Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Glenn to the Mountaintop

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Sex, Lies, and Oil Spills

In general, I don't think much of The Huffington Post, but here's an interesting article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about the oil spill catastrophe in the gulf:

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Kennedy notes the infamous sex scandals at the Minerals Management Service, too. But the fact is, government regulation will probably always be ineffective when the people in charge are ideologically opposed to regulation of any kind and have no real interest in protecting the public.

Similarly, Republicans who hate the government tend to be very poor at running the government. For that reason and many others, I'd say that we're much better off keeping them in the minority, wouldn't you agree?

Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's

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Conservative Magical Thinking (Voodoo Economics)

Voodoo economics - it's still with us. In fact, magical thinking has completely taken over the Republican Party. I took that graphic from Jonathan Chait's recent column in The New Republic, but he has another that's even better. After discussing what we really need to do to shrink the deficit, he continues with this:

So now we're down to raising taxes by 1.5% of GDP and cutting spending by 1.5% of GDP. That's not all that hard. In fact, recent history suggests that as the economy recovers, the deficit will shrink even faster than CBO projects.

Now, it's true that creating the political will for such changes is difficult. But a big part of the reason it's difficult is that conservatives reject out of hand any bargain that includes tax increases. Conservatives revolted against the 1990 budget agreement, which included some tax hikes and significant spending restraint. Republicans unanimously denounced Bill Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction as an economy-killer that would increase spending and the deficit. Here's what actually happened:

See that period in the 1990s, when the light blue spending line goes down and the dark blue revenue line goes up? That's the effect of the deficit reduction deals that conservatives continue to regard as unthinkable. Now, you might say it's a reflection of the 1990s business cycle, and that's partly true. But contrast it with the 1980s business cycle, when the deficit got big and stayed big. Or the 2000s business cycle, when revenues collapsed and only partly recovered even at the peak of the business cycle. The one period of time when federal spending actually declined on a continuous basis was when policymakers had implemented tax hikes. That's the period when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were clawing back the Reagan tax cuts. The periods when outlays were rising were when tax cutters Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in the saddle.

Interesting graph, isn't it? Click to enlarge it, if you wish. Ronald Reagan was president from 1981 to the beginning of 1989. That's when Republicans first decided that deficits didn't matter, or at least didn't matter as much as tax cuts for the rich. The first President Bush (1989-1993) famously - and rightly - labeled it "voodoo economics," before he finally bowed before the lunatics in his party. But he did raise taxes near the end of his term, violating his idiotic "read my lips" pledge, but starting us on the road to shrinking Reagan's deficits.

Bill Clinton served from 1993 to the beginning of 2001. Under his leadership, we cut spending, increased taxes, and didn't just narrow the deficit but actually produced surpluses. Far from being an "economy killer," as the right-wing prophesied, America's economy boomed. But you know what's coming next, don't you? Disastrously, Bush Junior was in office from 2001 to 2009. There's pretty much nothing he did right, but he was certainly a disaster for our economy. Increasing spending, combined with tax cuts for the rich - and starting two wars without paying for them - ending with the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression... Well, it's hard to imagine the Republicans could have done worse if they'd been trying to destroy our country.

President Obama took office at the beginning of 2009, with quite possibly the worst starting conditions of any president in our history. (Franklin D. Roosevelt had the Great Depression, but not even one war, not at the beginning of his first term.) Look at the graph. Why aren't the Republicans hiding their heads in shame? And how could they still be pushing voodoo economics? Chait thinks that tax cuts for the rich is their only real goal. They just don't care much about anything but that.

Certainly Republicans talk a lot about spending cuts, but never seriously. They never propose anything meaningful. Take their latest gimmick, online voting for spending reduction. I like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's take on that:

Now that’s pathetic. Via Steve Benen, Eric Cantor is calling on the public to “vote” on spending cuts — like eliminating $1 million, that’s right, $1 million — in HUD dissertation grants. Because nothing does more to ensure that taxpayer money is well spent than making sure that nobody actually studies what works and what doesn’t.

As Benen points out, however, the real story here is that the sums involved are ludicrously trivial; eliminating everything on Cantor’s list would amount to a rounding error on federal spending.

Meanwhile, of, course, the GOP went wild against real efforts to control spending, crying “death panels.”

