature monitoring network as a whole.

Watts makes a number of other mistakes in his white paper as well. One of the larger errors is that he claims, based exclusively on qualitative metadata, that “89% of the stations surveyed produce unreliable data by NOAA’s own definition (emphasis original).” It’s not possible to make that claim without a detailed mathematical analysis of the temperature record for the supposedly unreliable stations, and Watts shows no such analysis. Watts also claims that “the reported increase in temperature during the twentieth century falls well within the margin of error of the instrument record,” but doesn’t take into account the simple techniques that can be utilized to reduce error in a measurement – techniques like averaging multiple samples, correcting for known biases in equipment, filtering, homogenization of station errors, and so on.

Watts does, however, make a couple of good recommendations in his white paper. One of them is that “a pristine dataset should be produced from the best stations and then compared to the remainder of the USHCN network to quantify the total magnitude of bias.” While this is something that Watts himself probably should have done before making a blanket declaration that the US temperature record was bad, it’s still necessary to quantitatively assess the impacts of all the metadata on real temperature measurements. And that analysis is what the NCDC team undertook in their new paper titled “On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperate Record”.

What the NCDC scientists found was that, contrary to Watts’ claim of unreliability, the difference between good and poor sited thermometers was small and thus the US temperature record is reliable.

The NCDC scientists reached this conclusion by looking at thermometer stations scattered around the continental US that were in the surfacestations.org database and broke them up into two groups, one each for good and poor thermometer siting. Then the scientists calculated the monthly temperatures at each station and compared the results of the good stations to the poor sited stations, both before and after adjusting for discontinuities (aka “homogenization”) in the records. When they did this, they discovered that, contrary to what Watts expected, the unadjusted data showed that poor sites showed cooler maximum temperatures and only slightly warmer minimum temperatures, while the adjusted data showed almost no difference whatsoever. This is shown in the image below.

Furthermore, when the scientists continued their analysis, they found that the vast majority of the difference in the unadjusted temperature came not as a result of the location of the thermometer as Watts had claimed, but rather from changes in the technology used to measure temperature (liquid-in-glass thermometers vs. electronic) and from a widespread change from taking measurements in the afternoon to taking them in the morning. In fact, these two changes represented 90% of the adjustment required for good sited temperature stations and 72% of the adjustment needed for poorly sited stations.

The fact that the two transitions mentioned above represents so much of the overall adjustment disproves another claim of Watts’, namely that the homogenization process itself transferred hot temperatures from poorly sited stations to good stations. Had Watts’ claim been correct, then the time of day adjustment would account for a much smaller percentage of the total adjustment. In fact, the data shows that time of day adjustments account for less of the adjustments made to poorly sited stations (72% vs. 90% for good sited stations), suggesting that the good stations are actually correcting the poor ones.

Watts also claimed that the transition from LiG thermometers to electronic thermometers took too long to correct and wouldn’t show up in the data. The analysis in the NCDC paper shows that this claim is also incorrect. In fact, the transition occurred mostly in the mid 1980s, and the transition is clearly visible in the maximum temperature graphs of the figure below where the “adjusted maximum” crosses the red line (0.0 degrees C).

In addition, Watts’ surfacestation.org project classified USHCN temperature stations by using criteria developed for a new generation of climate monitoring stations, known as the United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN). The USCRN stations and the criteria by which they’re gauged as “good” or “poor” are newer and significantly more restrictive than the quality criteria for the USHCN. So Watts’ use of the CRN standards for USHCN stations is something of an apples/oranges comparison. However, the USCRN has 60 months of good data that can be compared to the most recent 60 months of USHCN data. The result is a statistical correlation (r²) of 0.998 and 0.996 for the maximum and minimum monthly temperatures respectively. While this is a short period of correlation, it shows that, at least recently, the USHCN data is clearly reliable. As the NCDC scientists point out,

the value of the USCRN as a benchmark for reducing the uncertainty of history observations from the USHCN and other networks will only increase with time.

The image below visually illustrates the close correlation of the USCRN (black dashes) data to the USHCN data.

Finally, Watts claimed that if the US surface temperature record was unreliable, then by extension, the entire global surface temperature record must be similarly unreliable, since “the U.S. temperature record is widely regarded as being the most reliable of the international databases.” While Watts offered no documentary support for this statement, if we accept his logic, then the results of the NCDC paper clearly show that the international records must be reliable because as the US records have been shown to be. However, it’s certainly possible that the international databases are less reliable than the US database, and so the accuracy of Watts’ original statement is questionable at best.

Ultimately, the paper’s conclusion represents a clear rejection of Watts’ conclusions:

[O]ur analysis and the earlier study by Peterson 2006 illustrate the need for data analysis in establishing the role of station exposure characteristics on temperature trends no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence of bias may be. In other words, photo and site surveys do not preclude the need for data analysis, and concerns over exposure must be evaluated in light of other changes in observation practice such as new instrumentation.

The NCDC scientists directly acknowledge Watts’ effort at documenting and categorizing the USHCN sites via the surfacestations.org project. And even though Watts’ conclusions in the Heartland Institute white paper cannot be supported, the work he organized and accomplished via a legion of volunteers at surfacestations.org represents a significant contribution to climate science and the surface temperature record in the United States. Unfortunately for Watts, he rushed his white paper to print before he had verified that his conclusions were justified by the measured data.

Ever since Watts and the Heartland Institute published Watts’ white paper, a large number of self-described climate disruption skeptics have been using the white paper as “proof” that that temperature records are riddled with errors. These so-called skeptics claim that the qualitative metadata about the surface stations make strong conclusions about the state of the global climate impossible. The new paper authored the NCDC scientists shows those claims to be wishful thinking. The temperature record clearly shows that the U.S. climate has warmed significantly over the last 130 years, and this paper serves as yet another proof of the robustness of that observation.

Other voices discussing this paper:

• Eli Rabett
• Skeptical Science
• DeSmogBlog
• Joe Romm
• Deltoid
• Wunderblog
• Robert A. Pielke Sr

Image credits:
Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres
surfacestations.org

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

However, today it appeared that Judicial Watch and number of large climate denier blogs didn’t get the memo. Judicial watch issued a press release that claimed

“This email traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA. Given the recent Climategate scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data. Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and honest manner,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Apparently, neither Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.com nor the aforementioned Steve McIntyre were aware that the emails had been released, since both deniers put up fresh posts repeating the Judicial Watch press release in the last couple of days. Furthermore, Telegraph blogger (and one of the more vocal Climategate pundits) James Delingpole also got caught by the press release, even going so far as to ask

Has Climategate moved to the US? Looks like it from this story at Watts Up With That.

After reading the emails myself, it’s clear to me that Delingpole must have come unmoored if he seriously thinks that these emails show anything even remotely like another climate non-scandal. And while neither Watts nor McIntyre have made the same claim that Delingpole made, both men did link to the Judicial Watch press release and both have been content to permit the comment threads to claim “scandal!” on their behalf.

Put simply, the emails show the GISS scientists acting professionally and in and open and transparent manner with reporters and McIntyre himself. To illustrate, let’s read some of the emails ourselves.

Gavin Schmidt wrote, in reference to responding to McIntyre:

I would suggest being more specific about what was assumed and what you will do now. The stats you had for the number of stations which had positive and negative offsets would be appropriate. You might also want to thank him for bringing this to our attention. The first because he’ll ask you anyway or work it out himself, the second since it doesn’t hurt to be gracious.

Reto Ruedy, in his email response to McIntyre:

..and I’d like to thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Ruedy also contacted the National Geographic Society to make sure that they updated their maps:

I checked what this correction does to your map and it does change the colors somewhat over parts of the US; the rest of the world is unaffected. Even the change over the US is way within the maring of error (0.5 C). So there is little need to make any changes.

Ruedy wrote several emails to Leticia Sorg of Redacao Epoca which show him patiently explaining how McIntyre’s overblown claims about the US have no impact on global climate (a point I made myself back in 2007). Sorg asked “Considering [the 1934/1998 ranking change], would it be possible to say that the planet is becoming hotter and hotter?” to which Ruedy replied

To answer your question, given the existing sampling error (.1-.2C): No – we cannot draw any conclusion about our planet from the US data (much less from the rankings you show below)

In other words, the emails show the scientists discussing their work, politely explaining things to journalists and to McIntyre, and generally being normal people.

McIntyre, however, doesn’t exactly come off nearly as well as the GISS scientists in these emails. McIntyre asked on August 4, 2007,

In addition, could you provide me with any documentaiton (additional to already published material) providing information on the calculation of GISS raw and adjusted series from USHCN versions, including relevant source code.

Ruedy points out that, as of McIntyre’s request, all the source code is already publicly available:

The software we spend close to 100% of our time in developing and which is the real basis or [sic] our work (in addition to general physics and chemistry), is openly available (giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE) to anybody.

And yet McIntyre, in a later email on August 8, 2007 (four days after his initial request and a day after Ruedy pointed out that the source code was publicly available), asks again for source code:

I would like to assess the impact of these modifications on the US and global averages for myself. I would appreciate a copy of the source code used for these calculations.

Reto Ruedy, responding to a request from a NASA press officer about McIntyre:

The blog [Climate Audit] you attached is a prime example of what gives bloggers a really bad name….

[McIntyre] omits that the global mean time series (which is generally considered the standard measure for global warming) is unaffected [by the small errors in the US record that McIntyre discovered].

He concentrates on US time series which (US covering less than 2% of the world) is so noisy and has such a large margin of error that no conclusions can be drawn from it at this point; showing the plot of annual means before and after the correction would have made the whole article a joke since the differences are barely visible.

He had to use the device of ranking the years rather than showing the plots to make any point at all. The problem with rankings is that there are large clumps of years which are equal within the margin of error and rankings within these clumps are purely accidental.

He finds it astounding that years 1934 and 1998 reversed ranks, not remembering that the corrections only affected years 2000-2006, hence that there is no possible connection there.

And McIntyre had been using a ‘bot to download every bit of data from GISS and complained when his IP was blocked (a point that McIntyre made today in the comments at climateaudit.org). Schmidt wrote on August 16, 2007

Reto and Rob Schmunk have the details. [McIntyre] was using a robot to automatically download pages that robots weren’t allowed to (because of the server demands of interactive scripts) and Rob blocked the IP. After a couple of emails back and forth, he was allowed to continue on weekends/evenings.

The webmaster’s account of McIntyre’s actions goes like this:

On about May 16, around 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., as I was getting ready to leave GISS for the night, I belatedly checked the error logs on the two web servers and discovered that there were several thousand errors in the log on Web2. On a normal day there would be about 500…..

Further investigation revealed that someone had been firing off requests to Web2 since about 2:00 that afternoon for the station data and by the time I looked into the situation, there had been at least 16,000 requests. Perhaps half of these had gone to addresses in the CGI directory, which means that activating CGI scripts to extract data, etc….

Plainly this activity was from an “automated” agent, which in rough parlance is usually called a “robot”….

As the robot on may 16 came from a generic ISP address rather than, say, an academic address and further because it’s “user-agent” tag provided no further information about who was running it, and _also_ because the GISS websites have “robots.txt” files which instruct all well-behaved web robots to stay out of the CGI directories, I cut off access to the ISP in question to the websites on Web2.

The next day I received e-mail from McIntyre asking what was up. He did not identify himself or on whose behalf he was acting….

All I know is that my first contact with him came because he was blasting umpteen thousand requests at the webservers.

I have no idea how much traffic McIntyre’s website gets, and I don’t know that I havve ever even looked at it. His tone in his e-mail was on the arrogant side, so I had no desire to prolong communication with him any longer than was necessary.

In other words, McIntyre created a ‘bot to scrape all the GISS data up and download it and did so in a way that a) interfered with the operation of GISS’ server, b) ignored instructions that the GISS webmaster had put in place to prevent overloading the servers, and c) he got annoyed when he was shut down. If that had been me (and I’ve managed websites from time to time), I’d have suspected an attack and done exactly what the webmaster did.

Columnist Mark Steyn doesn’t come off very well either, given the actual email responses McIntyre got. A Steyn column is quoted at length in a GISS email dated August 13, 2007, from Stephen Volz. The quote says in part:

So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow called Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove that there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible, and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings. (emphasis mine)

All in all, the emails show McIntyre being a jerk, the GISS scientists responding politely even to repeated, unreasonable requests from McIntyre, and the GISS scientists managing quite well under the stress of a media circus based on statistically insignificant differences that had no bearing on the actual error that McIntyre corrected.

So this isn’t Climategate 2.0 (Climategate 1.0 wasn’t Climategate either, for that matter), even though Judicial Watch and James Delingpole both seem to think so. And while Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre aren’t personally claiming that this a new Climategate, they’ve done nothing as of the writing of this post to correct the record at their websites, making any misperceptions of a scandal by readers Watts’ and McIntyre’s responsibility.

Furthermore, the content of the actual emails shows that the GISS scientists did engage McIntyre and reporters in an open and professional manner. GISS also openly and transparently permitted McIntyre to continue scraping all the data off the site after getting him to agree to do it on off-hours so as not to overload the GISS servers. Amazingly enough, GISS acted in 2007 just as Judicial Watch’s president, Tom Fitton, demanded last week.

Thanks to Eli Rabett for pointing this out, albeit indirectly.

He’s as Amer-iconic as Uncle Sam and the Lincoln Memorial. He’s bigger than life while still as down-home as hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball.

And for the past two years, he’s been dead.

As everyone knows, though, in the superhero world nobody stays dead forever. This month, Marvel Comics is bringing back the red-white-and-blue Avenger in a storyline called “Captain America Reborn.”

But that’s perhaps the best part about Captain America: He’s been reborn and reborn again, as the times dictate, ever since his creation back in 1941.

“The appeal of the character is that he stands for something. He stands for something bigger and greater,” says Marvel senior editor Tom Brevoort, who, among other titles, oversees Captain America. “He represents American values rather than the particular dogma of the day.

