A River Of Denial

Now that reader PT has joined the rational community on economic policy, the above may not be necessary. Perhaps his credulous claim about lack of climate change in the last sixteen years has succumbed to whatever clearing of the fog occurred, allowing his monetary awakening.

I saw the video in this article, worth reading in full, which has much more to say about climate change denialism. I will, too, in an upcoming newspaper column which, among other things, puzzles over the fact that denialism is exclusively a Republican thing. I'm starting to think they're a different species, at least when it comes to brain function. I guess maybe shoot-first-damn-the-facters were necessary back in the days when we rode dinosaurs to get away from aliens. But nowadays, they're just getting in the way.

The Facts

And There's This...

Seems like a nice followup to my previous post.

Richard Feynman, of course, is the Nobel Prize winning physicist whose statement about his atheism (nice little video) is one of my favorites, and which I've paraphrased many times as, "I'd rather live with doubt than have answers which might be wrong."

Or we could just watch this and enjoy it for its own sake.

A True Christian (?)

I followed the link to this essay from Andrew Sullivan's place. If this man's Christianity were the norm, and if, to the extent that "Christianity" has come to infuse our nation's politics, it were of his variety rather than that of today's teabagging, hateful, regressive, denialist, theocratic, anti-science Republican party, I'd have a hell of a lot less to write about. It's a long essay, which ends thusly:

... I know that I am picking and choosing, and that by many standards I've failed to meet the requirements of being a Christian. Many, like those with the banners at the sports events, take John 3:16 to contain the core message of the Gospels. I also claim to know what the core message of the Bible is: love and forgiveness (1 John 4:8, 1 Corinthians 13:13, Matthew 5:38), and I claim that there is much extraneous stuff too, which can have little to do with our understanding of the essence of Christianity: the rules concerning marriage, the disregard for animals, the cosmic significance of crucifixion. How do I justify my picking and choosing? Well, who wants me to justify it? The hoarse-voiced goon at the sports match shouting about how Jesus Christ died for my sins? What concern is he of mine? 

Those who know me or have read me will probably know that I have often claimed that I am an atheist. I would like to stop doing this, but if I had to justify myself, I would say that it is for fear of being confused with that blowhard with the 'John 3:16' banner that I am unforthcoming about what I actually believe. I am infinitely closer, in the condition of my soul, to the people who feel God's absence-- the reasons for this feeling are a profound theological problem, and one might say that it is only smugness that enables people, atheists and dogmatists alike, to avoid grappling with this problem. I am with the people who detect God's hand, perhaps without even realizing it, where the smug banner-holder sees only sin: in jungle music, dirty jokes, seduction, and swearing. I am with the preacher who puts out a gospel album, then goes to prison on fraud and drug charges for a while, then puts out a hip-grinding soul album, and then another gospel album. I am with the animals, who can't even read, but can still talk to the saints of divine things. I am sooner an atheist, if what we understand by Christianity is a sort of supernatural monarchism; if we understand by it that God is love, though, then, I say, I am a Christian.

Of course, it's sort of a copout: God is love. Who isn't down with that? With no difficulty or cynicism whatsoever, I can look around me and feel what some might call love, for the world in which we live (especially if you took a few of its humans out of it.) That sense of pleasure, or spirituality, or luckiness to be alive -- at least for those lucky enough to be able to live without (much) fear, with enough to eat, and with shelter -- as easily sits with non-believers as with believers of whatever faith. So the writer, typically, glosses over a lot; but not near as much as the guy with the sign at the game.

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Sunday Column

Here's my latest column in our local paper:

In 2012, we’ve just learned, more U.S. soldiers died from suicide than from combat. Think about that. More deaths from suicide than from battle. Then consider how much we love war in this country, how we glorify it. How we tear up as we salute our troops in a parade, how we stick magnets on our cars and trucks and call it supporting them. How little most people know of what wars do to those who fight them; how easily they rattle swords, knowing, far removed from it all, they’ll not be the ones asked to swing them.

 I served in Vietnam, and although my injuries were mild compared to nearly all others, I have a Purple Heart. As a doctor there, I saw things, and I think I know of what I speak; enough to become infuriated every time some elected official or talking head agitates for the next war while comparing negotiation to appeasement. Or treason. Unless we fight a war every now and then, they tell us, we’re weak. Gotta do more than just shake that big stick. 