The truth is that it has always been like this. Ever since Reagan, the conservative approach has been to talk about the need for smaller government, but refuse to offer any serious proposals for spending cuts, pretending instead that there are large sums being wasted on things nobody wants.

When Republicans talk spending cuts, they're either so vague as to be completely laughable ("cutting waste" is always a good one, since who could be against that?) or ridiculously petty (involving sums that sound impressive to the average voter, but - as Krugman points out - would be no more than the rounding error in the federal budget). A million dollars is a lot of money, yes. But nationally, it amounts to one-third of a penny per person per year.

[Of course, some of those petty cuts show almost incredible ignorance, too. Remember Bobby Jindal wanting to cut funds for volcano monitoring? Or Sarah Palin and fruit fly research? Admittedly, the whole Republican Party has become anti-science in recent years, but these are supposed to the GOP leaders. Oh, yeah, I forgot. Intelligence and education are elitist, aren't they?]

Anyway, here's another graphic I find interesting:

That's probably hard to see. You might want to click on it to get a bigger size. It's from Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic, apparently, but I don't have a link to the associated article. Still, it's simple enough to figure out by itself. It simply compares where people want to cut federal spending with where we're actually spending it.

I always think it's funny to hear tea-baggers who are adamant about protecting their own Social Security and Medicare from cuts (although, how dumb do you have to be to think you need Republicans to protect these programs from Democrats?), and who want even more spending on defense, but expect to balance the budget by cutting foreign aid or environmental protection. Oh, yeah, let's not forget about "waste," the duplicitous politician's favorite target.

Talk about magical thinking! Is it any wonder we laugh at these people? It's either laugh or cry, don't you think? I can laugh as long as they're out of power. But if they ever get back in power again, there will be plenty to cry about. Let's hope Republicans find their sanity again before that!

Get Shorty!

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The Internet: Where religions come to die

How long could you survive in a vacuum?

According to this article, only 30 to 40 seconds. Maybe up to a minute, if conditions were just right and medical care was standing by (though you'd lose consciousness much before that). It's not just the lack of oxygen, since you can hold your breath longer than that, but you need air pressure, too.

I just thought it was interesting.

Dwarf Fortress Notes

I mentioned in a previous post about Dwarf Fortress that the game was free, with the lone developer, Tarn Adams, surviving on donations from his fans. (The game doesn't even bug you to donate. There's just a nondescript PayPal link on his home page.) I thought it was telling that, during the year and a half he'd been working on a new version, he was still getting donations - generally between $2,000 and $5,000 every month.

Well, he released the new version at the end of March. It's still free and still nothing like a commercial game (note the graphics above). But in the month of April, fans donated a total of more than $16,000. Isn't that amazing?

Sure, that's nothing for a mainstream game company, the kind of multinational corporation which requires millions of dollars just to break even. But for fans to voluntarily support a single game developer, dedicated - maybe obsessed - with his own vision, like this,... well, I've got to think that it's really impressive.

I haven't had time to try the new version yet, myself. And I'm not in a big hurry, until the bugs are cleaned up a bit. (In this kind of effort, Adams relies on his fans to identify bugs, which he'll clear up in minor updates. He warned us that it was buggy when he released the new version.) And although I've donated before, I'll do so again when I get around to playing it. Frankly, I'm getting anxious to try it out. It's really an incredible game.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the tales of other players. Earlier, I posted about one of them, an illustrated battle report. Well, there are some nasty "forgotten beasts" in this DF version. Here is another fun example. It shows what happened after a beast with "deadly blood" was defeated.

Keep in mind that these dwarves have emotions. You must keep them content, if not happy. If they get too unhappy (if, for example, they lose friends or family members), they can go berserk or even completely insane. And their actions will tend to make their neighbors unhappy. So you can get a fortress spiraling out of control in violence, suicide, and despair.

I guess that's why the Dwarf Fortress motto is "Losing Is Fun."

Greece is the new France

In the Washington Post, David Weigel mentions how Greece has become the new France - i.e. the new example held up by Republicans in their never-ending quest for bogymen. Before, we were all supposed to be terrified of turning out like France (I never quite understood the rationale there), and the Democrats were somehow supposed to be leading us in that direction. Now, I guess, it's Greece. But still the same old scare tactics, of course.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, though, points out the critical error in their thinking:

Of course, the real rap on Greek fiscal policy is that the Greek government ran deficits even during the good years — not that it’s running deficits in a slump. And it’s true, we did something like that too. But guess who was in power then? Funny about that.