“Most people in the abstract agree with what he represents even if, in their own lives, they have shades of gray. Cap is black and white. He’s red, white, and blue.”

But, Brevoort says, Cap has also been a reflection of the times. “He can have meanings layered on to him as far as what he represents and what he can be made to represent,” Brevoort says. “Different people at different times do different things. Creators have wanted and needed to express different things over the years. Much of that was dealt with overtly.”

Take a look, for example, at the circumstances surrounding Cap’s birth. The world was ravaged by war. Writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby cooked up a hero who personified America in the fight against Fascism: Government scientists injected a scrawny, stereotypical weakling, Steve Rogers, with their top-secret Super Soldier serum, miraculously transforming him into the perfect human fighting machine.

The character quickly became Timely Comics’ most popular because readers could live vicariously through his exploits. After all, while Ordinary Joe might not be able to do much about the Nazis, Captain America could punch Hitler right in the friggin’ chopper. “It was less about his individual struggle than what was going on on the world stage, Brevoort says.

Cap vanished from the scene during the 1950s, but as Timely evolved into Marvel, and the so-called “Silver Age” of comics began, Cap made a comeback, resurrected from suspended animation by a group of heroes known as the Avengers. Cap joined the group and remained one of the company’s most stalwart characters right through the seventies.

By October of 1980, in issue #250, Captain America was nominated to run for president.

As the eighties wore on, though, Cap’s fortunes dipped a bit and sales began to flag. “Cap has not been as center-stage or as well-known during the last twenty years,” Brevoort says. “In many respects, that’s no different from the rise and fall of other Marvel mainstays. There will always be a flavor of the day.”

But, says Brevoort, “Cap has had long-term staying power.”

“Cap is wrapped in the flag,” Brevoort says. “His name is Captain America. He’s not Captain Freedom or Captain Liberty or anything like that. That makes him iconic.”

That status as an icon makes Captain America dramatically different than other Marvel characters, too. “Most characters are about who is in the suit, the person, not the costume or the powers,” Brevoort explains. “That was the great innovation of Marvel—it was about the characters. Cap is the one who kind of defies that. He’s more Cap than Steve Rogers. He gets his symbolic power from the suit.”

That symbolic power made Captain America wildly popular following the events of 9/11. “There was an immediate longing for Captain America in the world,” Brevoort says. “People were hungry for patriotic symbols. They wanted to be reassured that American could still kick ass.”

Since then, Cap’s presence has loomed large in the Marvel Universe. “The things Cap symbolizes are more in the forefront of the psychology of the world,” Brevoort says. It helps, too, that comics today are better written, more immediate, more worthwhile, than they used to be back when they were merely “funny books.”

“They have a relevance to the lives of our readership,” Brevoort says.

That was demonstrated perhaps most effectively in Marvel’s 2006-2007 crossover event, Civil War, which explored very real questions about personal liberty versus communal security.

In a move that shocked many fans, Captain America, the ever-faithful soldier, went rogue by disobeying government orders that required all superhumans to register their secret identities or face criminal prosecution. The leader of the pro-registration side of the argument was Cap’s close friend and colleague, Iron Man.

But perhaps that’s not so surprising to long-term fans, who can look back to the post-Watergate era and see a Captain America who gave up his identity to become “The Nomad” because he was disillusioned by the government—or, similarly, in the post-Iran-Contra era, when a disillusioned Cap gave up his identity to become “The Captain.” In both instances, he resumed his role as Captain America because, in the end, he realized that he represented the American Dream, not the American government.

In the Civil War, Cap eventually surrendered in an attempt to mitigate collateral damage. Before his subsequent trial began, he was assassinated on the steps of the courthouse. The issue, Captain America #25, was the best-selling comic of the month, and the event was reported widely in mainstream media.

“That stirred up such a visceral reaction,” Brevoort says. “Reaction was so strong nobody anticipated it. We had no idea it was going to be as big as it turned out to be. It was terrifying, confounding, exciting.”

Brevoort says the editorial team had considered many different ways to end the Civil War storyline—“Have Cap get on his motorcycle and ride off to ‘rediscover America,’” for instance—but the assassination provided the freshest ideas and boldest possibilities for good stories.

And that, says Brevoort, is the key: “When you think about things in different ways, the boundaries are limitless. Anything can happen.”

The challenge then became, “How do we run a Captain America book with no Captain America?”

In the most recent storyline, Cap’s former junior partner, Bucky Barnes, now adult, has assumed his mentor’s mantle. “Bucky is classic Marvel-style. He has a more Marvel-centric flavor, is more grounded in the Marvel tradition,” Brevoort says. “His story over the past two years has been more about the person in the suit than the suit itself. His struggle is that he’s striving to live up to the ideal. He has to put aside all this horrible stuff from his past and keep the legacy alive. He’s just gone about that in a different way. It has added a lot of dimension and character to the icon.”

In August of 2009, Marvel launched a storyline to bring Captain America back from the dead. Turns out, Cap wasn’t just shot on the courthouse steps—he was somehow forced to become “unstuck in time” by his arch-nemesis, the former Nazi villain the Red Skull. Originally slated to last five issues, “Captain America Reborn” extended to a sixth issue so that creators could “tell the story to its fullest.”

Was Cap’s resurrection ever in doubt? Most experienced comic fans would undoubtedly say “No.” After all, when D.C. killed off Superman in 1992, they only kept him dead for less than a year. At Marvel, comic book deaths and resurrections had become so cliché that the company had even instituted a rule during the last ten years that basically said, “No deaths unless they actually mean something.”

Brevoort is convinced, however, that Cap’s death was appropriately poignant and that his rebirth does mean something. And he believes there are many more Captain America stories worth telling.

“People can take him unto themselves,” Brevoort says. “They can say, ‘Cap is one of ours.’”

After all, he’s been “one of ours” for seventy years now.

Here’s to seventy more: Long live Cap!

• Item: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino says “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
• Item: GOP apologist Mary Matalin says President Bush “inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.”
• Item: Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.”

There are a number of problems with these assertions, not the least of which is that when Saudi terrorists started flying hijacked jets into large buildings on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush had been president of the United States for the better part of eight months. The lapses in memory noted above are all striking, but especially so in the case of Giuliani, who was, from September 11 until he dropped out of the presidential race on January 30, 2008 (a span of roughly 2,332 days, if my math is accurate), unable to say so much as “hello” without somehow shoehorning “9/11″ into the conversation. (He sounds even more clueless when he gets called out and tries to backtrack.) At the time of the attacks Perino was living in San Diego and working in “high-tech public affairs,” so it’s possible she missed the story. Still, when she was hired as Press Secretary, you’d think some mention of 9/11 would have been included in her orientation packet. And Matalin – wasn’t she working for Vice President Cheney at the time?

In any case, it seems safe enough to classify 9/11 as a “terrorist attack.” But the problems with this chicanery don’t end with the fall of the World Trade Center towers. A second wave of revisionism asserts that the US was a terror-free zone after 9/11. For instance:

• The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin claimed that former President Bush had “a record of zero successful attacks on America after 9/11.”
• Just last week Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour told Neil Cavuto that “one of the things the American people appreciate about the Bush administration, after Sept.11, not one time did the terrorists who tried to kill us and end our way of life, not one time were they able to attack the mainland United States again.”
• FOX News harpy Monica Crowley said on Bill O’Reilly’s show that after 9/11 Bush and Cheney had a “100% perfect track record in keeping the homeland safe from an Islamist terrorist attack.” The quote is in the video, but is not not mentioned in the linked post. (For bonus fun, note Crowley’s assertion that Obama cares more about terrorist rights than American lives. It takes some effort to make BillO look like the rational one.)

Other prominent noise engineers have been beta-testing the meme for awhile. The Dick is on record with this rhetorical misdirection: “The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years.” And, as Dave Neiwert and Blue Texan point out, Peggy Noonan was pioneering the meme in late 2008.

Of course, these claims are objectively, demonstrably false. While history teaches us to have low expectations for honesty when it comes to FOX News mouthpieces, Southern Republican governors, former Reagan speechwriters and Dick Cheney, Goodwin’s column would be an on-the-spot, no-appeal, have-security-escort-him-from-the-premises-right-now firing offense at a real newspaper.

The facts, please?

2002 attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX. In July 2002, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet opened fire at an El Al Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two people and wounding four others before being shot dead. A 2004 Justice Department report stated that Hadayet’s case had been “officially designated as an act of international terrorism.”

2006 UNC SUV attack. In March 2006, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill graduate Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV into an area of campus, striking nine pedestrians. According to reports, Taheri-azar said he acted because he wanted to “avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.” Taheri-azar also reportedly stated in a letter: “I was aiming to follow in the footsteps of one of my role models, Mohammad Atta, one of the 9/11/01 hijackers, who obtained a doctorate degree.”
…
2001 Anthrax attacks. A March 2004 State Department report on “Significant Terrorist Incidents, 1961-2003″ quotes then-Attorney General John Ashcroft saying of the letters containing anthrax mailed to various targets: “When people send anthrax through the mail to hurt people and invoke terror, it’s a terrorist act.” Five people were killed as a result of those letters in the autumn of 2001.

2002 DC-area sniper. The state of Virginia indicted Washington, D.C.-area sniper John Allen Muhammad — along with his accomplice, a minor at the time — on terrorism charges for one of the murders he committed during a three-week shooting spree across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Muhammad was convicted, sentenced to death, and subsequently executed for the crime.

Then there’s the hundreds of cases of domestic terrorism aimed at women’s health clinics during the Bush presidency.

Bob Cesca has compiled an extremely detailed record of terrorist attacks for the last three presidencies, and suffice it to say that the facts of the matter do not support the hype emanating from the right-wing noise machine.

(By the way, given how Matalin is trying to frame these “issues,” she shouldn’t have any problems with us chalking the underpants bomber and Fort Hood up to Bush’s account, since Obama “inherited” those attacks. Right?)

Bring in da Noise

So what’s really going on here? Giuliani, Matalin, Perino, Noonan, Barbour, Crowley, Cheney and Goodwin might be fork-tongued apparatchik tools of the first order, but they are not unacquainted with the facts. On the contrary – they’re very familiar with the facts. They just don’t like them. At all. So they hit the media trail with malice aforethought. They had a plan, and the plan was to lie like a cheap toupée.

Why?

“Because they’re congenital liars” isn’t enough, even if it’s true. Check their lineages. Review their résumés. Trace their connections and study the organizations that fund their activities and the activities of their allies. Remind yourself about the political and rhetorical landscape of the Bush years, when official speech came once and for all unhitched from fact, from truth, from any sense of decency or shame. These were the years when the words spewing from our official organs (and let’s include FOX News and the transcriptionists working for most other mainstream media outlets in this formulation, because the message couldn’t have been distributed without them) ceased serving any master other than desired outcome. You didn’t worry about telling the truth. You figured out what you wished the truth were, what you wanted the truth to be, then you looked at the camera, said it with a straight face, and kept on saying it no matter what. (NOTE: Technically speaking, you didn’t have to lie. It was perfectly acceptable to tell the truth so long as it worked as effectively as a lie.)

It wasn’t about the facts. It was about the narrative. And in the end, the decade of the ’00s saw the ultimate triumph of spin over journalism. From here on out, if you assume good faith on the part of our official political and “press” institutions ever again you well and truly deserve what happens to you.

No, the truth is that these people don’t go to the fridge for a beer without an agenda, and they all play their parts in the Long War Against America. The foundation for our current predicament was laid in the 1960s by players who cared more about the war than the battle and who were willing to lose a few games along the way in order to establish a long-term right-wing dynasty. If you’ve been paying attention since, oh, 1980 or so, it may have occurred to you that the brains behind the “conservative” revolution were pretty good at it, too.

So it would be sheer stupidity to assume that the recent parade of revisionism headed by Perino, Matalin and Giuliani was an accident or a coincidence. It makes infinitely more sense, given what we know about the Right’s meme machine, to see these bald-faced assertions as the leading edge of a coordinated propaganda campaign.

But to what end?

Ahhh, That Newspeak Smell

The short answer may look something like “to make Bush’s record look better,” but that’s hardly of long-term value in and of itself, even if it’s correct. He served his two terms and isn’t currently eligible to run again…although brother Jeb continues to lurk like a jackal just out of rock-throwing range. Regardless, we’d file “making Dubya look better than he really was” under “means,” not “ends.” Remember, the only goal that matters is long-term Republican hegemony. In that context, a literal reading of terrorism during the Bush years is a negative, and is something that a crafty opponent might be able to exploit. If everyone believes that Bush was hell on terrorists, on the other hand, that meme serves future electoral and policy goals. In the shorter term, it becomes a stick that can be used against Obama in 2012 (and against all Dems in this year’s mid-terms). In the long term, it strengthens the perception that Democrats are pussies and Republicans have balls that drag the ground. In combination with the “world is a scary place” meme, this makes for a powerful campaign platform.

The problem is that it’s not always easy to burnish the image of someone whose record is replete with inconvenient facts. Imagine, for instance, that you were hired by the descendants of Josef Stalin to polish his legacy. There are lots of strategies you might employ, but there is that unfortunate little genocidal maniac problem – he did, after all, kill way more people than Hitler, and you can only smear so much lipstick on a war pig. But what if, instead of working around the facts, you could change them? Perception is reality, especially in an era where words are not intended to signify actual objective facts. Turns out Stalin didn’t kill 20 million people – Lenin and Khrushchev did that. Sure, Stalin inherited a bit of a mess, but he was pure hell on the genociders while he was at the helm.

All of which is fun to contemplate, but how would you actually do it?

A Blueprint for Bushevik Revisionism

If I were going to do it, here’s the strategy I’d employ. Don’t worry if it seems like the plan may take a long time and cost a lot of money – as it turns out, my GOP backers have plenty of both.