 It’s pretty easy to fight a war from the comfort of a couch, from the perch of a pundit. If some wars are necessary – and, given the nastiness of so much of humankind, I know they sometimes are – we should pay a lot more attention to the people we ask to fight them, whom we teach to kill and then to live with it, and with the constant awareness that they might be killed as well; and then assume the experience will have no effect, figure they can return to the world as if nothing happened. We’re better at the physical part than we used to be. Vietnam taught us a lot about treating battlefield injuries, and lives are being saved that would have been lost in other times. But, within the military and without, there remains the tendency to ignore the psychological toll taken by war, or to view it as some sort of weakness. It’s not. It’s humanity. What’s left of it.  

As we subject our young men and women to war, we have an obligation to address and take responsibility for what we do to them in the process. Giving the legless a new limb makes us feel good, as if it’s all O.K. again. But acknowledging that, in sending them off to war, we’re causing unseen and maybe irreparable mental pain as well, is a lot harder. 

Maybe I’m too much of a cynic, but when I see those “support our troops” pronouncements on vehicles, it bugs me, as I wonder what their owners think it means. Many of them, I’m sure, are families of soldiers or have been soldiers themselves, who’ve done enough. But I can’t help thinking the majority are folks who, despite being sincere in the sentiment, feel they’ve discharged their duty by slapping on the sticker. I try to imagine what would happen if I stopped by with a petition and asked them to sign it: one that demands a war surtax to pay for the care of returning veterans for as long as they need it, to help them live with the damage done to them in our name. To pay for research and treatment of traumatic brain injury and PTSD. To prevent the next suicide. 

If “support our troops” means anything at all, first and foremost it’s recognizing that war, even when necessary, is an awful thing. It means considering war the last of the last resorts, and voting for representatives who agree. (It might also mean having a Secretary of Defense like Chuck Hagel.) It most certainly means willingness to spend whatever it takes to protect our soldiers from physical and mental harm; and when it happens anyway, to provide them the resources they need to deal with it if they make it back home. And that’ll cost real money, the kind you can’t get by cutting taxes and pretending revenue will magically roll in anyway. (Senate Rs filibustered a vets’ jobs bill!) It might even take not building another aircraft carrier or weapon system the military doesn’t even want, and which won’t stop a cyber attack or suitcase bomb anyway; and spending the savings on veterans’ care. 

Supporting our troops takes more than a buck ninety-five for a car magnet, and doing a slow-clap when a soldier walks by.

Why They Do It

Interesting article about Senators who filibuster and how they profit from it:

I’ve detailed before how lobbyists, even agents for foreign governments, have secured Republican filibusters at a shocking rate. The cottage industry around monetizing filibusters has grown rapidly since Obama’s first election. From 2009 to 2010, there were more filibusters filed than during the 1950s through 1960s combined, as The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel observed.

The interesting dynamic for me is, how money in politics has incentivized this contraction of democratic governance. Here are just a few examples of how powerful industries have usurped the normal gears of government, and used Senate obstruction to push policies that punish ordinary Americans and the environment:
• Senator David Vitter (R-LA) placed holds on Obama EPA nominees to delay scientific assessments on the health risks of formaldehyde, which is produced by some of his largest campaign contributors.
• According to a new report from Public Campaign Action Fund, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has collected a hundreds of thousands in funds from the same industries he has protected with filibusters, particularly from oil companies and the finance sector. McConnell has led filibusters to protect oil subsidies, to block efforts to mitigate the mortgage crisis, and against campaign disclosure reforms.
• Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) placed a “blanket hold” on every Obama nominee to force the administration to accept a Northrop Grumman contract to build a $35 billion refueling tanker in Mobile, Alabama. Northrop Grumman is a major Shelby donor.
• Senator John McCain (R-AZ) blocked the nomination of one of Obama’s most important Department of Labor nominees for months, which many believe led the US Chamber of Commerce to aggressively support McCain during a contentious primary with a Tea Party–backed candidate in 2010.
• Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), a close ally of the oil and gas industry, temporarily blocked Obama’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget to extract an administration promise to allow more oil drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.
• Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) filibustered the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill in order to demand a policy that prevents FedEx drivers from unionizing. FedEx is Corker’s third-highest campaign donor.
At the nexus of all of this obstruction are lobbyists who are making a small fortune negotiating these tactics.