I've been wondering about this, too. Are we Americans really so ignorant that we can't see the difference?  Like Greece, America under George W. Bush - thanks to tax cuts for the rich along with increased spending (including starting two wars without paying for them) - had record-breaking deficits in good economic times. So when disaster struck - again thanks to Republican incompetence - we were in especially dire straits because we started out in a hole.

I don't intend to absolve Democrats of all blame, because they spinelessly went along with pretty much every inane proposal the Republicans pushed. Yet it was the Republicans who led us - for eight years in the White House and 12 years in Congress - so it's hard to deny their primary responsibility, don't you think?

At any rate, deficits aren't always bad. We learned that in the Great Depression, when the Democrats also had to get us out of a hole the Republicans dug. (I'll just point out that the Great Depression taught us the need to regulate our banking industry, too, before I get back to the topic here.) During economic panics, credit dries up and private spending drops, causing businesses to cut payrolls, which causes a further drop in spending, which causes businesses to cut employment even further, etc.

If it's bold enough, deficit-spending by the government can stop this downward spiral, as we've seen in the past year. Combined with stabilizing our banking industry, it can halt the collapse and let us start to grow again. Again, that's exactly what we've seen in the past year or so, since Barack Obama took office. It's not pretty, and it's not speedy - and employment always lags other indicators (such as stock market performance), but it does work.

Where you don't want deficit spending, though, is when times are good, economically. All that does is create asset bubbles (exactly as we saw happen during the Bush administration) and make the next downturn far worse (or, at least, harder to combat). Like America under the Republicans, Greece partied when times were good, apparently thinking that the good times would never end. And so now they're in big, big trouble.

Again, Greece is not in trouble for running deficits now, after the collapse. They're in trouble for running deficits when times were good. If Republicans really want to compare America to Greece, they'll be pointing directly at themselves. Of course, they're counting on us Americans being too ignorant, and with very, very short memories - and on Fox "News" to eagerly encourage both. Sadly, that might actually work.

But in a democracy, we get the kind of government we deserve. If we're dumb enough, ignorant enough, or apathetic enough to give the GOP another chance at destroying our country, I guess we deserve that, huh? But I don't deserve that! Do you?

A Christian Nation?

This is typical of Fox "News," don't you think? It's obvious that they're arguing a particular point of view, and also that they're woefully uninformed about American history. Note the scroll along the bottom: Preying on Prayer?  But no one, absolutely no one, is telling people that they can't pray - or even urging them not to pray. That would also be unconstitutional.

If you're a believer, do you really need the government to tell you to pray? You can't pray without the government's involvement, then? Tell me, how would you feel about the government telling you to praise Allah? Would you also have no problem with government-organized covens? What about our government proclaiming a day of non-prayer, just one special day to support atheism and humanism by urging people to give up their prayer to imaginary supernatural beings? Still no problem with government involvement in religion?

This anchor mistakenly calls Dan Barker's organization the Freedom for Religion Foundation - and the scroll repeats that error - instead of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. And like Sarah Palin, he confuses the Declaration of Independence with our Constitution. (Frankly, that happens so regularly with these people that I'm sure it's not really an accident. They are simply... lying.)

For the record, our Constitution is a secular document, and deliberately so. Our Founding Fathers recognized the perils of religious strife and were intelligent enough to let people make their own decisions about such things. Our government was designed to stay completely neutral. (They didn't even have organized prayers at the Constitutional Convention.)

And as Dan Barker points out, this was confirmed in 1797, when the U.S. Senate unanimously (one of their relatively few unanimous votes) passed the Treaty of Tripoli. Signed by John Adams, the treaty states, in part, "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." No one knew better than our Founding Fathers that America's new government was strictly secular, by their deliberate intent.

"In God We Trust" was not the motto of our new nation. (It was E Pluribus Unum - "Out of many, one.")  That "In God We Trust" phrase was adopted by Congress during the notorious McCarthy era in the 1950's, when godless Communist hysteria was at its height. They also made the phrase mandatory on all U.S. currency (it had been on some money since the Civil War era, but not at our founding), and added "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance (which had gotten along very well for many years without it).