• First off, I need a gullible audience. Too many brainiacs will kneecap the entire project. The best way to optimize my audience is to dumb down the education system as far as possible. In particular, we’ll need to shift the emphasis away from programs that foster analytical skills and self-reliance and toward programs that teach people to follow instructions. “Empowering” parents and students and insisting on “accountability” by the runaway bureaucracy that is the public school system (fueled by “overpaid” teachers and “corrupt” unions) will be extremely helpful.
• Next, I need a powerful strategy machine. This is easy. We just pour money into “think tanks” that attract bright minds and develop conservative “ideas.” Money is the most compelling attractor in the world, and we can absolutely outspend our opponents.
• Now that I have the meme-generation engine set up and the audience primed, we need a medium by which to transmit the message. Our chances are going to be slim in a society that relies on a hard-nosed press that takes its watchdog responsibilities too seriously. So we need a strong offensive against the Fourth Estate. If media institutions see themselves as guardians of the “public interest” we’ll get chewed up and spit out in little pieces; however, if media institutions are businesses, then the goal is profit, just like any other business. To that end, we’ll lean heavily on the already dominant ideology of free enterprise in promoting ownership and taxation structures that corporatize the press. We’ll also promote the (also well-established) ideology of self-determination, which makes clear that people know what’s best for themselves (no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary). Those who would suggest that the public can’t be counted on to know what’s good for it we’ll dismiss as paternalists and elitists and socialists. There’s tremendous power in telling people that they’re right. The public interest, by god, is what the public is interested in, and an appropriately undereducated populace can be counted on to ignore complex news in favor of splashy entertainment.
• Now we’re in great shape. Citizens Consumers know they’re right no matter what, so there’s no reason to respect education. They sneer along with our noisemakers at the elitists. All opinions are equal. Their self-worth is a function of what they can buy. Their attention spans are insanely short. They don’t know history nor do they see any need for it – history is only relevant insomuch as it validates their immediate purchasing decisions. Life is good.
• Once we have destroyed, though weakened educational programs and the noise media, the ability to critically evaluate data and to distinguish between information and disinformation, we begin working through a variety of channels to socialize the idea that “controversial” “issues” should be “debated.” Since all opinions are equal and we have carefully crafted and distributed veritable libraries worth of disinfo, these debates become never-ending shoutfests that lead to more and more confusion (although, ironically, increased public certainty that ill-informed opinions are fact). A couple of “ideas” that should be “debated”: ubiquitous research demonstrating that our climate is warming and that human activity is in part to blame is part of a genocidal conspiracy and millennia-old superstitions are science. Remember, the refusal to respect all opinions as equally valid is arrogant and elitist.
• At this point we can begin shaping history a little more aggressively (because “facts” are now in play and the insistence on their preeminence is de facto evidence of elitist condescension). We’ve won a number of battles over getting the “creation” “debate” into textbooks so students can “consider all the facts” and “decide for themselves.” Ditto for the climate “debate.”
• Now, time to codify the Newfacts. Having softened up the textbook beachfront through a consumer-friendly treatment of manufactured controversy, we’re ready to take the final step. We rewrite history – literally. Even if we have to include events like 9/11, we now have the freedom to structure those lessons so that it looks like Bush “inherited” the attacks from Clinton and that Bush then became a warrior hero. Over time, well, it’s like they say – the winners write the history books. And not all wars are fought with guns. Our final co-option of the official textbook version of history will be significantly aided if we can call on long, cozy family relationships with powerful publishing interests.

Someone is guaranteed to read this scenario and cry “conspiracy theory.” When that happens, you’re encouraged to take a long, hard, critical look at how the person leveling the charge fits into the process outlined above.

The truth is that this blueprint involves no speculation at all. It points to real events and draws logical conclusions about motives. For instance, certain wealthy interests pour millions and millions of dollars into conservative think tanks that work in documented ways to shape public policies that are in the best interests of their donors. No conspiracy theory is required to reach the obvious conclusions here. In fact, any credible conservative will tell you that it’s essentially American for people to invest their resources in ways that benefit their interests – that’s what the free market is.

When people speak and act they do so for reasons, and many times we can figure out what these reasons are without too much trouble. When a lot of people who are known allies say and do things that seem obviously coordinated – especially when they have a history of acting in concert toward common goals – we’re well advised to pay attention and ask ourselves what’s really going on.

Our future depends on the answers.

____________________

Thanks to those who helped me find resources for this story: Brandon Hersh at Media Matters, Matt Browner Hamlin, Julia at The Voice, Clifford Schecter, Ellen at Newshounds, Spencer Ackerman, Wendy Norris and David Neiwert.

Let’s see how our 22 articles of foresight are holding up, one at a time.

1: Researchers will develop either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS by 2020. However, it will be expensive enough that the disease will plague the poor long after it has become a non-issue for the rich and middle classes (although this is one case where political leaders might fund free treatment programs). The end of AIDS will trigger a sexual revolution that will compare to or exceed that of the 1960s and 1970s (unless another deadly sexually-transmitted disease evolves, which is certainly a possibility).

Too soon to tell on the cure, although I suppose it’s still possible. We have treatments that can extend the HIV victim’s life indefinitely and any number of research programs are working on the problem so let’s call this a maybe. As for part two of the prediction, that one’s looking pretty likely, isn’t it? Part three I stand by, no matter when the disease is finally cured.

2: The first quarter of the century will see the assassination of a professional athlete during a competition.

Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s no reason to think it unlikely. Fans still have unprecedented access to athletes in some sports (in most NBA arenas front-row fans might as well be sitting on the bench) and it seems to me like it’s only a matter of time.

3: By 2015 a major corporate executive will be assassinated. As a result, top executives of American companies will have to live with security precautions we once associated only with top political leaders.

Again, hasn’t happened yet, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Madoff, Nacchio, the Rigas, Koslowski, half the bankers on Wall Street – it’s damned near unfathomable how none of these deserving pillagers have been whacked by one of the people whose lives they ruined.

In any case, put me down for “when, not if,” even if I miss my 2015 target date.

4: By the end of the 21st Century humanity’s evolution into posthumanity will be all but complete. We will be bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, and our average life span will approach (and perhaps surpass) 100, all as a result of technology’s colonization of the flesh. These changes will result from medical advances (including pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, and gene therapy, and possibly even nanotech) and computer interface innovations designed to link our minds more closely with the boundless information resident in the Internet. We will be fundamentally different from humans born 200 years ago – CyberHumans in the year 2100 will have less in common with humanity at the turn of the Millennium than we now have with Cro-Magnon humans from 10,000 years ago.

This is a long-term, too-soon-to-tell item, but I can’t imagine that it won’t come true. The impact of technology on the human physiology and human cultures proceeds at an insane pace, with the innovation curve being nearly vertical. So let me get on record as being more confident now that I was even a decade ago.

5: Columbine-type outbursts of school violence will continue to strike large, middle-class suburban schools. Intermediate steps to increase security will turn schools into armed compounds, and will deter all but the most serious conspiracies. However, these measures will only intensify the core disease infecting these environments, and unless major steps are taken to reduce the size of these schools (and hence the anonymity factor), some student or students will eventually succeed where Harris and Klebold failed, killing hundreds of their classmates.

We haven’t had a case that surpassed Columbine (although if we broaden the scope to include universities, Virginia Tech is comparable). We’ve seen no move to address the school size issue, so on the whole I’d say that I’m on track with this one.

6: The popularity of professional baseball will continue to slip. The pace of the game, already slow by late-20th Century standards, will fail to win over younger fans, who are increasingly attuned to video-game levels of sensory stimulation, and the continuing divide between big market and small market franchises will deprive fans in all but a handful of cities of the ability to emotionally invest themselves in the hope of winning. If Major League Baseball adopts a serious salary cap and revenue sharing structure in the first decade of the century the decline of the game can be delayed. But by the year 2100 America’s Pastime will be the third or fourth most popular spectator sport in the U.S., at best.

Ratings and attendance appear to be trending downward. A lot can happen between now and 2100, of course, but for the time being this prediction looks like a strong one.

I’m not terribly happy about it, either. I’ve played a lot baseball in my day and watched a lot more, and I love the game. I hope I’m wrong and that the game thrives in the future. But there are so many obstacles. The steroid scandals hurt the credibility of the game (although baseball has bounced back from scandal before), but nothing poses quite the threat of the rich/poor gap – and I say this as a fan of the Red Sox, the second-worst offender behind the Yankees. As long as supporters of 80% of the teams know they have damned near no chance to win, the sport is going to struggle.

7: The explosion of technological innovation and development we witnessed in the 20th Century (especially during the latter half) may plateau in the second half of the 2000s. Whether the leveling off occurs sooner or later will hinge on the feasibility of nanotechnologies. If nanotech proves as viable as many researchers (and science fiction writers) currently think we could continue to see the development of technological marvels we can barely imagine, and the plateau predicted here might not occur until late in the century, or even early in the 22nd. Otherwise, the nearly vertical innovation curve we’ve seen in the past few decades should be flattening out substantially by the middle of the century.

Perhaps more than any other item on the list, this one I’m not sure about. We could see a plateau – that has been the lesson of history – but our current pace is so explosive and shows no signs of doing anything except picking up more steam, so this prediction may wind up in the Nostraslammy’s loss column when all is said and done.

8: Artificial life will evolve, although not as a result of Artificial Intelligence projects. Instead, the massive growth of computing power, coupled with the development of the global communications web, will result in a ubiquitous network of connected information, and Information Life will occur when the concentration of information reaches critical mass, in a process not unlike the spontaneous eruption of organic life billions of years ago. Two things to note: first, given the non-physical, non-organic nature of this InfoLife, humanity may well not recognize it when it happens; and second, it may not recognize humanity as a life form, either.

This hasn’t happened yet, as far as we know, but I continue to believe this the most likely path to the evolution of AI/A Life. Not everyone agrees with me, including my friend and colleague Anne Foerst, who knows a frightening amount about AI and is convinced that it must arise within an embodied context. My counter is that the path I’m theorizing is the one that’s most like the evolutionary spurts we’ve seen throughout history.

We won’t know until we know, but mark me down as still confident in this prediction.

9: Public rhetoric about the democratizing power of the information economy notwithstanding, the rich-poor gap will not close, but will instead widen. It is unlikely that anything short of a major revolution will alter the underlying structures of power and wealth, which are robustly self-perpetuating.

Damn, this prediction is looking good. Of course, this was probably the most obvious one on the list.

10: The Neo-Luddite Movement will become increasingly violent. Cultural dislocations resulting from the rapid pace of technological innovation and deployment in the next 20 years will fuel increasing levels of resistance against “progress.” The Neo-Luddites, already well established and with spiritual leaders firmly in place, will eventually feel compelled to abandon rhetoric in favor of drastic action. At first the technoresistance will focus its energies in terrorist strikes against machinery and facilities, but will eventually graduate to widespread terrorism against technologists themselves.

We have not had outbreaks of violence tied directly to any overt neo-Luddite movements, but I’d argue that a lot of the terrorist acts we’ve seen have had at their core the same reaction to technopoly that characterizes our self-identified neo-Luddites (like Kirkpatrick Sale, Mark Slouka and others). For instance, I’d file any and all terror by religious fundamentalists under this heading, including 9/11. Fundamentalisms are ultimately about the displacement of religious institutions as the final arbiter of morality and ethics in a culture (and a hefty fear of the rampaging change brought on by technical innovation). Take something like abortion (or any question of reproductive rights), for instance. Isn’t abortion a direct artifact of the world of medical technics? And what happens to our ability to intervene in affairs on the other side of the globe if we strip away our technological superiority?

I believe this neo-Luddite impulse goes even further – I think there’s a great case to be made that the violence of the Unabomber (read his manifesto) and Harris and Klebold are essentially reactions against a technological society run amok.

So I’m declaring victory on this prediction and believe that the problem is only going to get worse so long as our technology evolves more rapidly than our ethics.

11: The Red Sox and Cubs will each win a World Series.

We knocked half of this one out in just a couple of years. Can the Cubs win it all in the next 90 years? I think so. They’ve shown signs of life in the last decade and I think it’s only a matter of time before they win one despite themselves.

12: Despite the growth of the Internet and other interactive modes of entertainment, the film will survive and thrive in its current form for the foreseeable future. Prognosticators who point to the power of interactivity and suggest that traditional one-way media are doomed may be right with respect to home-based media like television, but these dynamics don’t apply to film. First, it serves as a vital locus for social interaction (it’s an ideal activity for a date, for instance); and second, our thirst for the power and mystery of storytelling is in no danger of being extinguished (the most successful videogame authors have figured this much out already).

Anybody seen Avatar? It just cleared the billion-dollar mark over the weekend. Yes, we’ve seen an explosion in gaming and home-based entertainment offerings, but the movie biz looks stronger than ever.

13: By the year 2010, major universities will notice that their graduates lack many basic skills and will begin questioning the value of computers and the Internet in higher education. Some (but not all) will conclude that educational technologies place unproductive layers of machinery between student and teacher. This will spur a renewed emphasis on traditional educational strategies and basic literacy, organizational, and critical thinking skills.

Looks like I missed this one big time, didn’t I? In fact, it seems like precisely the opposite is happening at every turn.

Which is sad, because what I describe in the prediction is much needed. Our educational complex is in the worst shape it’s ever been in, and in so many cases technology is part of the problem, not the solution.

14: The U.S. population will migrate northward during the second quarter of the century. Rising average temperatures will fuel a move to milder climes. Air conditioning will insure the comfort of indoor living, but many people place a high importance on outdoor activities, especially during the summer months.

Too soon to tell, but if our scientists are right about climate disruption (and I think they are) this looks likely.

15: During the 21st Century we may finally learn that we are not alone in the universe. If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, which seems plausible at least, humanity should soon reach the point where our technology will either allow us to find it (the Contact scenario) or encourage it to find us (the Star Trek: First Contact scenario). Hopefully our first meeting will be more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Mars Attacks!, and if we get really lucky our new friends might have technologies for scrubbing the atmosphere, purifying vast bodies of water, and curing male pattern baldness.

We haven’t found alien life yet, but we have found a lot more evidence of worlds with the conditions to sustain life (like recent discoveries concerning water on Mars). It seems like we hear a new report on alien worlds that are very Earth-like every month or two. As a result, I remain bullish on item #15.