I think few if any of us fully understand the extent to which our legislative process is corrupted. Clearly, it's a bipartisan fact. But since Obama's election, it's been Rs that have used and abused the system. I'd thought it was mostly a matter of political gamesmanship; trying to keep him from success so they might regain power. How wrong I was.

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Speaking Of Deficit Reduction...

This article (from which the above graph is taken) summarizes a couple of others saying the same thing: we're already on a nearly-sustainable trajectory toward fiscal sanity.

See the orange line in the image? That shows the debt trajectory under the status quo -- which includes the Budget Control Act approved in 2011 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act (the bipartisan Biden/McConnell fiscal deal) signed into law last week. Under this scenario, the debt, as a percentage of the economy, will dip through the end of the decade before climbing again. 

Which is why that red line in the image is interesting. 

As the CBPP sees it, if policymakers agreed to about $1.4 trillion in additional debt reduction, the country would be on a "sustainable path." This does not, to answer your next question, include the sequestration savings, which are due to kick in next month.
In other words, for all the handwringing, if policymakers can agree to a balanced deal to replace the sequester sometime over the next seven weeks, they'll practically be done with debt reduction for a long time.

I admit I'm not enough of a student of the finer points of economics to judge all this. But I like graphs, and this one seems more encouraging than one might assume from the rhetoric coming from the teabagging zones of D.C.

Reduction Reality, Sort Of

I think we have much further to go in reducing deficits, but one thing is pretty clear: when Rs say President Obama has proposed no spending cuts, they're, as usual, full of it. This article is clarifying.

So where does all this deficit reduction leave us? Since the start of fiscal year 2011, Congress and the president have cut about $1.5 trillion in programmatic spending, raised about $630 billion in new revenue, and generated about $300 billion in interest savings, for a combined total of more than $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction. The result is a substantial cut in how much publicly held debt the country is expected to hold 10 years from now. Instead of reaching nearly 93 percent of GDP, debt is now projected to total about 83 percent of GDP—fully 10 points lower. And while that won’t be enough to finally put the budget onto sustainable footing, it is a massive improvement. In fact, it’s about two-thirds of the way toward stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio. 

It’s been a bumpy few fiscal years. But don’t let all the twists and turns obscure the simple fact that we actually have accomplished a significant amount of deficit reduction along the way. Three-quarters of that deficit reduction has been achieved through spending cuts totaling $1.8 trillion, with only one-quarter coming from revenue increases.

I don't doubt there's a certain amount of semantic hanky and panky here: "reductions" vs less of an increase, etc. But the point to be made is that, what you hear from RWS™ and teabaggRs notwithstanding, President Obama and Ds have been willing to address spending way more than Rs have been willing to address revenue. If it's ever going to be solved Rs have further to go than Ds. And defense spending must be on the table.

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Born Every Minute

In another "sun rises in East" revelation, some are pointing out how the credulous are being taken for a ride by their right-wing heroes; now, it's not just the phony media ginning up fear and loathing. It's the way in which they dishonestly separate those gullible followers from their money, for personal enrichment.

FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires. And what are people who donate to this grass-roots conservative organization funded mostly by a few very rich people getting for their hard-earned money? In addition to paying Dick Armey $400,000 a year for 20 years to stay away, FreedomWorks also apparently spent more than a million dollars paying Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about FreedomWorks, in order to convince listeners to send FreedomWorks money that FreedomWorks would then give to Limbaugh and Beck. It’s a pretty simple con...  

[...] 

This complete contempt for the audience is unique to the right-wing press — if the Huffington Post made its money selling snake oil, liberals would complain. The recent trickle of complaints about the major nonprofit money-making groups, like FreedomWorks and CrossroadsUSA, has come solely because those groups failed to win the election. If Romney, or even a couple of Senate candidates, had won, no one would mind that the two groups enriched their boards of directors on the backs of tens of thousands of small donors. Right-wing reaction to Armey’s admission to Media Matters has thus far been outrage …that Armey talked to Media Matters.