Our founders would have understood that none of these things are constitutional. But politicians are nothing if not cowardly. And supporting the majority religion in any country is always a popular thing to do. You certainly wouldn't expect McCarthy era politicians to stand up for American principles, any more than you can expect that today, right? Well, most of them, anyway. It's just a shame that we Americans are so ignorant about our own history.

(graphic by Shorthand-Hero, via Bay of Fundie)

Incidentally, the above image might not be entirely accurate. Thomas Jefferson was more of a deist than a complete non-believer. Certainly, he wasn't a Christian. In fact, he made his own Bible of sorts by tearing out all of the supernatural stuff in the New Testament - and skipping the Old Testament entirely. (Is it any wonder the Texas Board of Education is trying to remove him from American history books?)

But his personal religious views are beside the point, anyway. Our Founding Fathers were diverse in their beliefs. And even those who were Christian were determined to keep religion separate from our secular government, since that was best for our country and best for religion, too. That was perhaps their most important contribution to the world, the complete separation of church and state. In America, your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, were your own business, not the government's.

The right-wing has been fighting against our Founding Fathers ever since.

Lena Horne, 1917-2010

Lena Horne died yesterday at the age of 92. She was a great singer and actress who struggled against terrible racism in America (and was blacklisted in the 1950's for her progressive political views). According to Wikipedia, some states wouldn't allow films with black performers, so Horne couldn't be a leading lady, but only play a part where she could easily be edited out.

Apparently, she hoped to play the character of Julie LaVerne, a light-skinned back woman married to a white man and "passing" for white, in the 1951 movie, Show Boat. But in America back then, you couldn't show a real black woman married to a white man, even when that was the plot of the story. So Ava Gardner, in dark makeup and with all her songs dubbed, got the part instead.

Well, racism is still common, but we've come a long way since then, and Horne was lucky enough to see those changes.

Sometimes, I'm ashamed to be a human being

I'm ashamed to be the same species as people who do things like this:

An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia has had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child's father reported that she was raped by three men.

Amnesty International said al-Shabab militia, which controls the southern city of Kismayo, arranged for 50 men to stone Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in front of about 1,000 spectators. A lorry load of stones was brought to the stadium for the killing.

According to the article, none of the accused rapists were arrested.

If Science Worked Like Religion

Sleazy Campaigning

Yesterday, with the election just a couple of days away, I received a sleazy campaign flyer from the Nebraska Republican Party targeting my incumbent state senator, Danielle Conrad. This slick document noted that she was stopped for driving while intoxicated just over three years ago (which I already knew), but was not arrested because state senators are "privileged from arrest during the session."

There are a couple of things about this that struck me as rather bizarre. The first is that our single-house legislature, Nebraska's Unicameral, is officially nonpartisan. I've been getting mail from the GOP regarding this nonpartisan office, so I assume that Conrad must be either a Democrat or an Independent. But I wouldn't know otherwise, because this is not a partisan position.

Of course, Nebraska is a solidly Republican state, even after the disasters the GOP has brought us in the past decade or so - and even after the extremist turn of the whole party in recent years. (I have a hard time understanding how anyone can still be a Republican these days. But that's another story.)  I don't think that there's a single state office where the Republican candidate in Nebraska is even seriously challenged, so they probably have lots of money to spend on officially nonpartisan races like this.

And the party really doesn't like the fact that we have a nonpartisan legislature. Indeed, they make sure that it's still as partisan as possible. Indeed, the Unicameral maybe be nonpartisan, but it's overwhelmingly filled with Republicans, just like everywhere else in the state. And that brings me to the second bizarre thing about this political flyer.

It doesn't actually claim that a drinking problem is reason to vote against an incumbent state senator. No, instead, we're supposed to vote against Conrad as a protest against the law that kept her from being arrested and prosecuted. But as I noted, our legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, and has been for decades. We have a Republican governor, too. If the GOP wanted to change the law, they could certainly do so. I don't think that there's any question about that. So they're urging us to make a protest vote in favor of the party that's actually responsible for this law!