16: The U.S. will elect its first female and minority Presidents. Sadly, they will prove as corrupt as the white males they replaced.

One down, one to go.

17: American media will become more vapid and less reliable early in the century, but the long-term impact could be positive. Between corporate ownership and the drive to maximize ratings at all costs, most major news outlets will be all but useless for the purpose of informing and educating the public by 2020 (with the exception of news services covering financial markets). Ironically, this could lead to a new age of subjective journalism. With the once-mighty press institutions either gone or discredited, and the ideologies of objective journalism along with them, a new breed of reporter may arise. This new journalist will be openly committed to advocacy, and will make his or her biases clear at the outset. The advocacy reporter would intersect perfectly with local populations whose disgust with the corruption and unresponsiveness of national (and even state) politics have driven them to seek involvement closer to home. It is possible that these dynamics could usher in a new golden age of civic engagement.

This one is a mixed bag at present. The first element is a gimme – this is worst moment for journalism since the days of Pulitzer, Hearst and Twain – and while I gave the legacy J establishment until 2020 to complete it’s full meltdown, it only seems to have needed half that much time.

The rest is unsettled. We could see the rise of a responsible, ethical advocacy press movement (see my series on the rise of “subjective” journalism), but there’s been no movement so far.

18: As hard as it is to imagine, commercial radio and the corporate music industry will suck worse in the next 25 years than it did in the last 25 years. The Internet will make it possible for unknown musicians to distribute their work, but in doing so it will massively increase the clutter of a media landscape that’s already over-saturated, making it harder for any particular artist to break through into the broad public consciousness. Since people love music, and since music will continue to serve as a gravity well for cultural and sub-cultural identification and bonding, mechanisms for sifting good from bad will become even more important. A service that fills this role will emerge on the Net. It may look like one of the currently developing music Web sites, or it may be a Web-based music journalism outlet, or it could be a type of service we haven’t imagined yet, but something will fill the void once occupied by commercial radio, and probably by 2010.

Part one of the equation – it would have been hard for me to be more right, huh? The part at the end looks like a miss – we’re still seeing all kinds of attempts at providing a reliable center, but so far most of our energies have been devoted to delivery systems (and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Spotify or something very like becomes that all-songs-available-all-the-time uber-channel for us all). The filtering problem remains. Net radio and satellite are doing a nice job in places, but the only mass national music outlets are things like godforsaken American Idol, which really is the talent show at the Fall of Rome.

19: Killer storms will increase in number and intensity. Whether set in motion by industrial pollution or resulting from natural meteorological cycle, heavy weather is getting nastier, and the trend will continue. By the midpoint of the 21st century Category 5 hurricanes will hit the U.S. fairly frequently, and the mythical F6 tornado (which almost occurred for the first time in recorded history in 1999) will become commonplace. A Category 5 will hit a major coastal urban center in the next 25 years, resulting in near-total destruction of the city’s infrastructure. During the same time frame a city in the Lower Midwest will take a direct hit from an F6 or a strong F5 and will be annihilated.

Katrina was a lot closer to that Category 5 than we like to think about, and where destructive damage is concerned let’s remember that it missed New Orleans. All that damage happened on the back side of a Cat 3.

As with item #14 above, there seems every reason to believe that this prediction will come true, although it’s too early to put it in the win column.

20: Faced with mounting damage at the hands of increasingly sophisticated hackers, corporations will begin to see “black ops” (both online and real-world) as a necessary cost of doing business. The shift from “corporate security” to all-out “Info War” footing will accelerate by 2010, when it is revealed that a major online attack against an American company was sponsored by a foreign government. The U.S. government will be strategically, tactically, and morally unprepared to deal with this crisis, and the absence of policy leadership will result in the online equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only instead of three players there will be hundreds with the ability to spark a full-blown cyberwar. Needless to say, world stock markets will react negatively. When the dust settles, world governments and corporate interests of all sizes will work together to develop safeguards against activities that threaten the global economy. The most significant result of this accord will be to transfer most real power from public to private institutions.

This one is a mixed bag at best because there’s so much we don’t know. There is plenty of evidence that large corps have been hit in the way predicted (and an analyst like Winn Schwartau would tell you that foreign governments have provided all kinds of supports for the perpetrators). The problem lies with my prediction that this would all become public knowledge – that hasn’t happened, and in large part it’s because the companies involved have every incentive to keep it a secret. Further, if said companies (perhaps even with the help of our government) have launched black ops activities, that’s something else you’re not likely to hear about in a daily White House press briefing.

So all I can really do at this point is say that I failed to account for the need for secrecy, but at the same time I suspect most of the prediction was on the money. I may never be able to point to evidence that I was right or wrong, although I’ll be watching and listening with interest.

21: Sometime before 2075 a genuinely deserving artist will win a Grammy Award. Okay, so I’m out on a limb here…

This was mostly snark, but the underlying point is more valid than ever. The Grammys are almost as big a joke as the Rock & Roll Hall of Product Sales Fame.

22: Some form of nuclear fusion will prove technically and economically viable by 2015. If fusion and nanotech both happen by 2020, the year 2101 will bear no more resemblance to 2001 than 2001 does to 2001 B.C., and the specifics of the changes to society are nearly impossible guess at.

I have another five years before I have to admit defeat, but at this stage my chances look dim. I do believe that we’ll see widespread nanotech and commercial fusion in this century, but my timetable was too optimistic.

So there you go. A few wins, a couple of losses, some too-soon-to-tells and partial successes. On the whole Nostraslammy is doing better than the grandpappy of predictification, Nostradamus himself, and that ought to count for something, right?

See you in 2020.

Along the way he spends a good deal of time defining what he means by “egalitarianism” and “elitism.” A particular concern for Henry, and one that’s critical to the discussion here, has to do with the nature of equality, which is distinguished from egalitarianism. In specifically addressing equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes, Henry believes (as do nearly all American “conservatives” that I know and have read) that we have in recent decades overemphasized the latter. That Henry was a lifelong Democrat, a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and Northeastern liberal cultural elite of the first order (arts critic for The Boston Globe and Time) adds a bit of spice to the argument.

If you’ve read the previous installments in the series (part 1, part 2, part 3), it should be clear that I see elitism, properly understood, as an important key to a more enlightened society that better serves interests of all of its citizens. This argument has perhaps taken some unexpected turns so far, and there are more twists still to come. For the moment, it’s critical that we understand the following premise: performance elitism, which is necessary to the long-term health of a society, depends on a level playing field.

The concept of “level playing field,” then, is central to our ultimate goal. What do we mean by the term and what do we not mean?

Equality of Outcomes: Bad in Principle, Impossible in Practice and Nobody Believes in it Anyway, So Why are We Talking About It?

In Principle: I’m not sure this argument even needs making to a rational audience, but it’s important to dismiss the popular straw men that the privilege elites and their allies like to trot out in order to distract us from the real issues. For the sake of form, then, here goes.

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a human society that wasn’t hierarchical in some way. So let’s begin by accepting that rigid egalitarianism doesn’t come naturally to the species. But is it a good idea? It’s easy enough to paint a pleasant utopian vision where we’re all equal, so long as we’re all equally prosperous. The problem is that it’s hard to imagine how we get there from here. If we’re to suppose a philosophy that’s grounded more or less in plausibility, then we have to account for what we know about the human animal.

The individualistic/free market/classical liberal premise regarding egalitarianism is that people are motivated to work for personal gain, and the cynical contemporary conservative/Randian corollary is that if the end result is that the guy who innovates and busts his ass has to give it all away so that the lazy guy who refuses to work can have just as much, then nobody will work. Ultimately we’ll all be equal, all right – we’ll all have nothing.

The relative truth or falsity of this belief system aside for a second, this is an awfully dim view of the human spirit. It alleges that people won’t produce for the common good and that people won’t pursue achievement for intrinsic reasons. These conclusions, taken as absolutes (since they’re usually presented that way), have never been demonstrated and are suspect on their face. However, it’s easy enough to accept that they’re valid to some lesser degree. While I might argue that most of us have enough personal pride that we’d never lay down and quit just to spite the system, and while I might also also argue that as things hypothetically got bad enough we’d all pitch in and at least try to survive, the less there is in the way of return on our effort, the less we’re likely to produce – at a macro level, at least. The curve isn’t linear, but there’s no doubt an effect.

Conclusion: Given what we know about human behavior, the radical pursuit of purely equal outcomes would fail to maximize the potential of the system. Fair enough? Good. Moving on.

In Practice: Again, I can’t imagine that this point really needs making, but: assuming a cadre of extreme radical egalitarians somehow seized control of the government (and understand that at present, the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party don’t have a representative in DC who comes anywhere close to fitting this description), how would you enact the measures needed to bring into existence a purely egalitarian society? There are too many people who oppose it, these people have too much money and power, there’s no mechanism by which this money and power could be quickly be stripped, the reformers have no apparent allies in the military or on the Supreme Court (or even the federal circuit bench), and there are simply too many ways by which the haves could circumvent the new regime.

Conclusion: Some people have more than others and it’s impossible to imagine a day in our lifetimes when this will no longer be so. This means that some children are going to be born into better circumstances than others. They’re going to have access to better schools, and when they graduate they’re going to inherit a network of social connections that provide them with better and more lucrative opportunities, regardless of their qualifications. Period.

Nobody Believes It Anyway: In most cases, equality of outcome is equal parts bogeyman and straw man. To be sure, there are social and political movements and philosophies that seem to push in that direction if we insist on misunderstanding them in their shallowest forms (and this is America, so that’s precisely what we do). If all you know of the world comes from shout radio, for instance, feminism doesn’t seek equality of opportunity for men and women, it wants to render men and women the same in every ludicrous way imaginable, so either we outlaw urinals or have government-financed programs teaching women how to use them. And so on. Am I being unfair to conservative shout jocks? Well, I’m coming closer to fairly representing their views than they do the views of feminists.

Sure, there are members of the feminist movement (and this goes for members of all -ism movements) who hold radical views, and there are very likely a few who do propose policies that would result in something like a pure equality of outcome based on gender (as I’ve noted before, there are 300 million Americans, and it’s hard to imagine a proposition that nobody would embrace). But the .01% most radical members of a movement do not comprise, no matter what a media pundit may tell you, a majority, and in fact they are just what the numbers would imply: a very small minority. The majority of feminists, and multiculturalists, and gay rights activists and civil rights activists and so on are bright enough to grasp basic social realities.

Conclusion: A level playing field has nothing to do with a mythical forced equality of outcomes agenda or the non-existent hordes conspiring to inflict them on us.

Equality of Opportunity: A “Fair Chance”

In 2006 I wrote an essay on a man who was born with every advantage imaginable, but who had evolved a self-image that lacked anything remotely like self-awareness. I called the man “Bob,” and it shouldn’t take anyone who knows anything at all about my hometown more than a couple of seconds to realize who Bob really is. Here’s a bit of what I had to say in that piece:

Life is a 100-yard dash. Despite Jefferson’s horsewax about all men being created equal, the truth is that some folks begin with a 99-yard headstart. I get it. I understand that’s how life is. I run as hard as I can and I try not to begrudge anybody their advantages. I also try to keep a clear head about my own advantages, because while I began at the starting line, I know that some people began the race at the bottom of a hole 20 yards back.

Here’s what I’m over, Bob. I’m sick of guys who started a yard from the finish line writing self-absorbed books lecturing the rest of us on how to be better runners. Getting there first in your case proves that your daddy was fast, not you. So take your win for what it is and shut the fuck up.

I know dozens of people as smart as you or smarter, Bob. Maybe hundreds. And a lot of them are struggling just to get to the finish line because of how guys like you have rigged the game. This much I’d bet my life on: had you grown up where I did, you’d be pumping gas. Or, let’s give you some credit. You’re still pretty smart and have some attitude about you, so maybe you’d own the gas station.

I continue to like the 100-yard dash metaphor for its ability to convey proportion. Its limitation is that we can’t take it too literally because a race only has one winner. And as I note above, the reality of life is that some people are simply going to get a head start, while other unfortunate souls are going to have to run with a few handicaps.

When I insist that our society’s public policy must assure a “level playing field,” I don’t mean that we need a Harrison Bergeron-style Handicapper General to make us all “equal”: we don’t need to worry about completely eliminating head starts, even when they overprivilege halfwit douchebags like our most recent former president (although a productive policy would perhaps cultivate a strong progressive tax structure that limits inheritance privilege more than we do at present).

I also don’t mean that we need to obsess over what it means to win – it’s okay if a particular “race” has many winners. The business world has lots and lots of individuals who we’d consider winners. The same goes for the academy. And the world of arts and letters. And sports, and music, and theater, and film, and so on. What matters is that everyone is afforded an opportunity to achieve to their highest potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. If some are born into advantage, so be it, so long as all have a fair chance to succeed.

To this end, America’s public policy needs to:

• provide a minimum baseline of opportunity; this policy set would largely focus on education, although in some cases it may also take into account other factors;
• the goal of the policy should be to assure that young citizens of noteworthy ability who are willing to dedicate themselves to educational and professional achievement can reliably earn their way to the top of their professions (we can argue about the nuts and bolts of this policy later – for now, we’re discussing broad goals and objectives);
• to the extent that children of privilege can attain higher degrees of success despite inferior capabilities, the system would not be deemed a success.

Put more succinctly, when we look at the upper echelons of a given industry, profession or organization, we should see a higher correlation between success and merit than between success and privilege. Until this is the case, we have not sufficiently leveled the playing field and our culture will continue to underperform its potential, to the detriment of all of us.

Egalitarianism, Equality, Democracy

Henry attempted to distinguish between equality of outcome, which he called egalitarianism, and equality of opportunity, which he called democracy, and his use of “democracy” in this context was a little unsatisfying, for a lot of reasons. Still, it’s significant that he linked opportunity and democracy. They’re not the same thing, but one depends on the other.