Of course, that's really just a microcosm of the whole scene: the entire teabagger/RWS™/Fox "news" three-way is nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme aimed at the easily manipulated and happily distracted. Bought and taught by such as the self-serving Koch Brothers, manipulated by seductive deceivers like Glenn Beck into thinking they're acting in their own interests instead of those of their behind-the-curtain string-pullers, Tea Party people are dumbly doing their own long run destruction.

And yet, perfectly propagandized and brilliantly brainwashed, teabaggers rise up in indignant disagreement with anyone who points out the obvious. Unless they somehow wise up themselves, they'll be the end of us all. But since it hasn't happened yet, I can't imagine what it'd take to uneye the pulled wool.

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Consequences

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While We Stand Around With...

OSLO | Wed Jan 2, 2013 1:03pm EST (Reuters) - An agreement by almost 200 nations to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 will be far more costly than taking action now to tackle climate change, according to research published on Wednesday. 

Quick measures to cut emissions would give a far better chance of keeping global warming within an agreed U.N. limit of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times to avert more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels. 

"If you delay action by 10, 20 years you significantly reduce the chances of meeting the 2 degree target," said Keywan Riahi, one of the authors of the report at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. 

[...] 

The study indicated that an immediate global price of $20 a ton on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, would give a roughly 60 percent chance of limiting warming to below 2C.
Wait until 2020 and the carbon price would have to be around $100 a ton to retain that 60 percent chance... 

"The window for effective action on climate change is closing quickly," wrote Steve Hatfield-Dodds of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia in a separate commentary in Nature.

And while we're waiting, there's this.

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Five Minutes

That's all it'd take to get everything done. Mitch McConnell has announced that, after allowing a piddling 60 billion or so in annual increased tax revenue (while agreeing to a deal that raised the projected debt by four trillion bucks), he's done talking about taxes. Now, he says, it's all about cutting spending. So "balance," to him, is allowing 60 billion in increased revenue and doing the rest by, presumably, cutting spending by the remaining 900 billion of our deficit. Whadda guy.

So, fine. Let's just get this thing over with: Ds announce the amount they want in new revenue, the amount they want to cut in defense spending, and their bottom-line acceptable reductions in Medicare and Social Security. Rs do the same. Then we split the damn difference. Let 'em go back on break and not show up again until the next budget is due. (And if we don't pay them while they're gone, we'll have less of a deficit to fix.)

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Unbalanced

I know I'm never going to convince anyone not already singing in the choir, but the above graphic, from here, is just another in an endless list of examples of Fox "news" right-wing bias in reporting -- or not reporting -- the news. In this specific case, the connections of US evangelical and Fox's favored politicians to the Ugandan horror is precisely, I'm certain, why they're silent on the matter.

The non-story of a non-existent Benghazi coverup. The non-horror of the rounds-off-to-zero membership New Black Panther Party, accused of... standing there (or, more recently, of opening doors for little old ladies): those they cover, whipping their stupefied followers into paranoid panic.

Paranoia runs wild in this land. I don't get it, I don't understand why it's such a powerful force in our politics, but there it is. And Fox "news" sure knows how to milk it and to use it for their benefit, and that of the corporations and money behind their scenes. It's prestidigitation of the first order: look over there, and don't bother with what's happening right in front of you. Their viewers have no idea, and don't want one, of what's happening to them.

Wham Bam Thank You Spam

Okay. Sorry. Gonna go back to word verification. Spam is driving me crazy. If it were a proportionately smaller part of the picture, maybe it wouldn't be so annoying; but the ratio of spam to actual comments is about 50:1, maybe higher.

Hasta la vista, spammers. If real people want to comment, they'll have to puzzle out the pictures.

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Truly Awful Statistic

This, to me, is gut-wrenching:

More soldiers took their own lives than died in combat during 2012, new Department of Defense figures show. The Army's suicide rate has climbed by 9 percent since the military branch launched its suicide-prevention campaign in 2009.

Most people -- especially those America-fuck-yeah types who so love war and like to stick magnets on their cars and call it a day -- have no damn idea what war does to those who fight them. Same with those priapic militia types who've been stockpiling weapons like squirrels and nuts, playing war games and voting for teabaggRs, just itching for a not-fight with a not-real enemy.

Yeah. We're exceptional all right.

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