This is just sleazy campaigning from the Republican Party, no more than that. Of course, that's no big surprise, is it? And in sleaze, I don't think that the Nebraska GOP even comes close to the national party. After all, they didn't actually lie in this broadside, as far as I can tell. For them, that's surprisingly ethical, I guess.

But another funny thing is that I know absolutely nothing about Danielle Conrad's opponent in this election, except that he's a Republican. I've been getting lots of mail from the Nebraska GOP, all loudly proclaiming the party affiliation of their candidate (for an officially nonpartisan position). But I haven't heard anything else about him - nothing about his political philosophy, nothing about his priorities in the legislature, not a single word about how he'd be a better state senator than Conrad.

Danielle Conrad actually came to my door a week or two ago. She was going door-to-door talking to constituents. But the GOP wants us to vote for her opponent based solely on the fact that he's a Republican. Apparently, nothing else about him is supposed to be important at all. I suppose we're supposed to assume that he's another conservative nonentity who will simply follow the party line in all things - like pretty much every GOP politician these days.

Well, the sad thing is that this will probably work. Nebraska is overwhelmingly Republican, and nothing seems likely to change that (especially after the Democrats elected a non-white President). And our memories seem to be as short as those in the rest of America. We'll see.

Health Care Reform starts to kick in

To the Oklahoma Lawmakers

This must be why I'm so hairy!

(graphic from Science, via the BBC)

Despite the attempt at humor in my title, this is really a fascinating development. Scientists comparing the genome of Neanderthals with that of modern humans have discovered that the former species lives on, apparently, in most of us. Yes, this seems to indicate some interbreeding between Neanderthals and our own species.

Fascinating, isn't it? According to this article on the BBC News website, and to this one in the Guardian (London), modern humans outside of Africa contain between 1% and 4% of genes which came originally from Neanderthals. Previous thinking had been that Neanderthals had not contributed to our own gene pool, that they'd lived alongside modern humans for tens of thousands of years, but without mixing sexually. It's good to know that Neanderthals have left at least a little of themselves behind, don't you think?

If you're interested in the details, here is a good blog post describing the history of our thinking about Neanderthals, from the initial discovery of a partial skull in 1856 (remains found earlier weren't recognized as being from an extinct human species). It shows you how science works, constantly asking questions and painstakingly discovering new details which get us closer to the complete truth. As you know - or certainly should - science isn't any particular dogma, but rather a process. Science welcomes questions, but you must have evidence to back up any assertions.

In this case, briefly, you must understand that Africans are much more diverse genetically than the rest of us. That's because we evolved in Africa, and only a small portion of humanity (containing only some of our genetic diversity) left the continent. They spread across the planet, but each migration involved only a part of the local population. That's why Native Americans, for example, at the end of a very long migration route - or, rather, a series of migrations, each involving only a part of the local population - are relatively poor in genetic diversity.

Africans have the greatest genetic diversity, because they are the descendants of the majority who stayed put. But for the most part (modern travel is starting to change this), they don't have this small proportion of Neanderthal genes, which were apparently acquired soon after my own ancestors left the continent (we conclude this because the rest of the world shares them). That's how we can tell that they interbred.

After all, Neanderthals and we homo sapiens share 99.7% of our DNA, since we had a common ancestor 400,000 years ago. Obviously, it's not that it's unusual to find the same genes in both species. But when Africans don't have these genes, it's good evidence that they appeared in Neanderthals after that species split from our own and appear in other populations of modern humans only because of interbreeding.

Apparently, these aren't particularly important genes. Diversity in general is valuable, and I don't think we know exactly what all of these genes do, but they don't seem to be especially favored by evolution. Also, this isn't guaranteed proof that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. In science, after all, everything is tentative, always subject to being overthrown by newer evidence. There is never any proof, only evidence. And there are other explanations that could account for this, though they seem much less likely.

The neat thing is that these were people, just like us. Very similar to us, in fact. They were stockier and stronger than the long-limbed modern humans who emerged from Africa afterward, but they had brains about the size of our own. They made tools and even jewelry. Their disappearance was a tragedy, just as our own extinction would be. So it's wonderful to think that they might live on, at least to a small extent, in us.

Arizona, explained by crayons

(from 9GAG, via Comedy Central's Indecision)

Alpha Dog of the Week

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