Perhaps the more important point to make is that we can have democracy without having anything worth having. After all, if we all have a voice and we vote to usher in an age of unparalleled self-degradation, that’s democracy, even if it represents an undesirable state of existence. We can also use our democratic power to vote ourselves into a new era of serfdom – something we’re far closer to doing than makes rational, self-interested sense.

What we mean when we wax eloquent about democracy is a higher-order ideal of self-determination where we all have a shot at prosperity that hinges on our abilities and our willingness to work for a better life and where the fate of the nation rests in the hands of those who legitimately comprise our brightest and best. That sort of democracy is something that doesn’t exist in the United States at present, if it ever did. If we are to achieve this enlightened society someday, then we must maximize the fullest potential of each citizen, and this can only be accomplished by bolstering the default level of opportunity.

So when we say “leveling the playing field,” what we’re really talking about is raising up the low end so that the least fortunate among us still has a reasonable shot of succeeding alongside the most fortunate.

More in the Democracy & Elitism series…

According to the 2009WEO [World Energy Outlook], global emissions in 2020 are projected to be about 5 Gt for the reference scenario. According to the 450 ppm scenario, global emissions peak around 2015 at the level of 43.7 Gt and remain broadly stable at that level before starting to decline in 2020.

The UN Secretariat’s “reference scenario” puts the global emissions peak at or above 550 ppm, occurring after 2020, and at least 3 °C.

Most scientists studying climate believe that 2 °C is relatively safe for avoiding abrupt climate transitions, but that the higher you go above that, the more likely things are to get really bad really fast.

According to The Guardian:

The analysis seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last 24 hours of negotiations will be extremely challenging.

Other voice on this news:

• The official COP15 news site quotes Greenpeace:
  

  “The UN is admitting in private that the pledges made by world leaders would lead to a three degree rise in temperatures. The science shows that it could lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, and that’s just the start of it,” Greenpeace campaigner Joss Garman tells the newspaper.

• 350.org, a group advocating for emissions cuts to 350 ppm, not 450 ppm, says
  

  So if someone–Barack Obama, for instance–tells you that this agreement will hold temperature increases below 2 degrees (itself an unsafe level), just show him this document.

• A. Siegel at Get Energy Smart Now! claims that the “leaked UN documents show that current proposals would lead to a CO2 concentration of 770 ppm by 2100.” This analysis is from Climate Interactive’s Climate Scorecard.
• Democracy Now! has an interview with the journalist who received the leaked document.
• Andy Revkin at the NYTimes blog DotEarth said that “United Nations officials confirmed the document’s authenticity but declined to discuss it.” In addition, he points out that
  

  [3 °C] is far above the thresholds for dangerous warming being debated at the meeting and accepted in recent statements by the major economies of the world.

I’ll update this story as more information is available.

“Elite” hasn’t always been an epithet. In fact, if we consider what the dictionary has to say about it, it still signifies something potentially worthy. Potentially. For instance:

e·lit·ism or é·lit·ism (-ltzm, -l-) n.
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.le

That definition, while technically accurate enough, could use a bit of untangling, because it embodies the very nature of our problem with elitism in America. In popular use, the term “elite” and its derivatives has been twisted into a pure, distilled lackwit essence of “liberal” – another once-proud word that fell victim to our moneyed false consciousness machine.

However, if we sift the definition a bit, we find that it’s actually three definitions masquerading as one: intellect, social status, or financial resources. Those are not three ways of saying the same thing. On the contrary – they’re two or three distinctly different things. And in understanding these distinctions, we will hopefully come to a better grasp of what ails America. To wit: while elitism literally refers to a set of different and only barely related conditions, we are routinely encouraged to conflate them all. When we do, it causes us to ignore dynamics that threaten our individual and collective well-being and to denigrate the dynamics of opportunity that offer us hope for a more prosperous and productive democracy.

Elitism: Three Definitions

Let’s look at what the term “elite” means in three contexts.

1: Social elite. Up until the dawn of modern democracy in the 18th Century most societies were ruled by kings or emperors or chieftains or sheiks or some similar variety of hereditary elite. These societies tended to be rigidly class-based, and much of your life’s potential was strictly determined by the station into which you were born. If your parents were artisans, you were probably going to be an artisan. If you were born into the peasantry, a peasant you would live and die. In some places the “divine right” doctrine made clear that this was all God’s will – the hereditary lineage was as God intended. The class structure, with the king at the top, was the natural order as decreed in Heaven.

We don’t have the divine right of kings in the US today, of course, but humans being human, we still see vestiges of dynastic social elitism. In part one of this series we noted the Bush dynasty, of which former president George W Bush was at least fourth generation. We’re all well acquainted with the Kennedy clan, as well, and even if we don’t know the specific histories, we certainly know the names of other American royal families: Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Duke, Hearst, Pulitzer, Reynolds, Carnegie, Kellogg, Morgan, Stanford, Ford, Du Pont – and virtually every city of any size has its own local aristocracies. In my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC, names like Reynolds and Hanes carried a lot of weight, for instance, and in Denver, where I live now, one finds any number of things named after the Iliff and Bonfils clans.

2: Financial elite. In the old country social and financial status tended to go hand-in-hand. In America, social status has tended to trail financial success at a safe distance (since the first generation or two of an emerging financial dynasty invariably has to overcome the taint associated with being nouveau riche – that is, one may have a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean one has breeding, culture or sufficient social skills to be accepted into polite society). However, over time even a pack of socially distasteful Arkies like the Waltons can be expected to gain a measure of acceptance.

For purposes of discussing elitists in America, it makes sense to consider the social and financial elites as more or less one group. These groups, which we’ll collectively term privilege elitists, are distinct from what our dictionary calls…

3: Intellectual elite. In brief, intellectual elites are people who, regardless of socio-economic background, comprise a society’s “knowledge class.” They are usually educated (although they may be largely self-educated); they earn their livings with their brains; as a general rule they value learning and education; and they dominate the teaching professions. If the social and economic cohorts are privilege elitists, then let’s call this group the performance elites.

First, though, we need to address a sticking point. The word “intellectual” troubles many Americans for reasons they’ve probably never stopped to think about. This distaste results from the fact that Americans historically placed a great value on applied learning. Those who founded and developed our culture were people who crossed a large ocean to escape poverty or seek religious and social “freedom” (a popular, if problematic way of putting it) or get away from the European establishment, remember. They tended to have less patience with learning for its own sake (pure knowledge), which in families like mine often got dismissed as useless “book learnin’.” Book learnin’ was seen as infinitely inferior to “common sense.”

“Intellectual” has always signified the pursuit of knowledge that wasn’t “good for anything.” As such, it has never been respected in America, and any number of disparaging iconographies* have grown up around the concept. “Eggheads” and “brainiacs” are rarely thought to know anything of value, and even the main body of 20th Century “science fiction,” a genre ostensibly devoted to praising science, is perhaps better understood as engineering fiction.

Intelligence vs Intellect

So we have a perceptual hang-up about intellectuals. Are these perceptions fair, though? Or accurate? Or productive? In a word, no.

Once upon a time I insisted that I was intelligent, but that I was not an intellectual. I could go back and attempt to explain what the distinction was in my mind, but the reality is that I had fallen for the faux-populist ideology I’m describing here. I identified closely with my working class roots and allowed myself to associate intellectualism with smug, self-superiority. That I knew a few smug, self-superior intellectuals only served to reinforce my delusion.

Whatever attitude a particular individual case may adopt, our intellectual/performance elites are generally defined by a few extremely desirable qualities. They are smart; they have worked hard to acquire knowledge; and they believe that the wisdom arising from knowledge holds the key to a better world for all of us. They may not be “of the people” in the sense that their lives are fully integrated into working class culture, but the ones I know uniformly care a great deal about “the people” and wish for them greater opportunity, prosperity and happiness.

Let’s also be clear about the place of those with “useful” knowledge. There may be a popular tendency to herd them into different chutes than the eggheads, but engineer types are performance elites, too. Literally understood, they are people who put their minds into the service of building our present and our future.

Some intellectual elites were born rich, but most probably weren’t. Most had to work very hard for what they’ve gotten. Countless thousands mortgaged their futures with student loans. And if they take a minute to think about it, a lot of them would probably react strongly to being lumped into the same group as trust fund elitists who were born rich and never accomplished anything of lasting value in their lives.

As a way of visualizing the differences between these two groups (which we’re necessarily abstracting to make a point), consider this chart, which opposes the tendencies and qualities of performance and privilege elites.

Despite cynical attempts to convince the public that elitists are actively working to destroy the American way of life, the truth is that the targets of this scorn are guilty of precisely the opposite. Privilege elites are, by definition, born into legacies of wealth and power. When former President George W Bush talked about promoting an “ownership society,” these are the owners he had in mind. They’re the “haves and have-mores” who constituted his “base.” They’re the hyper-rich top one percent who, according to various analyses, own over 50% of the nation’s wealth. They also own, in addition to everything else, the media outlets responsible for propagating the toxic “liberal/intellectual elite” meme.

The elitism under attack, performance elitism, is built on striving, achievement and knowledge. These elites earned whatever status they have through hard work, while the privilege elites inherited their birthright through a modern equivalent of the divine right of kings. Intellectual elites seek equal opportunity while economic elites use their heft and influence to promote ever-greater inequality of both opportunity and outcome.

Yes, we do have elitists in America. But elitism isn’t necessarily bad – on the contrary, depending on what sort of elitism we’re talking about, it may be a very good thing. It may be the very quality that allowed the US to become the greatest nation in the world, or it may be the quality that is eroding our greatness more and more each day.

The next time you hear “elitist” used to describe someone who’s trying to destroy America, pause and ask yourself a few questions:

• Who’s doing the talking?
• What does their portfolio look like?
• Who owns the wires they’re using to address you, and what is the bested interest of those who own the channel?
• Is the image being presented plausible? Do the elites being pilloried have either the motive or the means to do whatever they’re being accused of doing?
• As you listen to the story, do you clearly understand what is meant by the word “elite” as it is being employed?
• Is it clear to you that the speaker/writer understands what the word “elite” means?
• Is the term being used to clarify or obfuscate?
• Finally, based on what you’re being told and how the argument is being presented, how much credit for intelligence do the story’s producer’s give you? Is it clear what they want you to think and how they want you to react? If so, what motivation on their part explains the direction they’re trying to move you?

Most importantly, if you have personally worked hard to improve your mind so that you can improve your life as well as the lives of those in your family and community, don’t let a cynical propaganda frame deprive you of that which you have earned. Be proud of your status as a performance elite and don’t back down from privilege elites who would denigrate your accomplishments.

* What I mean by iconographies is a series of narratives and popular images used to depict members of a group. For a quick example, think about the stereotype of the mad scientist. Or the trope of the wandering kung fu master. Or the crooked used car salesman. Or the ambulance-chasing lawyer. Or the narcissistic model. We have clichés of all sorts of types or groups of people, and more often than not these quick, cheap categorizations prevent us from understanding the humans depicted in meaningful ways. See Neal Stephenson’s use of the term in Anathem.

_______________________

Next: Who Are These Out-of-Touch “Liberal Elites,” Anyway?

Is there a more radioactive word in American politics today than elitist?

Admit it – you saw the word and had an instinctive negative reaction, didn’t you? If not, then count yourself among the rarest minority in our culture, the fraction of a percent that has not yet had its consciousness colonized by the “evil elitist” meme. If not, you’re one of a handful of people not yet victimized by a cynical public relations frame that poses perhaps the greatest danger to the health of our republic in American history.

Pretty dire language there, huh? Perhaps we’ve ventured a little too deeply into the land of hyperbole? It might seem so at a glance, but in truth the success of any society is largely a function of the things it believes and how those beliefs shape its actions and policies. A nation driven by ideologies that work to undercut its strengths is doomed, and the United States has become an abusive consumer of a complex, toxic cocktail of self-defeating dogmas and the resulting public behaviors.

American society has its share of elites, elitism and elitists, but unfortunately it badly misunderstands who’s who, what’s what and how it all affects our nation. These misunderstandings arise, in part, because we have been lied to so ubiquitously and so effectively by powerful, wealthy interests – interests that stand to gain a great deal by keeping the public as misinformed and confused as possible. Interests with the resources required for broad mass media propagation of the toxic meme. Interests with a deep comprehension of how the mass culture thinks and acts. Interests that are extremely adept at playing on the weaknesses of the public mind and shepherding it toward a desired end.

I rarely resort to Marxist terminology, but in this case Friedrich Engels* offers up an important concept: false consciousness. In a nutshell, this theory argues that a society’s economic elites use their resources to foster among the lower classes – in contemporary America, this would be the rapidly dwindling middle class and the working classes – an erroneous belief about how the culture is structured. This would include false beliefs about the distribution of wealth, about opportunity and one’s prospects for success, about the relationship between the wealthy and the poor, about the actual causes of poverty and inequality, and so on.

In all cases, the failure of the lower classes to accurately perceive the true nature of the society’s economic and political reality works in favor of the powerful and against the members of the underclasses.

A couple of relatively recent cases from American presidential politics illustrate the point. In 1992 Bill Clinton was the Democratic challenger to Republican incumbent George HW Bush. Clinton had been born into a poor, broken, Southern Baptist family in Arkansas. He was, in every sense imaginable, an American Everyman – a living-and-breathing Horatio Alger story. He’d worked hard and fought his way up the ladder, against all odds. He earned enough in the way of academic scholarships to put himself through Georgetown, one of the nation’s finest universities. He did so well there that he earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Now bad for a simple country boy from a trailer park in Arkansas.

Bush’s story was the polar opposite of Clinton’s. His father was a wealthy banker and a US Senator. His grandfather was a wealthy industrialist. He attended elite schools as a boy (Greenwich Country Day School, Phillips Academy), and whatever he may have accomplished in life, it’s uncontroversial to say that he’d been working with as many advantages as his opponent had disadvantages.

Fine – a wealthy man representing the GOP, a “man of the people” representing the “party of the people” – all was apparently running to form. Except that Clinton got mauled in the South. He got mauled with poor voters. He got mauled by Christian voters. The problem was that somehow a blueblood from Kennebunkport was perceived as being “more like” the common underclass voter than the man who was legitimately one of their own.

Clinton went on to alienate Americans on “both” ends of the political spectrum, and the point here certainly isn’t to lobby him a place on Rushmore. Rather, we should simply take note of the massive gap between who these men were and how they were perceived with respect to class, economic identity and the question of elitism.

A few years later, the next generation of the Bush lineage produced a president, George W Bush. In 2004 this Bush, who was even more deeply soaked in the rich juices of dynasty, stood for reelection in a contest where elitism again became an issue. He attended the Kinkaid School in Houston, then Phillips. Then Yale, then Harvard Business. (Please understand – if you attended Phillips, Yale and Harvard, you have trodden the most economically and politically elite pathway available in the United States, period.) While at Yale he was a member of arguably the most elite society of its sort in America, Skull & Bones.

His opponent, John Kerry, also came from a certain measure of privilege. His parents were upper-middle class and his mother was a member of the Forbes family. He attended Yale, like his opponent, and also was invited to join Skull & Bones. and In 1995 he married Teresa Heinz, whose estimated worth was in the $750B range.

A rational assessment of the 2004 election, then, would have cast it (policy positions notwithstanding) as a contest between two competing elites. Neither faced much in the way of want or class struggle growing up, both attended the finest schools money could buy, they were fraternity brothers in the nation’s most influential and privileged secret society, and so on. In the 100-meter dash of life, we might safely observe that Kerry began with a 90-meter head start, while Dubya had only to lean forward a bit to break the tape. (12 years earlier, the supposed elitist candidate had actually begun the race in a deep hole 20 meters behind the starting line.)

But if you’ll recall, that isn’t how the media-fueled campaign was framed at all. Bush, like his father, was painted as the regular joe and Kerry as the effete Yankee elitist. Amazingly – or perhaps predictably – the electorate swallowed the lie, hook and sinker.

Perhaps you can’t fool all the people all the time, but by November of 2004 we had clearly reached the point in our history when you could fool an electoral majority all the time.

* Eagleton, Terry (1991). Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso.

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Next: What do we mean by “elitism”?

Image Credit: Le Nouvel Ordre Mondial

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

Yes, there are gangs in real life, and there is some level of underworld in our major cities. But our movies would lead you to the conclusion that every street corner is a drug marketplace, every precinct is infested by corrupt cops, in every alley lurks an assassin, every bar is a spontaneous kung fu fight waiting to happen and every nightclub is a potential gang warfare site.  Around every corner a secret agent lays in wait for another secret agent. Domestic abuse is rampant and a serial killer lurks in your closet waiting to decapitate you.  Some zombie wants to eat your brains.

The real world does offer some of these adventures (the supernatural notwithstanding) but, again, the point of the story is to provide an escape for the viewer.  One thing to remember, though: violence always has a victim. Very few chainsaw murders are consensual.

Sex in the movies is also plentiful. It’s in our ads and our magazines, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere.  But there are rules. Flash a single breast or hint at a risque sex scene and your movie gets an R rating.  Show anything more and you’re stuck with an X rating – if you get a rating at all.  Movies with gratuitous nudity get R ratings, while others flirt with “the line” and get away with a PG13. In general, the idea is to offer various levels of nudity and sexuality for the sake of appealing to various levels of horny viewers (mostly men) and to make a buck in the process. It’s easy to view this brand of escapism as more positive than violence, mayhem and death.

Then there are more artistically inclined movies, usually independent, that ask us to think about real life.  In these stories, people who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies might get together and do the things that normal people do.  Some breastfeed in public.  Some have non-erotic showers.  Some change clothes.  Some kiss.  Some have sex.  They might show some skin but almost every human is nude at least once a day, right? Skin happens.

If these stories are told effectively we will relate to the characters as they tap into experiences that we all share.  They show reality, or some plausible fictionalized version of it.  Sometimes there are heated arguments and even violence, but they spare us the fx. No blood spatter analysis, nobody shot at point blank range, no body parts flying at us in 3D.

With this in mind, let’s think about the Moral Majority and its neo-puritan descendants.  Which movies seem to catch their attention?  What is it that gets under their skin and ruffles their feathers?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question.

While I respect the rights of people to choose what they see, let’s consider some numbers. Last year, depending on your source, between 15k and 20k Americans were murdered.  This adds up to about six people in 100,000.  Each of these murders, by definition, put an unnatural end to someone’s life.  Friends and family mourned, and in many cases incurred physical and emotional burdens that they will never shed.  The suck factor for homicide is 100%.

Last year approximately a quarter billion Americans had consensual sex.  (Okay, I’m making this statistic up but it can’t be far off.)  If the number is close, this comes to about 70,000 people in 100,000.  Each of these instances (by definition) involved two (or more) people coming together and enjoying the company of another for a time.  Whereas being a murder victim is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, many of these people will choose to have repeat episodes with the same person.  In general, then, it’s safe to assert that most of these victims of consensual sex leave better than they arrived.  The suck factor for sex is not zero but it’s a lot closer to zero than it is to 100%. (Obviously I emphasize “consensual” for a reason – non-consensual sex, sex with a victim, is not sex – it’s violence.)

Isn’t this odd?  Movies portray violence on an exaggerated, unrealistic scale. Violence has a very high suck factor. And nobody bats an eye.  Other movies depict natural sexuality (or maybe unrealistic, but harmless sexuality). And sex is an act that almost every adult in the country takes part in on a semi-regular basis (or they’d like to). The suck factor is very small. And this is what gets conservative panties in a bunch.

So to sum up: in art it’s fine to kill, maim and destroy but it’s not okay to portray a satisfying natural encounter or to take a picture of said encounter.

When you think about it, this bizarre dynamic extends well beyond the arts.  The Right has no problem advocating and rushing into real wars, wars that leave a lot of innocents dead along with the baddies we’re supposedly liberating them from. But sensuality, in all cases outside of married Christian sex, is considered bad (and even that isn’t to be depicted or talked about).  A major irony here is that when we consider all of the political sex scandals from the past few years Republicans seem to comprise a large majority of the perpetrators.  They profess to frown upon nudity, upon cleavage, upon homosexuality, upon sensuality of any type.  But behind closed doors this is exactly what everyone seems to seek.  Even some of the loudest proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act have been caught in hypocritical, compromising sexual situations.  Amusing, or perhaps tragic, is the fact that morality police like David Vitter and Larry Craig snuck behind the backs of their spouses for sexual fulfillment, betraying personal as well as public trusts.  Couples who simply acknowledge the realities if normal human sexuality, on the other hand, can explore their curiosities and desires with the full support, blessing and (optional) involvement of their life partners.

Damn, America has it backwards.

Europeans are a lot more comfortable with their bodies than Americans.  Their magazines feature topless women and there are far more topless beaches.  They have movies with unabashed sexuality (you even find live sex acts in respectable theatre presentations).  We always seem to portray Brits as stuffy but in this respect it is us that are the stuffy ones.

I imagine that with most S&R readers I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll say it anyway.  Sex is natural and it’s healthy to explore. It should be celebrated instead of demonized.

Disclosure: I take artistic pictures of people in edgy sensual circumstances and participate in activities that those offended by this article would certainly frown upon.  I am tired of having the reactionary moral positions of others thrust upon my art, my life and my friends when all of those participating are benefiting from their involvement.  I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say this but…. Make love, not war!

What’s worse is you’ve got a pediatrician appointment today for both of your kids – their asthma is acting up and the drugs aren’t working as well as they should be. Furthermore, your son is still recovering from a case of malaria he picked up, probably from a mosquito bite he got during the pee wee football game by the reservoir a couple of months ago. At least the rains will damp down on your environmental allergies some today. Better rain, even flooding, than the dust storm that blew through the area a couple of weeks ago. That caused several major pileups and fouled up ventilation so bad that some of the buildings downtown are still closed..

As you pull together breakfast for the family, there’s no milk because it’s too expensive. Most of the local dairies were forced to close down over the last few years as the drought reduced the cows’ milk production. The few diaries that survived can charge almost as much as they want to since the supply is far lower than the demand. The same is true of eggs and cheese, although beef has been cheaper recently as dairy cows are slaughtered for their meat in a last-ditch effort to pay off drought-driven debts.

You take the kids to their appointments and find out that your son’s malaria isn’t quite gone yet – it’s apparently a strain that’s become resistant to the more common, and cheaper, anti-malarial drugs. The next course of drugs is not only more expensive, but also has more side effects that will make it harder for your son to be effective in school. Both kids’ asthma is doing OK, but the pediatrician points out for the third time that you might want to consider moving out of the suburbs and into a rural area with cleaner air. Unfortunately, because of your spouse’s job, that’s just not possible. And with the chronic conditions you and the kids have, you need the company’s good health insurance.

After dropping off the kids at school, you head to the grocery store. The produce section is half the size that it was just a few years ago, and all the produce you do see is expensive – almost all of it was shipped in from out of state. Over the last three months there have been two e. coli recalls of produce from out-of-state farms where the water got polluted, and there have been dozens of others over the last few years. You’ve tried to grow a garden yourself to supplement the meager grocery store selection, but growth issues and the drought has forced your town to go on strict water restrictions. It doesn’t help that the garden plants always seem to be out-competed by the invasive weeds in your yard. The bindweed and thistle have grown largely immune to the commercially avaialble herbicides.

There have been several large dry lightning-sparked wildfires recently that tore through mountain communities. As a result, the insurance companies gave up on insuring homes in the mountains. The regional wildfire fighting coordination office had to give up on fighting fires – there is just too much fuel and temperatures have been too high for safe fire suppression, and when the city’s conserving every drop of water for human consumption, using city water to fight wildfires just was not possible. As a result, your neighbors were driven out of their beloved mountains down to the suburbs where they could be safe and get homeowners insurance.

Your neighbors’ daughter is in the U.S. Air Force, piloting an armed drone patrolling the Mexican border as air cover for the Border Patrol. There’s been a massive influx of immigrants and refugees from Central and South America recently, and even though the Border Patrol is now three times the size it was in the early 2000’s, there’s still not enough agents to police the border without military help. She’s worried that she’ll be deployed soon to southern Europe as back-up for our allies’ efforts at keeping the EU from being overwhelmed by Turks, Arabs, and Africans pouring northward. There have been a few brushfire wars recently, but most of Africa and parts of the Middle East are looking more and more like a powder keg just waiting for the right spark. As a result of the worsening national security situation, taxes have skyrocketed to pay for the large military required to maintain all the active deployments. Worse yet, there’s a chance that your neighbors’ daughter might be deployed to guard the Venezuelan oil fields that the previous President “annexed” in support of U.S national security interests and that the Venezuelans are resisting as an invasion and occupation.

After dinner, you let the kids stay up late for the first time in months – the flooding dumped enough water into the reservoirs and local streams that the power plants have enough water to operate all day instead of shutting down or operating on a rolling blackout schedule. You wish now you hadn’t voted to approve the nuclear plant (or elected the public utilities commissioners who approved the increase in your electricity rates to pay for it), since it’s no better than the coal plants – they all need so much water for cooling that just hasn’t been there the last few years. Well, until today’s flooding, anyway. So you let the kids enjoy the special treat.

———-

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, one of the largest peer-reviewed studies of climate science performed to date, a scenario similar to that described above is 90% likely. More recent scientific data suggests that the IPCC’s conclusions about the severity of climate disruption were overly conservative. As a result, both the IPCC’s projections for climatic upheavals later this century and their 90% confidence in those projections are very likely under-estimates of the severity of the problem.

Knowing all of this, how much would you spend on an insurance policy that lowers the chances that the overly conservative scenario described above happens? How much is your quality of life, your family’s health, your friend’s well being, your lower tax rate, worth to you? 1% of your annual income? 5%? 10%? More? Or nothing at all?

In 2008, the average American spent approximately 16% of their salary on health, home, car, and life insurance premiums¹. That’s a huge amount of money. The reason people pay that much is because they want to be insured against the likelihood of something horrible and expensive occurring. And the more likely something is, combined with how expensive it it is, the more we pay in insurance.

The table below illustrates the difference^{2, 3}:

The table clearly shows that Americans pay the most overall money for our health insurance, but given how high the risk of needing the insurance is (estimated at 100% in a given year), the risk value metric is actually pretty good.

What the table doesn’t show, however, is that we have homeowners or renters insurance not because of the average claim, but because the small chance of a severe financial loss is still risky. The table below illustrates this point:

Remember, insurance premiums cost the average American 16% of their annual salary in order to insure against future financial losses that could be, but usually aren’t, extraordinarily high. So the question is how much should the world be willing to pay in order to insure against future financial losses?

As was mentioned above, the likelihood of substantial risk is at least 90%, with more recent studies than the 2007 IPCC report saying that the risk is actually higher. The next question has to be “how much is the future financial risk” of doing nothing?

A University of Oregon analysis estimated 4% as the bare minimum cost of doing nothing. An International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) study estimated that the benefit:cost ratio of addressing climate change was at least 8:1. Recent worst-case estimates (discussed below) say that the annual GWP cost of addressing climate disruption is approximately 3%, so the IIED study says that the cost of doing nothing could be as much as 24% of GWP. This number is similar to that calculated by the Stern Review (which, not coincidentally, is what the IIED used as their baseline) back in 2006. The lowest estimates of the cost of doing nothing are in the range of 1-2% of GWP, and a few scientists have suggested that the upper range of the cost could literally be the end of human civilization.

As for the cost of mitigation, aka climate insurance, a recently released study by the E3 Network calculated how much money the world would have to spend in order to return the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s air to a recent estimate of a “safe” level – 350 parts per million (ppm). The study reviewed the available literature and found that the worst case estimate was 3.0% of global gross domestic product (aka gross world product, GWP), and the E3N models estimated the estimate put the cost at approximately 2.5% of GWP.

The table below compares the insurance paid by Americans to three projected climate costs vs. risks.

Notice that Americans pay more in premiums than they get in benefits (ie claims), so the risk divided by the expense is less than 1. The difference represents insurance company profits, and clearly Americans are willing to pay for the comfort that insurance gives them. The table also shows that the risk of significant damage due to climate disruption divided by the global expense of addressing climate disruption varies from 0.33 to 100, and in five out of the six cases shown above, the future financial risk that is effectively insured equals or significantly exceeds the cost of insurance.

To put this all into perspective, the GDP of the U.S economy in 2008 was about $14.4 trillion. 16% of that (the money spent on average for insurance) is a little less than $2.6 trillion. According to the World Bank, the GWP was just over $60 trillion in 2008. The percentage of the global economy that is likely at risk is 24%, or $14.4 trillion. And the economists are estimating that the cost of insuring against losses that could equal the size of the entire U.S. economy will be no more than 3% of GWP, or $1.8 trillion.

In other words, for less money that the U.S. spends on insuring itself, the entire globe could be insured against climate disruption. Then imagine taking your four favorite cities in the world – and then erasing one.

And for another dose of reality, the United States is presently arguing over spending money to insure the U.S. against climate disruption to the tune of 0.25% to 3.5% of GDP (ACES analysis by the CBO). 0.25% to 3.5% of U.S. GDP in 2008 would be between $36 and $500 billion ($0.5 trillion)⁴. That’s well below what the U.S. already pays for insurance and is several hundred billion dollars less than the financial bailouts.

Ultimately, the analysis of what the U.S. already pays to voluntarily insure itself against future losses illustrates that insuring the global economy against future financial losses makes economic sense. After all, Americans already pay more to insure against smaller future losses that have a smaller chance of occurring than does climate disruption.

If the U.S. is willing to insure itself against future financial losses due to damage to home, vehicle, and health, then there’s no good reason why the U.S. and the world should be unwilling to insure themselves against future financial losses due to climate disruption.

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¹ According to the national car insurance comparison site CarInsurance.com, the national average annual premium for car insurance was $1,600 in 2008. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the national average premium for homeowners insurance was around $800, although it varies widely from state to state. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the annual cost of health care per person in the U.S. is nearly $5,300. Life insurance premiums vary so widely that it’s difficult to come up with a solid number, but $300 per year is a reasonable estimate. The total from this estimate is $8,000.

Average salary was derived from 2008 Census Bureau data.

² Derived from the Federal Highway Administration and the National Highway Transportation Safety Board, and the Insurance Industry Institute. Percentage is defined by the number of collisions divided by the total number of private, commercial, and publicly-owned vehicles on the road. Average Insurance claim is the total for all claim types (injury, collision, comprehensive, and property damage) divided by the number of accidents.

³ “Risk value” is a term defined for this analysis only. While the insurance industry undoubtedly has its own metrics, this metric is my own and may or may not be equivalent to an official industry metric.

⁴ This “cost” is not an accurate accounting of the actual costs to the economy. This money would be circulating in the economy still, but would not be going to the interests that it goes to presently, especially oil and coal companies and coal-burning utilities. Instead, the money would be directed toward energy and carbon-efficient companies. As a result, the argument in Congress is clearly not one of economics, but rather a battle between entrenched, old-energy interests protecting their profits and influence and up-and-coming, new energy interests hoping to gain profits and influence.

In fact, this entire analysis illustrates that the reasons behind opposing insuring the world against losses due to climate disruption are neither scientific nor economic. Instead, the reasons are ideology, profit, and political power.

• Tipping points will be difficult to identify
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists
• Barrels instead of bottles
• Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018
• El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Is the Earth’s climate approaching a critical transition, aka a “tipping point,” beyond which major and largely unpredictable climate changes are guaranteed to occur? At this point, scientists do not know the answer to that question. A study published in the journal Nature aims to explain the mathematics of critical transitions beyond just the Earth’s climate and in the process, determine if there are early-warning signals that indicate when a complex system is about to undergo a critical transition.

According to the paper, every complex system, whether it be climate, asthma attacks and epileptic seizures, or systemic crashes in financial markets, exhibits the same basic precursor signs of a tipping point, at least mathematically speaking. All complex systems exhibit one or more of the following early-warning signs: they can take longer to recover from small perturbations and become less random over time (“critical slowing” in the paper), they can bounce dramatically between the old and new states (“flickering”) before finally settling in the new state, or they can develop patterns that gradually change before suddenly disappearing into a new state (“spatial patterns”).

With regard to climate, reconstructions have identified the hallmarks of “critical slowing” in multiple climate transitions:

In a recent analysis, a significant increase in autocorrelation was found in each of eight examples of abrupt climate change analyzed.

And the authors reference one other paper which suggests that recent climate variability is an example of “flickering” that signals a transition to a significantly colder global climate.

The problem, however, is that not all critical transitions show each early-warning sign – some transitions might show more than one while others show one this time and another next time. The result is clearly state in the paper:

[D]etection of the patterns in real data is challenging and may lead to false positive results as well as false negatives.

In other words, not all fast transitions are “critical transitions,” not all critical transitions will be detected, and sometimes a critical transition will not occur even though there were signs of one approaching.

In essence, the science of critical transitions is still very young, and as such, projections of tipping points should be very carefully analyzed, whether they be toward a new glacial period or a sudden melt of all the Arctic sea ice.

For news of a few politicians expecting a “social tipping point” on climate disruption soon, please read this piece by my colleague Wendy Redal.

Thanks to Ubertramp for pointing this paper out to me and to Dr. Scheffer for providing a review copy of the paper.

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U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists

Over the last several weeks, three utilities, Nike, and now Apple have resigned from or otherwise reduced their participation in the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), a business lobbying group that represents millions of U.S. businesses. As a result, the USCOC President and CEO, Tom Donohue, held an hour-long press conference to defend the USCOC’s decision to oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

According to the Greenwire report on the event (linked above), Donahue claimed that an “orchestrated pressure campaign” by environmentalists was responsible for the recent defections. However, National Resources Defense Council climate campaign director Peter Altman disagrees. From the article:

“It’s nice of Donohue to give the environmental movement credit for being able to convince Fortune 500 companies what group they should be a part of,” Altman said. “But it’s a red herring. These companies are making the decision on their own.”

Furthermore, San Francisco venture capitalist Nancy Floyd was quoted as saying “This issue (climate change regulation and/or legislation) has really divided the business community. The divide is not really along traditional players versus technology players; it is across the board.”

To date, the USCOC has not changed its position with respect to EPA regulation of GHGs or chosen to get behind either the Waxman-Markey ACES act or the new Kerry-Boxer draft legislation in the Senate. However, two Silicon Valley business organizations ran an advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News and the Congress Daily saying, in part:

As our European and Asian competitors move forward to build the next generation of clean energy technology, the U.S. Chamber seems mired in false debates over settled science and a 20th Century approach to energy. It’s time for the “voice of business” to move forward, embrace a market-based cap on carbon pollution, and help lead a new century of American prosperity. (emphasis original)

The two Silicon Valley organizations are the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network (JVSV). A brief scan of the membership of SVLG turns up a veritable who’s who of tech companies, as well as some banking, health, and energy companies: Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron Energy Solutions, Citibank, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Lockheed Martin, McAfee, Microsoft, NASDAQ, Netflix, Oracle, Palm, Roche, Seagate, Sun Industries, Symantec, and Yahoo!. And those are just the ones that most people would recognize – the list is even more impressive for someone who works in technology like I do – nearly all of the major U.S. electronics manufacturing companies have a presence in the SVLG.

Perhaps even more impressive, however, is that the JVSV signed on. The Directors include the mayor of San Jose, a product manager for Google, the Chancellor of the University of California – Santa Cruz, a senior VP at Bank of America, the CEO of Cypress Envirosystems, a California State Senator, to name just a few. The private companies who invest in JVSV are just as impressive as those involved in the SVLG: Cisco, National Semiconductor, Mitsubishi, PG&E, the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, and McKinsey & Company.

The JVSV represents business, labor, universities, city and state government, and non-profits, all of whom are involved in charting the future of the most visionary, profitable, and productive companies and region in the entire country. And they just told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that they were “dinosaurs.”

Perhaps this advertisement points will convince the USCOC to change its approach to climate legislation and regulation – or perhaps the USCOC will become irrelevant as the companies with vision abandon it and the USCOC’s positions become equivalent to those of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

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Barrels instead of bottles

According to the NYTimes Green Inc. blog, a number of wineries are foregoing bottles and are instead shipping their wine in barrels. As a result, the wineries are saving money on reduced packaging and are dramatically lowering their carbon footprint due to shipping and bottle manufacturing.

As a beneficial side effect, the wine lasts longer in barrels than it does in bottles.

This is hardly the first time that companies have pushed for reduced packaging – Wal*Mart was one of the first, but it’s hardly the only company working this angle. Still, anything that makes wine cheaper to drink for myself and my family is all good for me – even if that means I have to buy nearly a case at a time.

———-

Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018

Scientists researching ocean acidification in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway have made a surprising and awful discovery – the Arctic ocean is acidifying so fast that 10% it will become corrosive within the next 10 years and the entire Arctic will become corrosive by 2100. The Guardian newspaper reported last week on a presentation by French oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso that revealed the terrible news. From the article:

“This is extremely worrying. We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”

According to the article, the problem is that shellfish form the base of a massive food chain for herring, salmon, and several species of whales. In addition, walruses and seals subsist on shellfish and fish, and polar bears and other top predators feed on the seals and walruses, as well as on fish. So if the bottom of the food chain is disrupted by corrosive seawater, then the entire ecology of the Arctic could be disrupted. And the only way to prevent this is to dramatically and immediately cut carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

If you enjoy salmon or king crab legs, or even if you just enjoy the show Deadliest Catch, you might want to consider enjoying them sooner – there may not be a “later.”

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El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Back in October, 2008, I pointed out in comments to another Carboholic that La Niña years were cold because the ocean absorbed heat from the atmosphere and that El Niño years were hot because the ocean emitted stored heat back into the atmosphere. This comes from the physics of thermodynamics, specifically the fact that energy moves from hot areas to cold areas, and not the other way around.

I recently came across this same basic information presented in a different form by the Climate Prediction Center’s El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion page and the weekly ENSO updates contained therein:

The basin-wide equatorial upper ocean (0-300 m) heat content is greatest prior to and during the early stages of a Pacific warm (El Niño) episode (compare top 2 panels) and least prior to and during the early stages of a cold (La Niña) episode. (emphasis original), from page 9

In other words, the ocean heat content is lowest at the start of La Niña because after that, the La Niña is absorbing heat from the atmosphere and cooling it. Similarly, the ocean heat content is highest at the start of El Niño because after it starts, El Niño is emitting heat from the ocean back into the atmosphere and heating it.

Image credits:
AFP: Antara News Agency
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
DeLoach Vineyards
Russ Hopcroft, via Australian Antarctic Division
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center

The fate of the earth could end up determined by which tipping point is reached first: a physical shift that ushers in abrupt climate change with catastrophic consequences, or a social one, in which public attitudes rapidly coalesce around a mandate to address climate change. Or, neither could materialize, at least not imminently.

Al Gore believes the U.S. is on the brink of a political tipping point on the climate issue. Speaking to the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Madison, Wisc., last Friday, the former vice president said, “The potential for change can build up without noticeable effect until it reaches a critical mass. I think that we are very close to that tipping point.”

So what is a tipping point, actually? The term seems to be everywhere. It’s among the latest pop-sociology phrases to dominate public consciousness, along with “going viral.” That’s in large part due to the success of Malcolm Gladwell’s book by the same name, a volume that “presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does,” according to Gladwell’s website.

Change, this theory holds, often starts in small increments before reaching critical mass. The so-called tipping point is reached “when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” says Gladwell, utilizing an epidemiological model. Past the tipping point, the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.

Crossing such a threshold in terms of the public’s commitment to address climate change is essential to solving the problem, Gore suggested. “Fortunately, political will is a renewable resource,” he quipped to the several hundred journalists and other guests attending SEJ.

Gore optimistic for real change in Copenhagen

In his keynote address [full audio text on SEJ's website] at the opening plenary, Gore expressed optimism that Congress would pass meaningful climate legislation before the opening of the UN climate summit Copenhagen in December. “There is much more bipartisan dialogue behind the scenes in the Senate than is publicly visible” right now, said Gore. He expects a Senate bill “will look like the House bill.” Though the compromise carbon reduction bill was not what he would have written, Gore said, it has put the wheels in motion.

“What is essential is that we put a price on carbon.”

If the U.S. can pass legislation before Copenhagen, it could build rapid momentum in the global community, Gore said, drawing comparisons with what happened in Montreal on ozone in 1987.

“When the evidence was indisputable, the political community joined ranks,” led by the U.S. Though the treaty was initially criticized as too weak, the signing “began a process of change that picked up momentum,” said Gore. “I believe the Copenhagen treaty is likely to serve that same purpose.”

NOAA Administrator also thinks social tipping point near

Following Gore’s speech, a panel moderated by New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin
continued the discussion on the “Countdown to Copenhagen.” Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, picked up on Gore’s reference to tipping points.

“We’ve seen major 180-degree shifts in people’s attitudes toward things that for a long time to many seemed impossible: attitudes toward smoking, attitudes toward drunk driving, civil rights, women’s suffrage, are a few examples,” Lubchenco said. “I believe there’s very good evidence that you can be making significant progress toward meaningful change without that progress being obvious. And then you hit the tipping point and things can change very rapidly.”

We’re not there yet, though, Lubchenco said. The problem with climate change is that “there are multiple tipping points” that must be reached within complex social systems. “We have reached the point at which a majority of citizens say… ‘Okay, I get it.’ But we haven’t yet reached the next tipping point which is agreement on how to address the problem.”

Lubchenco left her academic post at Oregon State University to join the political sphere when her hopes were spurred by last year’s shift in power.  “This administration represents an opportunity to get to those tipping points, to make very meaningful changes that will benefit the world.”

Only time will tell

If tipping point theorists are right – and the earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous physical thresholds– there is no time for the public to dally in achieving such agreement. Plenty of scientific evidence exists that demonstrates non-linear behavior within climate systems. A report issued by the UN and World Bank in February 2009 warns that the planet may quickly be approaching the tipping point for abrupt climate changes that could usher in outcomes like the collapse of the coral biome in the Caribbean basin and extensive rainforest loss in the Amazon.

NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen wrote in the London Observer last February that “the climate is nearing tipping points,” citing a larger expanse of dark ocean water as Arctic sea ice melts, and the increasing release of methane by melting tundra as two phenomena that could rapidly shift climate change.

Other scientists, also concerned about human warming of the planet, question the use of the “tipping point” concept, since so little about climate can be specifically predicted. Revkin explored the debate among scientists earlier this year in the New York Times.

Tipping points in human attitudes and behavior may be just as unpredictable. The H1N1 flu virus comes to mind. No one knows for sure if, or when, a major flu outbreak will occur, or how devastating it will be, or how effective the new vaccine will be in protecting against it. The public is definitely aware of the issue. The next step is to weigh the perceived risks and act accordingly. If I thought there was a small but significant risk of a massive, lethal flu outbreak — based on the best science available at the time – I’d get in line for the shot.

We’ll see whether the world community is ready to tip toward action in Copenhagen in less than two months.

But it’s the Special Relationship that’s of interest here. We were, I admit, somewhat surprised to learn, when we arrived on these shores eleven years ago, that this was still a major concern. We thought this was something that Churchill and Roosevelt had during that last good war, but had died a slow death from attrition. Certainly we weren’t giving it a lot of thought when we moved here. But it was surprising, still, to discover that it’s taken very seriously here.

Recently this has been crystallized by the release in Scotland of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from prison on compasionate grounds—he’s dying of cancer. But the affair is shrouded in enough mystery to keep tongues wagging. The following, from The Telegraph (so consider the source) is fairly representative of some of the reaction to this move:

But the growing transatlantic fall-out is likely to worry Downing Street more.

The New York Daily News, an influential newspaper, told readers that Mr Brown’s behaviour during the Megrahi affair had ruined relations between London and Washington.

In a stinging editorial it stated: “It was Winston Churchill who asked in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour, ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’,” the newspaper said. “And it is Gordon Brown who has given grounds to believe that today’s British are a cowardly, unprincipled, amoral and duplicitous lot. Because he is all of those.

“As for the “special relationship” between the US and Britain, the storied alliance built on the resolve of World War II and carried on through Thatcher and Blair, through Iraq and Afghanistan: It is, in a word, gone.”

In the same edition, Michael Rubin, from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank, wrote that as well as enraging the US government, Mr Brown had also failed to gain anything from Libya in return.

He said: “Not only did Libyan celebrations destroy the goodwill which Prime Minister Gordon Brown hoped would jump-start Anglo-Libyan relations, but his clumsy and transparent attempt to substitute an oil contract for justice has shredded the seven-decade U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship beyond repair.”

The Wall Street Journal, the influential international newspaper, also sharply criticised Mr Brown’s handling of the affair in its editorial column.

It said that the release of the documents had cast yet more doubt on ministers’ insistence that the release had been a matter only for Scottish administration.
The newspaper said: “The more we learn about the British Government’s negotiations over the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Megrahi, the more it appears we aren’t getting the whole story from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Cabinet.”
Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress think-tank, said the fall-out was serious.

He said: “The feeling in the US is disappointment that our oldest ally and one we rely on would be a party to this.”

Well, boo-hoo. Only The Telegraph, by the way, would tell us that The New York Daily News is an influential newspaper, as opposed to The Wall Street Journal, which is an influential international newspaper. Leaving aside the fact that the US does not have anything like “release on compassinate grounds” in its legal system, while a number of European countries do, there are a whole lot of other issues here as well. First, the broader point to keep in mind is that the Scottish government, in releasing Megrahi on comassionate grounds, was entirely within its legal rights. It was not bound by any side deal Blair may have cut with Washington to keep Megrahi in prison—if Blair made any such deal in the first place. Second, it’s not as clear-cut as is supposed in the US that Megrahi is in fact guilty. There are any number of people, including the head of the victims’ families group here in the UK and others, who remain convinced that Megrahi was railroaded into this. We don’t imagine that this story was widely broadcast in the US media, but it’s s pretty widespread feeling here. (Although there are an equally large number of people who are convinced of Megrahi’s guilt. We’re agnostic—we don’t know enough one way or the other to say.) But here’s a convenient summary, from Marcel Berlins in The Guardian:

Megrahi’s return to Libya seemed conveniently to have sidelined another potentially embarrassing question: was he the victim of a miscarriage of justice? Was the decision to free him at least partly based on the Scottish desire to avoid having that question answered? Of course, no one connected with the decision, whether in Scotland, Whitehall or Downing Street, could admit, or even hint, that guilt or innocence was a factor. Officially, he was a properly convicted prisoner, no question.

It is not just Megrahi himself insisting on his innocence. For many years, the case has induced unease in the Scottish legal world. Evidence has emerged that appears to cast some doubt on the verdict. No one is saying the material absolutely proves Megrahi’s innocence, but it has been enough to raise the possibility of wrongful conviction.

Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, who led the campaign of bereaved British relatives to discover the truth about the tragedy, now believes that an injustice occurred – so do many families of British victims (though this doubt is not shared by families on the American side).

Robert Black QC, one of Scotland’s most eminent advocates, who has studied the case, is of the same view. More importantly, in 2007, the independent Scottish criminal cases review commission (SCCRC) referred the Megrahi case to the Scottish appeal court, finding sufficient grounds to suggest a miscarriage. The court would not have been obliged to grant the appeal, but it has usually done so on previous SCCRC referrals. The court was due to hear the appeal later this year, but Megrahi formally withdrew it during the flurry of activity leading to his release.

His lawyer has made it clear that he did so because it was felt that continuing the appeal – which would have gone on after his death – might have prejudiced his chances of being sent home. In the last few days Megrahi himself has reiterated his claim to innocence.

My understanding is that the Scottish appeal court was to rule shortly. A finding that Megrahi was not fairly convicted would not have helped matters between the various nations here—Scotland, Britain (because their interests here are not necessarily aligned) and the US. I also imagine that the fact the this case could possibly have been found faulty by the Scottish judiciary was not widely covered in the US either. Now, there’s quite enough surrounding this case, and Megrahi’s release, to occupy a book, and I imagine there will be one (or more) at some point, all concerned with the machinations of the various governments, and what their various objectives were. The US, clearly, needed a guilty party, and Megrahi may or may not have been the one. The Labour government, between Blair and Brown, wanted the US off their backs, and Libyan oil. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats want to make Labour look foolish and duplicitous, which is not at all hard. Scotland wanted—well, it’s not clear what. Scotland wanted to let Megrahi go before he died, perhaps, as has been suggested about Brown as well, so that Megrahi would not die in a Scottish prison. So there are lots of balls in the air here, and most of them haven’t come down yet.

There’s a more general issue here, though, that relates to the whole Special Relationship thing that has fascinated me. If you read the quotes in the Telegraph article (go ahead—re-read them now), you almost pick up a threatening tone in some of the US comments. How dare these governments not do what we want, is the implication. The petulance here is staggering. This isn’t new, of course. But it does go to remind everyone of how short memories are. It just seems only yesterday that Tony Blair was lying through his teeth (with Gordon sitting by, silently) to declare Saddam Hussein a menace, whose weapons of mass destruction could reach Britain within 45 minutes, in solidarity with the US in its time of needing to exorcise its grief by invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, that was known to have no WMD, and that had never attacked the United States. That was about oil too.

Blair was the great enabler. Without his support, Bush in all likelihood could not have gone it alone, and the Coalition of the Willing would have been considerably smaller, if it had existed at all. And this is largely what the Special Relationship entails—the UK blindly supporting US policy, whatever it is. Once the US started pressuring the EU to lift the bans on GMOs, Blair thought that was pretty neat idea too. In fact, Blair and Brown’s slavishness toward anything American has been breathtaking. In spite of the recent hoo-hah over some Tory MEP’s negative comments about the NHS (which made quite a big splash in the US), it’s been the Labour government that has been privatizing portions of the NHS over the past decade, while denying it. Maybe part of the Special Relationship is lying with comparable equanimity.

It’s not that the Special Relationship was been such a great deal for Britain, either. It seems to run one way, in fact. Keynes was convinced that the post-war financing agreements were designed to prevent Britain from recovering economically, and it was his fighting these agreements that probably killed him. And history does sort of bear this out. We were astonished after moving here to discover that Britain was still paying off its WWII war debt to the US—and, in fact, was the only country doing so. These loans were finally paid off in 2006. Let’s see, what else? There’s Diego Garcia, the island in the Indian Ocean that the UK stripped of its inhabitants so it could turn it over to the US for an airbase. There’s lots more, in fact. About the only time Britain took a major, principled stand against the US was when Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam.

There have been significant and very public doubters. John Le Carre has build part of his fictional world on openly questioning the wisdom of the UK government, including its intelligence services, lending themselves like Rent-a-Cops to the US. One would have thought that Iraq would have proved his point, but we still see the types of anxieties expressed by right-wing oafs like Alistair Horne in the following passage:

It may be the sign of a romantic, but I still believe in the mystique of the special relationship. Pragmatically it received a boost at the time of the Falklands when the naval commander of the task force, Admiral Sandy Woodward, declared to me that in no way could the risky operation have succeeded without US commitment. This was founded upon long years of joint Nato experience, of speaking the same language, not only philologically but in terms of military-speak.
….

After Megrahi, can the special relationship be restored? We romantics, and optimists, believe that it can; it happened, after all, following 1973. But almost certainly it will not happen under this disastrous and terminally sick government. One can only hope that David Cameron can pull something out of the locker, to build upon that great residue of respect for British institutions, and enterprise, that continues to exist in the United States.

This is delusional thinking at its highest. Even yesterday Tony Blair was out there defending the Special Relationship to David Letterman, of all people.

But I suspect these are starting to be minority voices. When we first moved here, everyone loved America. After 9/11, we got calls of sympathy from people we barely knew. People would stop us on the street to express their sympathies. It’s all gone now, shredded in the tailwinds of Iraq. Now, or at least before Obama got elected and gave everyone a bit of hope, I would hear random conversations on the underground about going to pubs to beat up American students. Someone I worked with—a good lad, solid Tory, likes his pints, generally a pretty good guy—came back from a trip to Las Vegas and Florida two years ago with the comment, “You know, I don’t think I like your country very much.” And this is someone who thought Thatcher was the greatest Prime Minister ever. So the country is changing a bit. And with Brown continuing to fail to convince the public (and an increasingly vocal subset of Parliament across all parties) over the logic of remaining in Afghanistan, there are a fair number of people in the UK now who are starting to think that the Special Relationship isn’t so special after all.

The stamp above was issued in 1976 by the Royal Mail in honor of the US Bicentennial.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world.

And yet the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering a hearing during the court’s recess in order to hear legal arguments over whether corporate money could be spent to influence elections and whether the current bans on most such money in politics were constitutional. And indications are that the conservative majority will likely rule to overturn nearly 20 years of precedent and rule that it is constitutional for corporate money to be spent directly to influence local, state, and federal elections.

According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the four liberal justices were the ones quoting from the U.S. Constitution to support their questions and arguments:

Justice Ginsburg reminded Olson that it is living persons, not corporations, who are “endowed by [their] Creator with unalienable rights.” Justice Sotomayor, too, picked up on this theme, emphasizing how the Supreme Court had rewritten the Constitution to create the fiction that corporations are persons entitled to the same basic rights as human beings. If we are looking to constitutional first principles to topple precedents, she asked, why shouldn’t we also look at the cases that invented corporate constitutional personhood and “imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics”?

Several of the court’s conservatives are supposed to be Originalists, judges who believe that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at it’s writing (except for amendments, of course) and has not changed since then. Granting state creations the rights guaranteed to flesh and blood people when the Constitution doesn’t mention state creations is hypocrisy of the first order. It’s also an example of the very judicial activism than the Senate Republicans who voted against confirming Justice Sotomayor feared she would bring to the court. Perhaps the most activist judge on the Supreme Court today, defined by being the most willing to overrule Congress, is Antonin Scalia.

At present, corporate profits may not be spent to directly influence elections. This has historically been the case because corporations can live effectively forever and amass financial resources that no individual person could equal, and because legislators and courts have been concerned about corporate influence corrupting the political process. In essence, these are many of the same arguments that federal law uses to ban foreign nationals and governments from donating money to political campaigns. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no foreign governments suing for free speech rights to influence elections.

The problem twofold – corporations are presently considered people, and money is considered speech. Corporations were defined legally as people for the purposes of limiting personal liability in the event of a business failure. But one of the results is that corporations have claimed the rights guaranteed to real people in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment right to free speech. And because the Supreme Court declared, in Buckley v. Valeo, that spending money equals exercising the right to free speech, corporations are now claiming that their money should be given identical rights to the money of individual citizens.

There are at least two direct solutions to this problem. The first would be to overturn Buckley v. Valeo. This would make money no longer equal to speech and could be an even more significant change in legal precedent than overturning 100 years of campaign limits on corporate donations to candidates. It would also require the conservatives on the court to go against their known personal ideologies.

The second is to redefine corporations so that they are not considered individual people for all situations. This would certainly require federal legislation and would probably require state legislation as well. It would also require that the economic and political powers at the state and federal levels voluntarily relinquish the power that corporate money (via PACs today, possibly via direct contributions in a few months) brings them.

Neither is particularly likely given the composition of the Supreme Court and the major influence of money in politics today.

Eventually, though, if the laws are overturned, enough companies will corrupt enough politicians with direct donations that they’ll overreach, and the public reaction will be swift and unstoppable. And when that happens, Exxon Mobil’s money and Wal-Mart’s money and Chevron’s money will be as untouchable as money from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Both of which have smaller economies than either Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart.