The Wall Street Journal’s most popular article today was an editorial by one Professor Michael J. Boskin entitled, “Get Ready for a 70% Marginal Tax Rate,” and it was a doozy. It hearkened back to bygone days at university, when we carelessly tossed haphazardly written bullshit under the professor’s door a minute after the deadline, filled with neat little tricks and techniques designed to give the appearance of substance to whatever flimsy excuse for an argument we had to present that week.

Maybe it’s because Boskin’s article reads like a sophomore homework assignment. “First, as college students learn in Econ 101, higher marginal rates cause real economic harm,” he tells us. (I guess they don’t teach history students the same thing.) Good, we’ve established an axiom. But Professor Boskin, how can we tell?

The combined marginal rate from all taxes is a vital metric, since it heavily influences incentives in the economy—workers and employers, savers and investors base decisions on after-tax returns.

So, the metric for how much higher marginal tax rates are affecting the economy is… the combined marginal rate? Leaving aside the circular logic for the moment, questions arise: how are these tax rates combined, and what is a marginal tax rate, anyway?

The current top federal rate of 35% is scheduled to rise to 39.6% in 2013 (plus one-to-two points from the phase-out of itemized deductions for singles making above $200,000 and couples earning above $250,000). The payroll tax is 12.4% for Social Security (capped at $106,000), and 2.9% for Medicare (no income cap). While the payroll tax is theoretically split between employers and employees, the employers’ share is ultimately shifted to workers in the form of lower wages.

Later, he gives us a sample question, assuming taxes will be broadly increased across the board:

It would be a huge mistake to imagine that the cumulative, cascading burden of many tax rates on the same income will leave the middle class untouched. Take a teacher in California earning $60,000. A current federal rate of 25%, a 9.5% California rate, and 15.3% payroll tax yield a combined income tax rate of 45%.

How does that work? Well, I got out a calculator (you can, too! it’s interactive!) and checked the professor’s math:

60,000×(1−(.095+(.153÷2)) = 49,710

49,710÷60,000 = 82%, or 18% tax rate before federal taxes

Federal taxes take 25% off the rest, leaving 62% of 60,000;

100-62 = a 38% effective tax rate.

How did he get to 45%, I hear you cry? Well, 60,000×(1-(.095+.153))×.75 ends up being a 43.5% effective rate, which is 45% if you round up to the nearest odd number, for some reason. But that would mean Boskin is counting the full payroll tax, half of which is paid by the employer, entirely as lost income in terms of the total tax bill. Why, by those standards, the teacher is actually making $64,590 a year (instead of $60,000 as stated). Also, our teacher takes no deductions whatsoever.

With failures in math and logic, the bigger problem lies in the fact that nowhere does Boskin say what “marginal” tax rates actually are and how they might differ from the other tax rates he yammers on about throughout the piece. Marginal taxes are those paid on the portion of income above a series of cutoffs. So, for example, California’s citizens face a haunting marginal tax rate (on wages only, not capital gains) of 44.1% including state and federal taxes; but that’s the most anyone can pay in taxes anywhere in the state (barring property, sales and other sin taxes, of course). Now I bet you’re wondering, how many people actually pay that rate? Well, here’s a look at income inequality in the United States:

The bottom 99% receive between 76-79% of the wages (which is what we’re talking about here) and the same source as the graph above says that in “9 out of 10 households — income [is] below $104,696” and that the average income for these bottom 90% is $30,374 (which includes capital gains). By smoothly transitioning from the injustice of taxing the absolute richest people in the country–a.k.a. the “marginal tax rate”–to the inflated woes of a poor beleaguered California public servant (who is making, one might point out, just about twice the average for the bottom-90% bracket) and threatening Wall Street Journal readers with a projected 70% marginal rate on wages, Boskin has all the bluster he needs to distract from the argument’s essential flaws. One that jumps out at me is the following paragraph:

Nobody—rich, middle-income or poor—can afford to have the economy so burdened. Higher tax rates are the major reason why European per-capita income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is about 30% lower than in the United States—a permanent difference many times the temporary decline in the recent recession and anemic recovery.

Besides the intentionally misleading wording that leaves the reader to decide whether the OECD specifically blames higher tax rates in Europe for the comparative difference in per-capita income with the U.S., or whether they just operate a website that features statistics for the whole of the European Union (or maybe even all of Europe as a continent), the truth is that the rich can be so burdened. Not only can they be so burdened, but the idea that lower taxes on the extremely wealthy somehow translate into economic benefit for the rest of the economy is flat wrong. You can see exactly how flat I mean:

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Average Federal Taxes by Income Group, “Average After-Tax Household Income,” June, 2010.

You see, no matter what the after-tax income of the top marginal earners, since 1979, it hasn’t made one lick of difference in real take-home pay for the rest of us. On the other hand, the wealthiest 5% now make what the wealthiest 1% used to make way back then, and the top 1% themselves are taking in money on what, to the rest of us, looks like a vastly distorted curve.

1979, it turns out, was not only the year Reagan began to return our country to greatness by running for president, but also the year average wages basically stopped growing. Here’s the best part. Baskin acknowledges this problem, and then waves it away as if trying to swat a persistent mosquito:

Some argue the U.S. economy can easily bear higher pre-Reagan tax rates. They point to the 1930s-1950s, when top marginal rates were between 79% and 94%, or the Carter-era 1970s, when the top rate was about 70%. But those rates applied to a much smaller fraction of taxpayers and kicked in at much higher income levels relative to today.

There were also greater opportunities for sheltering income from the income tax. The lower marginal tax rates in the 1980s led to the best quarter-century of economic performance in American history. Large increases in tax rates are a recipe for economic stagnation, socioeconomic ossification, and the loss of American global competitiveness and leadership.

Back to the history books: in the 50′s and 60′s, when we were doing the exact opposite of “economic stagnation, socioeconomic ossification, and the loss of American global competitiveness and leadership,” marginal tax rates were between 94% and 70%. Not to mention the entire article is a long strawman directed at imagined increases in taxation connected to the weight of our deficit, $1 trillion of which were awarded as tax breaks to the wealthy in the last 10 years–and look how well that turned out.

So Boskin fudges the facts and the figures and the history and drips a little Milton Friedman blood on the altar of no-taxes. Who is this guy, anyway? Only last year, Boskin issued a screed on the same WSJ editorial page savaging the totalitarian impulse to destroy the truth with faulty numbers:

Politicians and scientists who don’t like what their data show lately have simply taken to changing the numbers. They believe that their end—socialism, global climate regulation, health-care legislation, repudiating debt commitments, la gloire française—justifies throwing out even minimum standards of accuracy. It appears that no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not budget, not job or cost estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO issuing such massaged numbers would land in jail.

Well, at least his motives are purely scientific–Boskin is, after all, a humble Stanford economics professor. It’s not like he’s in that rareified top echelon of earners who are actually paying the top marginal tax rate, he’s just a neoclassical economist with a real ideological fervor, right? Wrong.

Boskin happens to be a member of Exxon Mobil’s board of directors and has been for over 15 years. He also sits on the boards of Oracle, Japan’s Shinsei Bank, and European telecom giant Vodafone. He also happens to be the Friedman chair and a fellow at conservative think-tank The Hoover Institution, named after one of America’s favorite presidents (definitely in the top 100). So, this guy knows a thing or two about corporate number-crunching. And, history!

In Argentina, President Néstor Kirchner didn’t like the political and budget hits from high inflation. After a politicized personnel purge in 2002, he changed the inflation measures. Conveniently, the new numbers showed lower inflation and therefore lower interest payments on the government’s inflation-linked bonds. Investor and public confidence in the objectivity of the inflation statistics evaporated. His wife and successor Cristina Kirchner is now trying to grab the central bank’s reserves to pay for the country’s debt.

Most interestingly, Boskin was once head of the Boskin Commission, which convinced the government that… here, I’ll just let Wikipedia explain, it’s easier:

Its final report, titled “Toward A More Accurate Measure Of The Cost Of Living” and issued on December 4, 1996, concluded that the CPI [Consumer Price Index] overstated inflation by about 1.1 percentage points per year in 1996 and about 1.3 percentage points prior to 1996.

The report was important because inflation, as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is used to index the annual payment increases in Social Security and other retirement and compensation programs. This implied that the federal budget had increased by more than it should have, and that projections of future budget deficits were too large. The original report calculated that the overstatement of inflation would add $148 billion to the deficit and $691 billion to the national debt by 2006.

I guess Stanford’s Irony Department is really great.

The economic turmoil of the past year hasn’t just thrown Wall Street into disarray—it’s causing ideological havoc in Washington. The two major parties are just as confused by the crisis as the rest of America, and party lines are becoming blurred just at the point where the Democrats seem poised to steamroll the Republicans on a national level.

For years, the lines were clearly drawn in the sand—Democrats were Keynesians who wanted to increase regulation, and Republicans were free-market devotees who wanted to minimize government intervention in the markets. The last month has seen a startling realignment in Congress—the White House and moderate Democrats and Republicans lining up to hammer out the largest government intervention since FDR, while left wing Democrats and right wing Republicans banded together against this bipartisanship and the $700 billion bailout.

“There are a few hundred socialists in Congress,” observed a friend during the first bailout hearings, “and one fiscal conservative—Bernie Sanders!” Sanders, who opposed the bailout, is the only Socialist and one of two independents in Congress (the other, of course, is Joe Lieberman, essentially booted out of the Democratic party over his support of the Iraq war). The major news networks all stumped for the bailout as soon as it was announced, warning that there would be a major drop in the markets if the bill did not pass. It seemed a foregone conclusion, said every newscaster, that Congress would act swiftly to “save the economy.” There was only one snag. Poll results, announced a few days into the crisis, revealed that Americans were against the bailout by huge margins.

Let’s look at the vote counts in the House, where every Representative is up for re-election in less than a month: on the first vote, where the bailout bill was defeated, 40% of Democrats and 67% of Republicans voted “No.” On the second vote, 27% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans voted against the bill, which then passed. Both presidential candidates said they were in favor of the plan, with McCain even “suspending” his campaign to go back to Washington and work for the bill’s passage. (If you want to gauge McCain’s legislative effectiveness, note that the bill only passed when the Arizona senator left Washington.)

When both major-party candidates are in agreement with each other and disagreement with the majority of Americans in an election year, you have to wonder how well American democracy is working. On the eve of the first presidential debate, when it wasn’t certain whether McCain would even show up, there was one thing which was undeniable: no minor party candidate would be allowed to speak. Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, Green candidate Cynthia McKinney or independent Ralph Nader could have provided counterpoints to McCain and Obama’s support for the bill, but each was locked out of the debate. Barr is polling about 1% nationally, but 4% in his home state of Georgia, where he may draw enough Republican votes away from McCain to make the state competitive.

About a third of the American electorate consistently identify as independents, and the indepenedent vote is the most coveted prize in a national election. A popular theme for both major party candidates is either “bi-partisanship” (for McCain) or “post-partisanship” (for Obama). But why is it that there are only two independents in all of Congress? Why does dissatisfaction with the two-party system (which a Zogby poll in 2007 cited as 67%) have little to no effective outlet across America?

The answer, according to political scientists, is that America’s voting system is the least democratic of any democracy. That’s because we use “first-past-the-post,” or, in poli sci jargon, “single member district plurality” voting. Simply put, whoever gets the most votes wins a single seat in each race. That may sound like common sense, but it leads to all sorts of unintended consequences—the most important is called “Duverger’s Law.”

Maurice Duverger, a French social scientist, was the first to publish the theory that voting systems like ours tend to produce a two-party system. When there are third parties on the ballot, as we saw in the 1992 (and arguably 2000) election cycle, their effects are limited to being “spoilers” for the parties most closely aligned with their platforms, helping mututal enemies more than anyone else. With only two parties, the actual platforms of each becomes secondary to vague cultural appeals, boiling down to “liberal” vs. “conservative,” whatever those terms actually mean. Since two-party systems end in a competition for the independent vote, parties are in a constant state of coming apart at the ideological seams.

There are many other types of voting systems, but the one that has gotten the most traction in the United States is called “instant runoff voting,” or IRV, where voters rank the candidates by preference. For example, if you were a Florida voter in 2000, you could have voted 1 for Nader and 2 for Gore, or 1 for Buchanan and 2 for Bush; when the votes are tallied, second preference votes are redistributed from the lowest vote-getters until an absolute majority of voters are shown to prefer one candidate over another. IRV is used in Australia and Ireland; many other countries use similar systems to fill more than one seat (imagine Congressional elections where Representatives are elected on a state-wide ballot, and apportioned according to the overall percentage of votes by party, instead of district-by-district plurality).

IRV, which is part of the platform for Nader and both Libertarian and Green parties, has already been adopted by a few dozen local governments and minor party primaries around the country—it eliminates the costs of having a spearate runoff election for multi-candidate races. Recently, Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina implemented IRV for all overseas and military voters, and cities from Cary, NC to San Francisco have adopted IRV locally.

Interestingly enough, both Obama and McCain are on the record as supporting IRV, according to Fairvote.org; Obama voted for IRV in Illinois municipal and primary elections, and McCain urged the voters of Alaska to adopt IRV in 2002, saying, “Instant runoff voting will lead to good government because voters will elect leaders who have the support of a majority. Elected leaders will be more likely to listen to all and cities will be able to enjoy big tax savings and keep majority rule.” There has only been one call to implement IRV on a national level—a 2005 bill sponsored by current third-party candidate Cynthia McKinney, when she was a Georgia Democrat.

What IRV does (besides make election night vote-counting much more interesting) is allow third parties to have an impact on policy and provide an opportunity for wider debate on the issues. This is a lot more complicated than it sounds—Australia, for example, has had tons of minor parties with names like the Non-custodial Parents Party, the Fishing Party, the What Women Want party, or the No Aircraft Noise Party. Critics of IRV contend that it gives minor parties undue influence over general elections, and many point out that one of the two major party candidates usually wins anyway.

On the other hand, preferential voting doesn’t always lead to multi-party democracy, and there are important exceptions to Duverger’s Law. The recent election in Canada (which also uses first-past-the-post) underscored this point; Canadian federalism gave rise to certain parties which compete on a national level but only operate in parts of the country—notably the Bloc Quebecois, which only runs candidates in Quebec, or the New Democratic Party, whose power base is traditionally in the western provinces. The Canadian Green party, by the way, got 7% of the popular vote, but no seats in Parliament, and many progressive Canadians are heaping scorn on Green voters in the wake of the reelection of a Conservative minority government.

By the way, there is a simpler and supposedly more democratic voting system than IRV, which has become all the rage in voting systems analysis—range voting—where voters rate each candidate from 1-10.

No matter the method, what is clear is that breaking free of our two-party system will require a state-by-state campaign to change the way we elect our leaders, and most likely the elimination of our wildly unpopular Electoral College. So if you want third parties to have a real impact, you’re better off organizing a state-wide ballot initiative than casting what amounts to a protest vote for Nader or Barr. If a third party gets a real foothold in Congress, they can make a real policy impact. Otherwise, we’re still stuck with the lesser of two evils.

Don’t you at least want a wider variety of evils to from which to choose?

The component of the price of oil due to speculation was always kind of an unknown quantity. At the height of the oil bubble this summer, with prices at $150, someone suggested to Congress that up to a third of the price was actually due to market manipulation (a.k.a. “speculation”) by financial institutions, many of whom were looking for some quick cash after the housing bubble had collapsed.

Now oil is below the OPEC target price of $100 a barrel—so it looks like those speculation estimates were right on the money. (As my radio fans know, I called $100 as the baseline for the future, so I wasn’t too far off.) Even the destruction of a Nigerian pipeline and hurricane season aren’t buffetting crude prices, which is how you know there are much more powerful forces at work. The American financial system is in turmoil.

The ‘invisible hand of the market,’ if you will, is punching its way to the top of global financial institutions. And to offset their giant losses and acquisition costs, we’re seeing these banks and brokerage houses and hedge funds liquidate their oil holdings.

What OPEC and those ‘foreign oil’ producing countries fear the most is “demand destruction,” which is what happens when consumers at the top of the consumption curve start buying less. Even though global trends for oil consumption keep increasing, the greatest increases are in developing countries. (Interestingly enough, of the BRIC economies, Brazil and Russia are successfully developing their own domestic energy supplies, Brazil with ethanol and Russia with oil and natural gas. The real future for oil is in countries like India and China.)

The global average oil consumption is about 4 barrels of oil per person per year. But the American average is 24 barrels per person-year. We’re not just on the far side of the curve, we’re near a global maximum. There are other countries which have a greater per-person consumption of gasoline, but most of them achieve the numbers by using gasoline for power consumption, something the U.S. has largely stopped.

What OPEC is afraid of is America becoming more fuel efficient. “Properly-inflated tires,” that old liberal hobgoblin, would, , be the equivalent of finding an oil field bigger than Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. A 1% decrease in our daily demand would be like canceling out the entire production of Bahrain.

Those who complain about the leverage that OPEC and “foreign oil” have over the American economy don’t seem to realize that it goes both ways—we have plenty of leverage over global oil prices, and most dramatically, when it concerns reducing our disproportionate use. Our economy, and thus the world economy, is based on the assumption that everything will keep expanding. When things contract, the works get gummed up.

Speaking of I-told-you-so’s, McCain’s new running mate is pro-ANWR drilling, so as I predicted previously, Sarah “drill, baby, drill” Palin can be counted on to temper his position against it. The whole phenomenon of off-shore drilling expansion and the politics around make my head hurt.

Polls indicate that a large majority of Americans are for off-shore drilling, if it means lower prices at the pump. Republicans need you to forget the caveat there, because as we all know, it won’t help. Look at, for example, gas prices today, which are at near-record highs even as oil hits a one-year low.

It’s the math, stupid:

America consumes 20.7 million barrels a day.
America produces 8.3 million barrels a day.
How many countries does America need to invade to get off foreign oil?

Likely targets include:

a) Saudi Arabia (10.7 million barrels a day),
b) Russia (9.7 million),
c) Iran (4.1 million),
d) China (3.8 million),
e) Mexico (3.7 million), or
f) Canada (3.3 million).

Pencils down.

Since I spent most of my last appearance on Sirius’ Blog Bunker and all of the previous post talking about oil without too much emphasis on the greenhouse gas part of the equation, I think it behooves us all on the left side of the political spectrum to deal with the fallacies of global warming politics.

Now, some of you may be wondering why I am focusing on the problems with “our side” of the global warming debate, as it were. I’m doing this because there are many better researched and comprehensive sources which explain the fallacies involved in global warming skepticism, which is essentially political and not scientific in nature.

Historian Naomi Oreskes has what I consider the best freely available and technically accessible overview of this topic, which you can watch on YouTube. The point about climate change skepticism is that it’s an ideological battle against regulation, literally run by the same people the tobacco companies hired to tell you the science behind the tobacco-cancer link is “inconclusive.”

All the same, I tend to stay way from discussing global warming when it comes to oil prices, because thn you get sidetracked int a whole new debate (at least when it come to more doctrinaire conservatives).

My goal in this post, on the other hand, is to combat the optimism with which the greenwashing movement has sold itself, because that’s the kind of contrarian I am:

1. Carbon dioxide is the most harmful greenhouse gas.

Actually, water vapor is the most harmful of the greenhouse gases, contributing more than a third of the heat-trapping action known as ‘the greenhouse effect.’ Usually, this is good, because without the greenhouse effect, the Earth wouldn’t be habitable. It’s easy to forget that it isn’t warming itself which is the problem, but the increase in warming. (But remember that next time you talk to some fool who doesn’t believe in global warming.) No, the problem is that the environment wants to maintain equilibrium, so when the amount of heat in the atmosphere increases, all sorts of other things in the climate (and we don’t really know what else) start to change to achieve a new equilibrium. That’s why, besides the fact that methane and several industrial by-product gases are more powerful heat-trappers per molecule, I’d say that the most harmful greenhouse phenomenon is not actually emissions, but deforestation. You see, a tree processes, on average, about 64 pounds of carbon dioxide into oxygen a year. But given the massive deforestation and environmental chaos which human habitation caused, it’s not only that there’s more CO₂, but less capacity to process it all.One of the problems in dealing with global warming is that the science behind it is so complex, and it’s easy to make generalizations that can be picked apart. I mean, look at the twists and turns of calculating share of greenhouse effect by substance in the Wikipedia article on greenhouse gas effects:

By this particular measure, water vapor can be thought of as providing 36% of the greenhouse effect, and carbon dioxide 9%, but the effect of removal of both of these constituents will be greater than the total that each reduces the effect, in this case more than 45%. An additional proviso is that these numbers are computed holding the cloud distribution fixed. But removing water vapor from the atmosphere while holding clouds fixed is not likely to be physically relevant. In addition, the effects of a given gas are typically nonlinear in the amount of that gas, since the absorption by the gas at one level in the atmosphere can remove photons that would otherwise interact with the gas at another altitude. The kinds of estimates presented in the table, while often encountered in the controversies surrounding global warming, must be treated with caution. Different estimates found in different sources typically result from different definitions and do not reflect uncertainties in the underlying radiative transfer.

2. $4 gas is good.

The rise in gas prices reflects a variety of factors, but they can all be summed up as follows: extracting oil from the ground keeps getting harder. Whether it’s the uncertainty that comes from political unrest or the pirce of exploration and new drilling technology, people are consuming oil faster than the earth can make it. Now, there’s a huge amount of oil and we’ve been at it for a long time. In bible, they talk about ‘bitumen pools’, in which oil used to just bubble up to the surface in some areas. Humans have used petroleum for a very long time, as sealant, fuel, medicine, construction material, and so forth. And the reason you don’t see black gold bubbling up into pools any more is that all the easy sources of oil have been tapped already.Oil has become exponentially more important to humanity, and so when we build an infrastructure based on cheap gas, more expensive gas hits the poor the hardest, while we turn to ever dirtier and more expensive methods to extract fossil fuels from the earth. The higher gas prices go, the higher the ceiling for extraction costs, which basically means than drilling itself becomes less efficient and worse for the environment. As we have already seen, $4 gas just makes it easier for oil companies to drum up support for ANWR drilling and so forth, and forces more of our (and China’s) energy production into coal.

On the other hand, nothing else, in the absence of government action of some sort, has the direct power to get Americans to drive less.

3. Moving to a hydrogen economy will fix global warming.

Hydrogen not only is less efficient than plain old electricity to create and transmit along pipelines, but its use (at least in today’s incarnation of H fuel cells) creates water vapor, which, as we know is one of the most important greenhouse gases. The reason you don’t hear that much about it is that water stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, both of which are produced when you burn gasoline, for example. But if we all switched to a hydrogen economy tomorrow, we’d be loading the atmosphere with more water vapor than ever before on a constant and increasing basis. The only way H can be said to help global warming is if it doesn’t succeed on a large scale.Not to mention that the principal way to manufacture hydrogen industrially is to use fossil fuels like methane or coal.

On the other hand, if we just affix a condenser to the exhaust from a hydrogen fuel cell, and found an efficient process for electrolysis (the conversion of brine [salt water] to hydrogen) and then figured out how not to lose another third of its energy to be compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline…

4. We need to lift restrictions on Brazilian ethanol.

As I mentioned above with regard to deforestation, Brazil’s ethanol industry, while impressive from a political and economic viewpoint (they’ve achieved independence from “foreign oil”), it’s killing off the rainforest, which recycles about 20% of the world’s oxygen from carbon dioxide. And even though the land is being used for photosynthesis, sugar cane doesn’t absorb as much CO₂ as old-growth forest.

5. OK, but we still need to invest in biofuels anyway.

Using land that should be growing food to grow fuel is a waste of natural resources, particularly considering how little arable land there is as opposed to land that receives proper sunlight but has poor soil.What is slightly more promising when it comes to biofuels is waste recycling; landfill gas, cow manure, trash and so forth can be burned with less carbon than other fuels in the grand scheme of things, but really it’s probably best to work on real carbon emissions processing (not sequestration) for all combustible fuels rather than drive up the price of staple foods world wide to fuel ethanol vehicles at a very small energy efficiency rate.

There’s been interesting work done with algae (more biofuel technology) and turning CO₂ into baking soda. Let’s work on that, because nothing the biofuels industry does is going to stop the US and China from burning massive amounts of coal.

6. Hydroelectric power is carbon-neutral.

It turns out that the artificial lakes created by these huge dam projects lead to massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. When the lakes were created, they just flooded the existing flora (and fauna), which drowned and began to rot on the lake bottom. As decay continued, gases were released and rose to the surface, they continue to rise and contribute to global warming. And of course, we’re talking about methane and other very powerful greenhouse gases.Of course, as with agriculture, if we figured out some real capture technology, we could recover and use that methane the way we do from landfills now.

7. The Kyoto Protocol will fix global warming.

As global warming science has continued, since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in the 1990′s, it has shown us that changes have already begun; furthermore there may be a tipping point beyond which climatic catastrophe lies.The deal with Kyoto is that it’s not about reducing total emissions or the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; it’s about reducing projected emissions. It is woefully outdated and not based on today’s global warming science, besides the fact that it isn’t really designed to work.

Bottom line: ‘cap’ might have a chance, but ‘cap and trade’ just demonstrates that there’s leeway with enforcement for political reasons, not scientific ones.

8. Al Gore’s energy plan is too ambitious.

Gore wants to replace fossil fuels—72% of America’s total energy consumption—with renewables within ten years (the number chosen because that was the NASA project plan for the moon landing in the 1960′s).The math of this is really daunting at first glance, but along with the estimates I used from David Butcher’s Solar Calculator, it’s a bit easier to figure. According to the government, Americans consumed 101.6 quadrillion BTU, or 29,768,532,083,211,251 kilowatt-hours of energy last year, 72% of which is 21.4 quadrillion kWh. To meet America’s fossil fuel needs with the highest efficiency solar panels on the market today (22% of light converted to energy), for example, we would have to optimally position about 22,500 square miles of solar panels, a little less than the total area of West Virginia.

In fact, if we covered two lanes and the median of our interstate highway system with 40% efficient solar panels (which have been demonstrated), we could generate almost half of the energy America’s drivers need—if they switched to plug-in vehicles.

Look at it this way; each American consumes 98,740 kWh per year on average, which works out to 270.5 kWh per day. In order for ordinary Americans to generate that kind of power, we’d each need an optimally positioned solar panel the size of a Lafayette, Indiana Journal & Courier newspaper, operating at 40% efficiency.

But that’s just the supply side of the equation; if we are to take Gore’s challenge seriously, we need to look at demand. As Gore himself has recently estified befre Congress, the future is distributed, small-scale renewable energy (a.k.a. “micropower”). As this summer’s upcoming blackouts will testify, our national power grid is in bad shape and getting worse every year. But even at peak efficiency, we still lose up to a third of the electricity we generate in transmission—i.e., powering the lines themselves. The farther you are from the source, the more power you lose in the cables. Some forms of micropower (the nasty burning kind) can also recover what at a large plant would end up as waste heat, which is not economically feasible to transport.

I would also be remiss if I forgot to point out that another big problem with energy is that Americans are being attacked by vampires, all across the country. I am referring, of course, to standby or ‘vampire’ power, which is the kind your appliances suck out of the wall when they are plugged in but turned off (or “mostly off,” the state in which your big fancy electric machine functions as a digital clock instead of, say, a microwave). Standby power supposedly makes up 5% of our total consumption, and who knows how much more energy could be saved by replacing most of America’s energy-hogging gadgets with more efficient ones over the next 10 years.

China builds a new coal-powered plant on an avergae of 1-2 every week. Can’t we do the same thing with solar plants? It can’t be THAT hard.

In summary, even if Gore’s 10-year plan doesn’t work, trying to achieve it will still help a hell of a lot more than the Kyoto protocol. Which, I suppose, is why Gore is now behind it—a taciturn admission that our current efforts are a little underwhelming.

9. We need to reconsider our objections to nuclear energy.

The problems with nuclear energy is that while it’s a very efficient process in and of itself, the real costs involved in building and running more nuclear plants is far too great.Here’s a great article from AlterNet that says most of what I would have said about nuclear power: it’s simply not safe.

Nevermind the tons of radioactive waste; a terrorist attack on Indian Point [full disclosure: Casual Asides is nuclear powered] might leave New York uninhabitable for decades. And even if the terrorists never successfully attack a nuclear plant, the cost of security, not only for the premises and equipment but for fuel, workers and the waste products, only rises. And as that the article I mentioned points out, the massive water requirements and America’s unease with other countries developing nuclear technology make it a poor candidate to solve the world’s energy problems.

One of the ways to mitigate the risk factor is to build the nuclear power plant far away from populated areas. The problem is (as I talked about before) that the farther away the source, the more power is lost being sent over the miles of wires.

10. Humans need to live in more harmony with the planet.

As the late, great George Carlin once said about the slogan ‘Save the Planet,’ the planet will be fine. It’s the people who are fucked. Global Warming is a natural response to the pressures of a well-adapted species’ unprecedented success. Nature doesn’t know us personally or pass judgments on our lifestyle, it’s just a feedback loop that has no qualms about killing or torturing us. Fighting global warming isn’t about letting nature take its course, it’s about beating back climate chaos.The big danger of global warming is the dreaded “positive feedback loop,” which is a way of saying that warming can feed on itself in a vicious circle—more heat leads to environmental changes which lead to more heat. But then again, nature responds as only it can, with repercussions we describe as natural disasters, even if humans started it.

What drives oil prices? Everyone has a theory that suits their ideological niche—Democrats blame lack of regulation, Republicans blame too much regulation, and the rest of us wonder why prices aren’t higher than they are already. Earlier this month, Congress got an earful from a variety of oil experts on both sides of the ideological divide (and on a variety of paychecks), and the upshot is—it’s all of those things, and more.

Really, what can and should politicians do about high gas prices in the U.S.? We’ve had plenty of Congressional hearings, firmly establishing the facts that a) much, but not all of oil’s price can be ascribed to unregulated ‘speculation,’ and b) the larger point is that global demand is going to keep rising. The UN’s International Energy Agency estimated recently that China and India will account for up to 70 percent of new demand from now until 2030, when the IEA projects the need for Asia’s new power-players to import 20 million barrels’ worth of oil a day between the two.

Karl Rove was on Fox News the other day saying that he knew people in the oil industry and they had told him that only a small part of the price of oil’s increase was due to speculation, but really it was about supply and demand. Congressional hearings, on the other hand, say that the so-called “Enron loophole” which allows unregulated trading in energy markets contributes 25-50% of the current record price increases. But all the speculation in the world won’t change the basic fact that global demand keeps growing, which of course is why people are speculating in the first place. It used to be that gold was considered an inflation hedge—nowadays, it’s a better bet to put your money into oil instead. (By the way, small investors, the minimum amount of crude oil you can buy at a time is 1000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, so start saving those pennies.)

Merely saying “supply and demand” doesn’t cover the whole of it—American gas demand is actually down and supply is actually up, and prices continue to rise, past $4 a gallon at the pump. As we learned in the 1970′s, when our domestic production peaked, the United States no longer controls the price of oil. And because even the crude we pump out of American soil is priced according to the global market, it doesn’t matter if Americans curb their consumption, which is actually what we’ve been doing for the past year. This is a great deal for oil companies with vertical monopolies, because they just pass the high global cost of oil onto consumers without having to buy their own crude on the open market. That’s why, even though the cost of extracting oil is definitely going up, the speculative rise in price lead to record oil company profits.

Now that we created the globalized world, we have to live in it, and that means facing up to the reality that cheap oil is gone. As I wrote almost exactly three years ago, the point about ‘peak oil’ is not that oil will run out, but that it will become increasingly more expensive to extract in terms of both money and energy. And now that crude prices are never going below $100 a barrel, all sorts of ‘unconventional deposits’ are becoming economically (if not environmentally) feasible, such as all that shale oil extraction which is ruining everything it touches near Fort McMurray in Alberta.

Is there a responsible way to stave off $5 gas at the pump come September?

There is, sort of. If you look at the news coverage of crude oil increases, there are always two things cited as contributing factors: growing global demand and political instability threatening supply. It’s no coincidence that an energy-intensive lifestyle and war are two of our major exports. Let’s look at how demand is structured first.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the major factors in the increase of demand is the rapid industrialization of countries like China and India, whose depressed labor markets have become newly available (thanks to globalization) to make large amounts of stuff for export, which takes even more oil to get to the industrialized countries which used to make the same products. And as I’ve said before, the price of oil will continue to climb as long as Americans drive their SUVs to Wal-Mart.

Break down the chain of events implied by this example—driving an SUV or minivan necessitates a certain amount of refined gasoline, of course, and Wal-Marts tend to be located in suburban towns (made possible by the Federal Highways Act and oil company subsidies), or exurban, smaller communities which are rapidly losing their manufacturing base to factories in China and India. Wal-Mart itself is largely responsible for this phenomenon. A memorable scene from CNBC’s documentary about the world’s largest retailer, “The High Cost of a Low Price” shows the buyers explaining to an entrepreneurial couple who came down to Bentonville to hawk their latest tchatchkeh that there is simply no way they can sell their item at Wal-Mart stores if the insist on manufacturing it in the United States (there are price targets which must be met). Of course, most of the items sold in Wal-Mart are actually made from oil in whole or part, from all the plastic to various industrial solvents and chemical process components. Not to mention the raw oil has to be moved from refining stage to processing stage to factory to consumer, all of which involve the consumption of even more oil as fuel. Even the agricultural products you can buy at a Super Wal-Mart invovle petroleum-based fertilizers and diesel-powered machinery, thanks to the Green Revolution in the 1970′s, which saved the world’s food supply at the cost of installing agriculture’s dependence on plentiful oil (the Rockefeller Foundation, itself built on windfall oil profits, bankrolled that research). Transportation only accounts for two-thirds of our petroleum usage—and only 19.5 of 42 gallons in each barrel of crude end up as regular gasoline; 9.2 gallons become diesel.

China’s exports, for example, have increased tenfold from 1992-2005. There are no available figures (please let me know if you have any) for exactly how much oil is involved in America’s burgeoning trade deficits like the one we’ve been accruing with China, but I can say with certainty that they are a major factor in the rising global demand for oil. It’s no coincidence that the Clintons have a long history with Wal-Mart and that Hillary (a former Wal-Mart board member) became the health-care industry’s darling by stealing Mitt Romney’s corporate health care plan. Whether or not you think the Democrats who were pushing it were betraying their constituency at the time, the promises of globalization (or at least as it was sold to the working class Democratic base) have certainly been exposed as folly. Not only are jobs, but entire industries are leaving, and they aren’t being replaced. And underpinning all of this is a dependence on advances in transportation, which makes cheap labor affordable in the larger scheme of things by letting developing countries export back to developed countries. But some analysts are wondering whether fuel costs are challenging the structure of globalization, which, like everything else the United States has built, relies not only on petroleum, but cheap petroleum.

Globalization is designed to address those market inefficiencies which have made the middle class possible. Let’s start with labor costs: the wages and job security which made America the envy of the world in the post WWII boom years were unsustainable in a globalized world, in two important ways: a) taxes were much, much higher for rich people back then, and b) organized labor and the industrialization required by World War II enjoyed a brief and fruitful affair. Workers got higher wages, health coverage, pension plans, and the promise of a career. To be fair, I don’t think corporations should be handling any of these things, because look how they’ve screwed up wages (stagnant, while productivity has soared), health coverage, pension plans, and job security. The problem, of course, is that the so-called ‘golden straightjacket’ of globalization, the neo-liberal regime imposed on developing countries, is to have the government privatize these functions and leave everything to the market. “When America sneezes,” they used to say, “the rest of the world gets a cold.” Through the World Bank and the IMF, we’ve elevated our Reaganite ‘pro-market’ policies to (what used to be called) a social disease.

Post-war America (and correspondingly, the American-built global marketplace) was built on the assumption that we could rely on extracting cheap domestic oil indefinitely. European drivers pay twice what we pay for gas, so they have smaller cars and avail themselves of government-built public transportation. Which, as we all understand, is totally un-American. We need to have highways and suburbs and three-car families and two hour commutes and cheap plastic knick-knacks because these are God-given rights. That’s why we consume so much oil (and everything else) per capita—it’s not just because we can, it’s a matter of national pride. Recognizing the consequences and costs of our lifestyle, however, is probably more un-American than taking a national rail service to a soccer match. This is the land not only of Manifest Destiny, but of white flight. America doesn’t like to deal with problems directly; we’d rather just get in a fast car and keep moving until we lose them in the rear-view mirror. And for a long time, it worked for many people.

Conservatives seem to think that no matter how much demand grows, we should be able to keep extracting more and more oil from the earth in order to preserve our way of life. Unfortunately, even if we increased our domestic oil production, we’d still need to import large amounts of oil because our production peaked over thirty years ago. Take, for example the folly of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Any day now, Jon McCain will flip-flop and declare that he is for oil exploration in ANWR, the same way he just came out for off-shore drilling. In many ways the ANWR issue is a bellweather for your concept of America, because allowing companies to go in there today would mean Americans would see the oil start flowing in 2013 and hit a peak of just under 900,000 barrels per day (about 5% of our current daily consumption) somewhere around 2025. The question is, do you want to put America in the position of needing 900,000 more barrels of oil a day in 2025, no matter the cost to the environment?

Of course, the dynamics of demand are only half the story. Global demand has certainly risen greatly in the last ten years, but that isn’t what’s been fueling the sharpest upturns in the price of oil. Demand has been rising arithmetically worldwide, according to the IEA’s web site:

But prices rose exponentially:

This rise in demand is totally fueled by globalization; demand in developed countries is actually shrinking. Supply is up, too:

So if supply is increasing and our consumption is shrinking, why are Americans paying $4 and more at the pump? It’s simple: war is the answer. We export conflict; much as real and projected increases in global demand for oil drive speculation, real and projected disruptions in the flow of oil come to bear on prices as well. This phenomenon is concentrated in three countries: Iran, Iraq, and Nigeria. You’ll notice that the price of crude drops during the beginning of the Iraq war by about $7 during the month of March 2003, when it seemed as though Bush’s plan for $20 gasoline through sheer force of personality (and depleted uranium) might actually work. But soon after it became clear that “Mission Accomplished” was a bit premature, crude began its inexorable climb.

When it comes to Iran, which sits atop the world’s second-largest proven reserves, U.S. policy, though less violent, is just as much responsible for driving up the price of oil. But our embargoing and sabre-rattling are always directly quoted as causes for any jump in the price of oil, even when we do it by proxy. Consider this snippet from earlier this month, when the price of oil sustained its largest single-day increase in history:

“It’s Iran — all Iran,” said Bernard Picchi, a senior managing director at Wall Street Access. “Iran is the bête noire of the Bush administration, the last remaining member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ that has not been militarily or diplomatically neutralized,” Picchi said in emailed comments. Comments from Israel’s transport minister, reportedly a close adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that an attack on Iranian nuclear sites looked “unavoidable” has driven buying to a fever pitch, according to Michael Fitzpatrick, an analyst at MF Global. Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz* was quoted by Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper as saying that if Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, Israel will attack.

By the way, Shaul Mofaz is actually Persian himself, one of the few ‘Oriental’ Jews in Israel’s power elite.

And Nigeria? The oil companies have been engaged in a “low-intensity conflict” with Nigerians for many years; lately even these multinational corporations’ white-collar Nigerian workers are ready to strike, not to mention the rebels who want their Nigeria’s oil to actually, you know help Nigeria. Last year, Chevron (who, with Shell, represent the western oil interests in Nigeria) were dragged into U.S. court for some of their routine murders of Nigerians in the name of petroleum extraction:

United States (US) District Court Judge in San Francisco, Susan Illston, ruled that Chevron was directly involved in the alleged attacks by acting in consonance with Nigerian government security forces, paving the way for a trial which the company had made spirited attempts to avoid for eight years. The lawsuit was brought against Chevron eight years ago in San Francisco Federal Court by nine Nigerian plaintiffs for alleged deaths and other abuses in the two incidents in 1998 and 1999. The plaintiffs assert claims ranging from torture to wrongful death.

According to information made available to THISDAY, Judge Illston “found evidence that CNL [Chevron Nigeria Limited] personnel were directly involved in the attacks; CNL transported the GSF [Nigerian government security forces], CNL paid the GSF; and CNL knew that GSF were prone to use excessive force.”

Of course, there’s one more component to how our foreign policy has raised the price of oil—the massive debts and global ill-will incurred by Bush’s war-mongering have driven the dollar into a downward spiral. Now, it is entirely possible, that if we stop threatening Iranian democracy, withdraw troops from Iraq, make Chevron and Shell pay for their crimes in Nigeria, enact a real alternative transportation energy policy, start drilling in North Dakota, and rebuild our railway system, we could get through this oil crisis. Or, there may actually be an oil speculation bubble to burst (although I think it’s pretty unburstable, barring some major advance in alternative fuels). Let’s see what Obama actually does in office.

In 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther, began a new era in Christianity by declaring his independence from what he saw as the excesses and iniquities of the Roman Catholic Church. Having kicked off the Reformation by nailing an itemized list of complaints to a church door, Luther challenged not only the orthodoxy of the Church but the political structures of Christian Europe.

In the early years of Luther’s new religion—Protestantism—he became known as a defender of the Jews, whose treatment at the hands of Catholics horrified him. “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian,” he once wrote. As his theological revolution had purged what he saw as the impurities of Catholic dogma, Luther thought that now the Jews would finally be able to be converted to Christ.

Of course, the problem Jews had with Christianity wasn’t with the selling of indulgences, but with the divinity of Christ. When Europe’s Jews failed to join Luther’s new church, he turned on them most viciously. By 1536, he presaged the Final Solution in his book, “Of The Jews And Their Lies,” calling for Jews to be put into bondage, killed, or expelled from Europe if they did not convert to the gentle message of the Gospels (he put his money where his mouth was by driving them out of many a German principality.) In the introduction to this seminal work of anti-Semitism, Luther writes,

“I have received a treatise in which a Jew engages in dialog with a Christian. He dares to pervert the scriptural passages which we cite in testimony to our faith, concerning our Lord Christ and Mary his mother, and to interpret them quite differently. With this argument he thinks he can destroy the basis of our faith.”

Chris Hedges, author, journalist, and himself a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and son of a Protestant minister, has written his own 21st-century version of “Of The Jews And Their Lies,” entitled I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Anti-Semitism is a bit passe for today’s Christians (a bit tacky after Hitler, wouldn’t you say?), but bigotry against the godless remains relatively safe to express in public. Many a reviewer and interviewer have called the title “cute” (cuter than Von Der Juden und Ihren Lugen?), and Hedges’ bigorty seems to be getting a pass from folks on the left for who probably would have reacted differently had it been anyone else writing the same words.

I feel the same about Hedges as I do about Christopher Hitchens, after he came out so forcefully behind the Bush’s invasion of Iraq; a deep admiration now gone sour. Hedges says the book was born of his debates with what he calls ‘the new atheists,’ writers such as Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and E. O. Wilson. He calls today’s atheist writers religious fundamentalists, assigning them to “the cult of science” and decrying their intolerance and bigotry while doling out plenty of his own.

In foreign policy terms, an atheist like myself has much more in common with Hedges—we both oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (unlike Hitchens and Harris). In searching for a larger framework to contest what he sees as Hitchens’ and Harris’ support of imperialist war, however, he decides to tar even war opponents like Dawkins and Dennett with guilt by association and lumps us all together as evil and a danger to the Republic. But while atheism might be said to have a political philosophy (the separation of church and state), it certainly doesn’t have a foreign policy.

Within the 224 pages of I Don’t Believe in Atheists, Hedges winds his way through a dense thicket of strawmen. Not only has Hedges created a new Christianity for himself (one without heaven, hell, religious institutions, or an interventionalist god), but he’s created another one for his enemies. “To turn away from God is harmless,” Hedges grants, magnanimously, but “to turn away from sin is catastrophic.” You can have your Model-T in any color you want, as long as it’s black as religiously-defined sin.

Works like I Don’t Believe in Atheists reinforce the fact that nonbelievers are one of the most hated minorities in America. Hedges’ liberal bigotry is writ small, at least in the physical sense—the book is a pocket-friendly 5″ by 7″. The sprawling (and often repetitive) critique of today’s out-of-the-closet atheists finds Hedges equating us with Nazis, all the while calling on the reader to heed the wisdom of, say, Christian Realist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who helped shore up support for the atomic bomb and is considered by many to the first neoconservative. Niebuhr’s “just war” theory is often invoked by Iraq war supporters, because it frames mass murder as the necessity to confront evil.

I Don’t Believe In Atheists is a gentle, liberal incitement to an American pogrom against nonbelievers, based on his very own version of a blood libel:

“while the new atheists do not have the power of the Christian Right and are not a threat to the democratic state as the Christian Right is, they do engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism. They sell this under secular banners. They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection, this time made possible by science and reason.”

Do atheists believe in a ‘state of perfection?’ Do atheists belong to what Hedges calls the ‘cult of science?’ Must we all have gods, as Martin Luther once said?

A thoroughly modern believer, Hedges declares he can pick and choose truths and falsehoods from science with the same ease as he does from Bible (parts of which he calls ‘morally indefensible’). As with other intelligent design advocates, a faulty understanding of science buttresses a foregone conclusion—that the divine inhabits the gaps in human scientific understanding and the pursuit of further understanding is hazardous to the soul. Richard Dawkins, a target of Hedges’ self-righteous indignation, calls this belief the ‘god of the gaps,’ and Hedges tries mightily to sacralize the mysteries of the universe in order to warn scientists against the hubris of discovering truths about reality instead of waiting for revelation about the mystic.

Intelligent design, a modern descendant of creationism, is the same impulse which lead ancient mapmakers to draw sea serpents in unexplored parts of the oceans and declare: “thar be monsters.” Hedges’ book amounts to nothing less than the intelligent design argument applied beyond biology to all realms of human endeavor, from physics to philosophy. And the monsters are the so-called “new atheists.”

“Religious thought is a guide to morality. It points humans toward inquiry,” announces Hedges, but his dogma leads him toward an inquisition instead. The main thrust of the book is the idea that today’s atheists are trying to ‘perfect’ humanity, which is at the top of Hedges’ list of cardinal sins:

“[t]he belief in human perfection, that we can advance morally, is itself an evil. It provides cover for criminality and abuse, a justification for murder. It sanctifies war, murder, and torture, for an unattainable purpose. It denies our own moral pollution.”

One could substitute “the divine” for “human perfection” in the above sentence, but that’s the easy way out. Even if the new atheist authors really believe in human perfection, is that the same thing as a belief in moral progress? “There is nothing in human nature or in human history that points to the idea that we are moving anywhere,” protests Hedges. Well, it all depends on your metric for progress, of course—not to mention your definitions of ‘moving’ and ‘anywhere.’ If nothing in nature or history supported the idea of progress, Hedges’ wouldn’t have to repeatedly and weakly dismiss the notion. For Hedges, the fact that there is still murder and hatred and all manner of iniquity and inequality proves that there is no progress ever past or present, QED.

But really, is there anything in human nature to say we, as a species, I suppose, are moving anywhere? There’s a whole science of genetics which is helping to explain how we got here in the way we did, from helping us trace the movement of early humans out of Africa to developing cures for birth defects which were never possible before. Did morality work differently for our pre-human ancestors as it does for homo sapiens? Does the evolution of and within hominid society qualify as moral progress? I would venture to say so, if only because I don’t think animals are capable of the kind of abstract reasoning ethics require. Evolutionary biology shows us that change is slow, and its smallest increment is generational.

Hedges’ idea that naturalists believe we are the culmination of a process leading towards perfection shows the limits of his understanding. “The belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march toward a glorious culmination, is malformed theology.” Actually, it’s malformed science; biologists understand that evolution is a continuing phenomenon, and we are not the end of it. Only under the weight of eschatology (the study of the end of time) does evolution have an ‘end.’ For scientists, Darwin only described a ‘means.’ What Darwin showed was that evolution was random, as opposed to competing evolutionary scientists of his day—like Lamarck, who theorized that giraffes grew long necks in order to feed from tall trees.

Hedges is just getting started mischaracterizing science for his own ends: “[p]luralism has no place in science. Neither does the principle (so familiar from the arts, humanities and human sciences) of competing truths. Scientific ideas, because they an be demonstrated or disproved, are embraced or rejected on the basis of quantifiable evidence.”

Pluralism certainly has a place in science, and it’s called the cutting edge, where such ideas are called theorems. (Just look at the panoply of string theories, which are themselves intended to resolve the competition between quantum field and general relativity theories.) Hedges’ rants remind me of an English major drunkenly explaining that Science majors have no soul. And not only that, adds Hedges, but neuroscientist Sam Harris “does not engage in the laborious work of acquiring knowledge and understanding… He has no interest in debate, dialogue or scholarship.” (One presumes Hedges had compelled Harris to debate him against his will in San Francisco in 2007). Or, “[Sam Harris'] assertion that Muslim parents welcome the death of children as suicide bombers could only have been written by someone who never sat in the home of a grieving mother and father in Gaza who have just lost their child.” Now, I have never been to Gaza, but one such parent, known as ‘Umm Nidal‘ (who famously encouraged her sons to become martyrs and handed out chocolate and halvah upon hearing her son was killed attacking an Israeli settlement) was, in fact, elected to Palestinian parliament on the Hamas ticket in 2006. Similarly, Hedges protests that somehow religion had nothing to do with the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Christians. The book is full of such hollow falsehoods, Jesuit-level equivocations and semantic boondoggles.

The tone of the book is reminiscient of a sermon—long, tedious, repetitive, and full of earnestly resolute pomposity:

“The question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly indifferent to the transcendent, that which cannot be measured or quantified, that which lies beyond the reach of rational deduction. [...] God—and different cultures have given God many names and many attributes—is that which works upon us and through us to find meaning and relevance in a morally neutral universe. [...] God is, as Thomas Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. God is a search, a way to frame the questions. God is a call to reverence.”

Reverence of what, exactly? It isn’t clear, but it seems that if anything should be exalted, it is human limitation and our irredeemable shortcomings, whatever those might be. Hedges not only constructs a strawman (the belief that atheists and scientists are trying to perfect humanity) but a new religion—the worship of human flaws. There is no greater sin for Hedges than to turn away from the concept of Sin, and those who do are embracing an evil so profound that Hedges’ doesn’t talk about much else. Hedges’ speaks of the “wisdom of original Sin” and exalts, at length, human evil:

“Human evil is not a problem. It is a mystery. It cannot be solved. It is a bitter, constant paradox that is part of human nature.”

Hedges goes on to accuse the new atheists of ‘externalizing evil’ — but the truth is that Hedges is guilty of internalizing ‘good.’ English doesn’t have a distinction between religious and secular definitions of ‘good’ the way it separates ‘evil’ from ‘bad,’ so let me clarify that as an atheist, I believe in ‘bad’ but not ‘evil.’ Because contrary to what religion wants you to think, the relevant parties to telling right from wrong are your fellow beings, rather than any imaginary ones. Yes, there is bad and good, but we must always ask—bad for whom? Good for what?

In a summary of his book published by the Free Press, Hedges writes,

“Religious institutions, however, should be separated from the religious values imparted to me by religious figures, including my father [who was a liberal minister]. Most of these men and women frequently ran afoul of their own religious authorities. Religion, real religion, was about fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, finding empathy and defying the powerful.”

Leaving aside for the moment the question of how Hedges gets to cleave ‘real religion’ from the kind most people practice, we must ask—what exactly are religious values? Are there such things regardless of the religion in question?

The truth is, there’s only one universal religious value: orthodoxy in the service of power. The world’s faiths share a vast-ranging disagreement on everything else, even the number of gods to be worshiped—from zero in Theravada Buddhism to the Trinity of Catholicism to the countless loa of Voodoo. Everything about the temporal world is up for spiritual grabs, from the threshold for justifiable homicide to the divinely inspired way to wipe your ass.

Much as science is morally neutral, religion is merely a tool for the powerful to control the masses. And yet, there is a process by which religions themselves evolve. Within my own lifetime, for example, Bob Jones University, which went from defending their ban on interracial dating and marriage on God’s ipse dixit 1983 before the Supreme Court to revoking the policy in 2000—not because George W. Bush was about to make a speech there and they didn’t want to offend the heathens for political purposes, but because the sacred words of God must have changed, mysteriously acquiring a new meaning.

Whether there’s a text or an oral tradition, every religious person picks and chooses, interprets and reinterprets the tenets of their faith and applies them to the real world. Those choices are temporal, secular—because religion is all in your head. Interaction with your fellow humans is real, and therefore will never live up to Hedges’ idealized ‘good.’

Morals are personal, ethics are interpersonal. The zeitgeist (as described by Dawkins) describes the movement of social mores—the definitions not only of evil, but of ‘good’ as well.

When Hedges admits that some parts of the Bible are ‘morally indefensible,’ it is the reader’s duty to ask how they got that way. So when Hedges writes, “All ethics begin with religion. We must determine what moral laws to accept or reject. We must distinguish between real and false prophets,” while enjoining us from using reason and science to do so, on what basis does Hedges make these distinctions? It would appear that there is no rational distinction between true and false prophets.

The truth is that all of us, Hedges included, create a personal moral code using real-life, secular ethics—the realm of human interaction which Hedges finds so spiritually devoid: “Those who focus only on human communication, who are unable to step out of the realm of prosaic knowledge, sever themselves from the sacred. They remain trapped in a deadening self-awareness. They lose the capacity to honor and protect that which makes life possible.”

A band of prophets known as the Firesign Theatre once said, “when you clock the human race with the stopwatch of history, it’s a new record every time.” Things we view as “evil” or immoral by today’s standards were moral yesterday, and we gauge our progress by comparing these standards. For example: would Jesus buy an SUV? Has burning gasoline always been sin, or just bad for the environment? And how could we possibly answer such a question (much less ask it) without the advances of science? Moral ‘progress’ is inevitable, if only because morality has to address new problems every day.

Hedges goes on at length about how the new atheists want to ‘perfect’ humanity, but suspiciously, he doesn’t use any direct quotes. So, I decided to read Harris and Dawkins in search of this ideology of perfection, but I couldn’t find any. Dawkins definitely speaks of the Zeitgeist and of “evolving complexity,” but nowhere does he say that ‘perfection’ (whatever that is) is attainable or that he has set his sights upon it. Harris hardly speaks in absolutes, and certainly doesn’t say that atheists seek to achieve perfection. So, where is this murderous ideology of perfection?

Seek and ye shall find, says the Bible, and Hedges’ uses his denseness as his guide: “Wilson and Dawkins build their vision of human perfectibility out of the legitimately scientific theory that human beings are shaped by the laws of heredity and natural selection. They depart from this position when they assert that we can leave determinism behind. There is nothing in science that implies our genetic makeup allows us to perfect ourselves. Those who, in the name of science, claim that we can overcome our imperfect human nature create a belief system that functions like religion… there is nothing, when you cut through their scientific jargon, to support their absurd proposition.”

Leaving aside whether Hedges is truly capable of understanding scientific jargon—as opposed to simply cutting through it—you have to wonder (as with his claim that “Dawkins, like Christian zealots, reduces the world to a binary formula of good and evil”) where he’s getting this stuff. As Hedges writes, “these are not questions atheists answer. They attack a religious belief of their own creation.” Atheists don’t believe in eschatology, and neither do we seek to negate ourselves by becoming gods. Atheism merely seeks to turn the pyramid scheme of religion upside-down.

“Because there is no clear, objective definition of God,” writes Hedges, “the new atheists must choose what God it is that they attack.” Actually, that’s not true, but like all good debaters, Hedges needs to reframe the debate on his terms in order to claim rhetorical victory. What Hedges fails to understand is that atheism is a rejection of the whole notion of a top-down universe, no matter whom your particular creation myth places at the top. A universe without gods is one which is eternal and works from the bottom up, without meaning or intent. Hedges characterizes the universe as “morally neutral,” but at the same time posits an objective ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and that God is the good in each of us. One wonders why, if there is only one god, why it can’t be the morally neutral in each of us? If animals have a moral value, what is it, and do they share the same god as humanity or the rest of the universe?

For most of the book, Hedges’ seems hell-bent on conflating atheists with Raëlians, an extropian UFO cult who send out press releases claiming to have cloned a human being every so often. For all his Western-centric chauvinism, Hedges’ concept of the universe, with its personally uninvolved deity in an amoral universe who works through us, sounds a lot more like some Yoruba-derived syncretic religion, such as Candomblé or Santería: Oludumare, the creator, doesn’t deal with people, and so requests are made of orishas (‘the owners of heads’) who possess and work through their followers. But Hedges’ Christian prejudices against atheism and polytheism are merely precursors to the real weakness in his arguments.

When Hedges writes, for example, that “[w]e progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression and economic exploitation, and to accelerate environmental degradation,” is he saying that the pursuit of any scientific knowledge (for example, genetics, which can certainly be said to “change human nature”) is an evil because it attempts to improve the human condition? And if some science is OK, where is the boundary between good and evil science, the border line where Hedges and the Unabomber stand, wagging their fingers at humanity?

“There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving towards a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere,” he proclaims. It seems by definition that if there there is human progress that we are moving somewhere (if not towards some glorious utopia). Hedges lives in a world of absolutes, as much as he protests otherwise; since the imaginary end (utopia) is deemed impossible, he seems to say there cannot be any movement altogether, failing to make the distinction between ‘perfect’ as a verb and as an adjective. When, for example, America’s founding Deists employed the phrase ‘a more perfect Union,’ it didn’t suggest (to me, anyway) that they thought there was going to be a perfectly perfect Union.

I Don’t Believe In Atheists plumbs the depths of Hedges’ unwillingness to engage with atheism, or atheists—encapsulated by the way he laughs off Christopher Hitchens’ lack of theological training with regard to his question of who created the Creator:

“This is the declaration of an illiterate. Aquinas, along with many other theologians, addressed at length the issue of who created the creator. God, Aquinas argues, is not an entity. God is not a thing or a being. Creation is an act of handicraft. Creation is the condition of there being something rather than nothing. Creation didn’t happen long ago. Creation is a constant in human existence. It is part of life.”

This is what’s known as “conversion by definition” (or “the bear hug”) where extremely lazy evangelists posit that the fact one is alive is proof that at least one god exists. (For the sun, or your electronic devices, which operate on the principle that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, it’s a different story.) “God is a human concept,” admits Hedges, but that’s about as far as he’s willing to go in understanding the subjects of his monograph. Because Hedges’ doesn’t understand atheism, his critique is understandably flawed. Worse still, he is unwilling to subject himself to his own critique:

“They see the “other” as equal only when the other is identical to themselves. They project their own values on the rest of the human race. …Those who are different do not need to be investigated, understood or tolerated, for they are intellectually and morally inferior. Those who are different are imperfect versions of themselves.”



Dear readers, exciting things are happening. Here’s a quick review of the past few months.

That Book I’m Always Talking About

For the last two years, I’ve been writing a non-fiction book—it’s what I’m doing when I’m not posting here. When people ask me what the book is about, I usualy say something like, “it’s about killer robots and globalization.” While this is true in some sense, the book is actually about a lot more than just those things, but when you work on something for two years (or longer) the ability to faithfully summarize it kind of falls away.

This book, entitled Why Can’t Money Grow On Trees?, is about the open-source movement, the global economy, and the connection between, for example, Adam Smith, Jean-Pierre Proudhon, Howard Scott, and the Unabomber. It is subtitled “A Practical Guide to Building Your Own Utopia.”

Now, because the book is about open source and contains a lengthy section about how lethal intellectual property rights can be, I decided to make the book into a wiki. This way, you can actually watch me write the thing in real time (at this stage it is a lengthy proposal and not too much more) in a format meant for your computer monitor, unlike the 50+ page PDF file I have been sending people.

If you are confused about all this, just go visit whycant.org and you will probably become slightly more or less clear about what I’m trying to say.

Catch me on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Indie Talk March 13th at 5pm EST

I’ve had this blog for almost five years now, and sometimes I wonder if anyone is even listening anymore. But occasionally, I will get some random confirmation that I have, in some small way, had an impact in the media universe. Sometimes, I’ll get questions from college students asking me to elucidate a point they’re writing a paper on; sometimes publishers offer to send me advance copies of suitably “progressive” books to review. Sadly, I no longer get hate mail, which I used to enjoy immensely.

But I found something even more fun than hate mail—free media ops! Sirius, which just launched their new “Indie Talk” channel, asked me to come down to “The Blog Bunker” this Thursday and chat about politics for half-an-hour, after which I will spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how I can leverage this appearance into one on the O’Reilly Factor.

But D. J., I hear you cry, “I don’t have Sirius Satellite Radio!” Don’t worry. You can sign up for a free 3-day Internet radio trial on their web site. It’ll be just like when the whole family used to gather around their gigantic vacuum-tube powered radio cabinet after dinner to listen to Fibber McGee & Molly or Suspense!, only without the family, or the radio.

Free Xenu! Shirts!

The other way I found out that people actually do read this blog is that someone ordered a “Free Xenu” T-shirt from my lonely and neglected T-shirt shop. So I actually had to make one, and now that I spent all the revenue on the first shirt, I implore you, dear readers, to buy one, too.

For those of you who don’t know the story, Xenu is the deposed alien overlord who is currently being held in intergalactic superjail by the Church of Scientology, according to court documents. As far as I can tell, Xenu is being held without bail or formal charges, with no method of redress or habeas corpus. I don’t even think there was a trial. If any of you give a damn about civil rights, I implore you to wear this shirt so that the CoS knows you will no longer abide by their illegal detainment of what, for all we know, is just a sweet, harmless, 75 million year-old man.

It’s Her Party, She’ll Cry If She Wants To

I’m less of a Barack Obama supporter than an ABC voter—anybody but Hillary. What’s my beef with Hillary, you ask?

Is it that she’s a carpetbagger? I do resent the fact that my state is apparently so welcoming we’ll let anybody in the President’s family who wants to run for the White House represent us. Tempting, but not sufficient.

Is it because she’s a hawk? Her stance on Iran is basically the same as McCain’s, which is that they would really rather prefer to go to war Iran than not. Both of them have been agitating for this for years, although Hillary’s anti-Iran record is long and storied and includes her potential running mate, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. As a matter of fact, Hillary’s foreign policy is remarkably similar to McCain’s in many respects. That’s getting closer to why I can’t stand her, but there’s more.

Perhaps it’s Hillary’s right-wing pandering like her clearly unconstitutional throw-flag-burners-in-Federal prison law, which was fortunately rejected; perhaps its her authoritarian top-down style, presaged by her Wellesely senior thesis dismissing the whole idea of bottom-up community organizing.

Yes, these were all fine reasons to dislike Hillary, and I have made full use of them in the past. But what burns me about Hillary the most right now is her gargantuan sense of entitlement, a thing so huge it was pretty much her platform—before that young upstart upstaged her “get-out-of-my-way” campaign style with—you guessed it—bottom up grassroots organizing.

Barack Obama may be well-spoken (somebody check Lexis-Nexis to see if Hillary’s camp has ever slipped up and said it in those terms), but he clearly hasn’t suffered enough to win the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Medal for overcoming adversity. As Aristotle said in Poetics, tragedy works best when the sufferers fall from privilege and fortune, and Hillary’s story is characterized by the most fortunate of circumstances.

As I’ve said before (maybe not in these exact words), when you challenge white people’s privilege, watch the fuck out. Hillary’s whiteness isn’t her sole privilege, but it’s clearly working to her advantage. For example—let’s look at Ohio, the “firewall” which helped Clinton turn her campaign around:

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International— respected polling firms — surveyed 1,612 Democratic primary voters in 40 precincts across Ohio on Tuesday. Among other things, the pollsters asked if the race of the candidate was important to them. Twenty percent of those surveyed said yes, and three out of five of those voters said they cast ballots for Clinton.

As a pundit once said on CNN a while ago, this is the first time identity politics-based attacks have been trained on the identity groups themselves as opposed to, shall we say, hegemonic power. And it’s threatening to rend the Democratic party.

It is in this light that we must examine the comments of Geraldine Ferraro, Clinton supporter and former VP candidate:

When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro’s comments took on a decidedly bitter edge. “I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign – to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

How refreshingly reprehensible! It always strikes me, whenever this meme is floated, that the name “Carol Moseley-Braun” seldom crosses the lips of these Clinton supporters. Moseley-Braun, whose Senate seat was won by Obama when she stepped down, ran for president in 2004, the second black woman to do so after my old Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

While Moseley-Braun did receive a modicum of support from NOW and some other feminist groups, I guess it wasn’t too important, because seldom did you see a Gloria Steinem-penned op-ed calling women gender traitors if they didn’t support a female candidate based purely on chauvinism.

The forgotten campaign of Moseley-Braun, who dropped out just before the Iowa caucuses, is an embarrassment to the Clinton campaign, and that’s why she never talks about it.

When I meet people who hand me that ‘if Barack was a woman line,” I always counter with, “If Barack Obama was a woman, he’d be Carol Moseley-Braun. And do you know who she was married to?” I ask.

“No…” they say.

“Who the fuck cares?” I reply. (Of course, the answer is “Mr. Braun.” They are now divorced, and she founded Ambassador Organics) And that’s really the crux of the issue—the only reason Barack Obama is black is because the laws in this country won’t let him marry Bill Clinton. Hillary’s only doing this well because she is now the most corrupt woman in America. Don’t think for a minute that her experience as intern to a few Senate subcommittees was what propelled her to the Senate seat of a state she in which had never resided. It was because she was so inside the Democratic machine, she was married to the president, and so the DLC told all other Dem Senate contenders to get out of her way.

And yet, if this is anyone’s party, it’s Hillary’s party. She is the most invested in the machine, the backroom deals, the money-fueled corruption, the chickenhawk foreign policy. Not only does the Democratic party owe her the nomination, but the audacity of Obama’s candidacy is inappropriately inopportune. That’s why she’s intent on destroying the party.

Take a look at CNN’s delegate counter. After one of the dirtiest primary challenege the party has seen in decades, she managed to work her way up to ‘spoiler’ in the delegate count, but there is no way she will be able to catch up with her opponent without a significant helping hand from the superdelegates. But now, neither will Obama, unless the party spends even more of their war chest redoing the Michigan and Florida primaries.

Is it because, as she has implied on the campaign trail, she’d rather have McCain in office than Obama? The scorched earth, kitchen sink approach Hillary has adopted constitutes a pyrrhic victory, but what does she care? It’s this supreme arrogance, the way she offers Obama a VP slot shen she’s trailing in delegates, the way she pretends that sleeping in the White House is a qualification for being commander-in-chief, the indignance at being challenged for what she seems to believe is some kind of birthright—that’s why I’m an anybody but Clinton voter. Because a victory for Clinton has become, through her machinations and speechifying, a victory for corruption and against hope.

More on this in a few days.

It’s time for me to tell you what’s good for you, besides the obvious—cod liver oil, plenty of sunshine, and switching to a ‘light’ cigarette.

Start Snitching

The greatest thing about the immigration debate today is that everyone involved in debating it in the media is totally full of shit.

You have your Lou Dobbses, crotchety old men whose doctors’ orders are obviously the only thing prohibiting them from taking to the streets armed with shotguns and Civil War-era cavalry sabers, ridding the streets of the zombie menace of illegal immigrants. The host will accuse illegal aliens (I will not call them ‘undocumented workers! We don’t even know what planet they’re from!) of doing something to the country, and then the hapless guests respond:

First the Democrat says, what are you gonna do, round up 20 million people? Yes, that what these people want to do, haven’t you been listening? Lou Dobbs has a reality show in the works where he personally picks a screaming waitress or construction worker up over his head and tosses them into the ocean at the end of every show. Democrats have little to say about the issue generally because illegal immigrants are, by definition breaking the law. And when these foreigners break the law, they ought to be punished—not like when the President or one of his friends do it. This is serious law-breaking.

So the Republican starts scolding us that these so-called people are trying to take over this country from real Americans! What Indian tribe is this asshole from? Your ancestors came off a boat, get real. They usually send someone vaguely ethnic, too, to let Catholic and Jewish Republicans know it’s OK to hate immigrants now because they’re all darker than you, thank goodness!

The real reason illegal immigrants can’t get a break in this country is because they are unwilling to adopt the simple, honest, God-fearing American ways which won us the West and made us a great nation. If illegal immigrants are ever going to get respect from Americans, they need to change up their whole game plan—guns and horses and broken treaties and disease-bearing blankets! That’s how you conquer America!

You think Custer came to Montana armed with a toilet brush so he could sneak into Crazy Horse’s camp as a minimum-wage worker? Hell no! He had the U.S. Cavalry! Not that it did him any good, but you get my point. America has a long and proud history of illegal immigration—ask an Oklahoman why they call it “the Sooner State.”

But we all know you can’t get up in a state or national legislature and say that. Recently, Governor Spitzer and Hilary Clinton were taken to task for supporting and then decrying drivers licenses for undocumented workers. In principle, I agreed with Spitzer’s original argument, which was that without a drivers’ license, you end up with a lot of uninsured drivers on he road, which only ends up costing everybody more money in the end. But immigration is such a hot-button issue that you can’t be soft on it even if you’re a Democrat!

So, my proposal combines the parts nobody likes about the other proposals and mixes them all into one perfect plan. It’s called The S.T.A.R.T.S.N.I.T.C.H.I.N.G. Act of 2008. I don’t know what the acronym stands for, but like any great piece of legislation (U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, I’m looking at you!) I’ll figure out the insignificant details later.

Immigration reform that keeps borders closed doesn’t work until housewives go to jail for hiring illegals as babysitters. So the plan is simple: we should grant amnesty to any illegal immigrant who informs on their employers to the authorities. Special hotlines with Spanish, Chinese and other language-speaking operators should be set up, and the fines paid will go toward agricultural subsidies for labor-intensive farming.

Dam The Atlantic

It’s really wonderful that the majority of Americans are now on the climate change bus, just as it’s becoming too late to reverse it. Yes, we need to get off carboniferous fuels, but we have an equally large problem: preparing for the effects of what one environmentalist called “climate chaos” on Fox News recently.

More freak weather, strange patches of drought, and of course, sea level rise. And honestly, as a native New Yorker, I care about sea levels far more than I care about any of the other adverse effects of climate change.

Our mayor, the newly independent Mike Bloomberg, is at a climate-change conference right now. Bloomberg is the kind of guy who’s not afraid of large projects, so I implore him: Dam the Atlantic! We need to start building a breakwater between Rockaway Beach, Queens and Sandy Hook, New Jersey now, because the construction of such a massive dike will take just long enough to actually start seeing sea levels threaten Manhattan.

We need to construct a six to twelve mile long sea wall to stop the Atlantic from reclaiming New York City and its harbor. And wile we’re at it, why don’t we build five miles of tidal barrage hydroelectric plants and a lock system to accommodate commercial traffic? IT will take years to build, so we’d better start now.

I also have a two-birds-with-one-stone aspect to the project—New York City produces an incredible amount of garbage each year, and we have a real problem figuring out how to stash it. Why don’t we reclaim as much of that garbage as possible and use it as construction material? That way we save money on landfill fees and supplement the materials budget. In fact, we could double-wall parts of the wall and just start a new, narrow landfill for structural support in some sections.

Of all the mayors New York has ever had, I think Bloomberg would have to be the one who has enough wherewithal to make it happen. Look at his bid for the Olympics—a terrible idea, sure—but you couldn’t say it didn’t have vision. Now, imagine that you could extend Flatbush Avenue all the way into Route 36 in New Jersey? We could set up rail links in both directions and a new container port on the inland side of the wall that makes New York a real port city again.

The Fairer Tax

A few years ago on this blog, I endorsed a version of the Fair Tax which is being pushed by libertarians and Mike Gravel (my hero!) alike. The Fair Tax proposes that a standard 23% sales tax be placed on all goods instead of an income tax, and to modify the regressive nature of the tax, a “pre-bate” of around $10000 would be give to each American in monthly installments so as to offset the higher cost of goods and provide what Gravel calls “a national wage.”

I acknowledge that such a tax would be regressive and it would reduce the total amount raised, which is why I would rework the proposal as follows:

Instead of a 23% sales tax, the Fairer Tax would be a 30% VAT on all goods and services. VATs, or value-added taxes are collected on the value added by each stage of production rather than the total sale price of the item to the end consumer. Businesses actually get a rebate on the VAT they pay by reselling their products to another business which adds value. Canada and France reap major revenue from their GST and TVA, respectively.

From Wikipedia:

VAT is a general tax that applies, in principle to all commercial activities involving the production and distribution of goods and the provision of services. VAT is assessed and collected on the value added to goods in each business transaction. Under this concept the government is paid tax on the gross margin of each transaction. VAT proposes to replace sales tax which in most developing countries trying to shift to some variant of VAT, like India, is the ‘only’ major revenue source for the regional governments since low per capita income and unemployment render income tax inadequate as a revenue source.

VATs work better than traditional taxes because they’re easier for consumers to understand (the increase is pre-calculated into the price of goods) and provides an incentive for businesses to collect and properly file (because they get to reclaim taxes already paid). A properly structured VAT might help close some of the notorious loopholes in our tax system. And the national wage ought to be pegged to the Consumer Price Index.

Oh, and there should also be a whopping estate tax with exemptions for actual family farms.

Ring Around Darfur

I just realized—Darfur represents the end of America’s claim to unipolarity in the world political system. I have always seen Darfur as China’s mess—in the same way we subsidized the terror regimes in South America and such during the days of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Double Standard,” China is doing to Sudan, which is a key oil supplier and arms purchaser.

If the state-armed militias carrying out the genocide in Darfur didn’t get their weapons from China, they’d get them from some other dealer—a Victor Boot or some such—and it would be its own problem, but the involvement of China in Darfur is hard to ignore. Except we do it all the time.

However, the list of divestment options identified by SaveDarfur.org is a virtual who’s who of campaign donors: JPMorganChase has given politicians $9,436,814 since 2000; Fidelity gave $8,772,000; the Vanguard Group gave $1,390,330 since 2003. Save Darfur also fingers the Women’s Equity Fund and Pax World Funds as culprits).

The bigger problem has always been China, who sit squarely in the way of the UN doing anything about the situation. It’s kind of cute—they’re doing the same thing we used to do when Reagan was president—they’ve got the whole “we’re doing all we can, but intervention at this time is not prudent” stuff big brother Ronnie Reagan used to pull. (A self-proclaimed Stalinist recently divulged to me his secret love for Reagan as a Stalinist icon in his own way.)

So, how can we solve this problem? I have always advocated taking the high road, which is to open-source all renewable energy patents and devote massive government resources toward a moonshot of global oil independence in 10 years. But in realpolitik terms, why don’t we just hang the Sudanese government out to dry by offering an embargo combined with an oil-for-food program for Darfuris backed by UN peacekeepers? China would still recoup its investments in the oilfield while winning a PR victory and a great price for its agricultural exports. 

Dear readers, you may be wondering what I’ve been up to, since lately dispatches are few and I never call anymore. Well, I’ve been working on a book. If you want a copy of the proposal, e-mail me and I’ll send it to you. For the purposes of this website, the proposal is to be distributed under the terms of the Godfather Intellectual Property License: If you want to take a look at the book proposal I’ve spent the last three years working on, you may do so free of charge as long as it never redistributed in an incomplete form (i.e., without my name on it). However, in return, know that someday—and that day may never come —I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.

If that’s too much for you, you may enjoy this little video clip I did for MediaChannel a few weeks ago (during this blog’s autumn vacation):

Did I mention I hate what the web does to video? No? Never mind. Let’s just say that as an editor, I deeply resent the reduced frame rate of web video, because all that time I spend making sure the cuts are exact within a thirtieth of a second is essentially wasted. Sigh.

Good For the Gander!

Remember how I used to complain about torture? Well, I have put those fears to rest. The President himself has assured me that the United States does not torture. We merely apply psychological or physical pressure, nothing that leaves marks (never mind that these exact techniques rendered Jose Padilla unfit to stand trial).

Donald Hebb—who worked my old alma mater—helped the CIA figure out that basically, you can drive anybody crazy with a bare minimum of equipment:

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars a year. Many have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research — the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr. Frank Olson, who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere. But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American form of torture: psychological torture. With funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done—drugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none of the above.

For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs.

Ironically, Hebb was the one pioneered research into the physical manifestations of thought patterns in the brain, but as Dana Perino said, “The bottom line is, we don’t torture.” Principally because torture, as we are now defining it, isn’t supposed to leave marks.

And whom do we torture er, ‘legally and successfully interrogate,’ again? Only the most important suspects are tortured in the name of national security, as the television keeps reminding us. We’re talking high value targets here, the Justice Department assures us. Which brings me to point here: if these techniques are truly legal and effective, the next Attorney General really needs to use them on Alberto Gonzalez.

You’re probably thinking, who’s Alberto Gonzalez, and what’s his connection to Bin Laden? Well, in keeping with the ‘eat your own dog food’ principle, it’s important for Gonzalez, if he truly steered the United States government away from committing war crimes (i.e., torture) on a systematic level as he claims, ought to be able to let those same safe, effective techniques help him jog his memory. You may recall the countless (OK, 64) times he said he didn’t recall things during Congressional testimony. What he needs is a little help from his friends, and afterwards, he can testify to Congress about those techniques as part of their ongoing torture investigation. I mean, don’t you think his testimony will be enhanced by a little real world experience?

They Love That Dirty Water

The comic book villain potential of Erik Prince is truly awesome, as noted by the Daily Show—a wealthy, secretive ex-Marine who runs a wildly corrupt mercenary outfit above the law. But while it’s easy to blame Blackwater for the awful things that they do (routinely), let’s look at why Bush needs Blackwater so much in the first place.

Private contractors are needed to protect high-value targets, like American State department employees or drive fuel trucks from Kuwait. Now, Iraqis, including lawmakers and police, get killed all the time. But private contractors—mercenaries— who occupy the kind of legal grey zone that lets you shoot first and ask questions later.

When you can’t distinguish between civilians and assailants, you have to get aggressive, otherwise, you’ll get hit. And we can’t afford that kind of PR. When a Congressional delegation visits Iraq, you need the kind of security detail that plays offense as defense, no matter how many civilians you kill. The Iraq body count website is full of civilians who got shot travelling too close to Americans on the highway.

Running an occupation requires a certain amount of brutality, because the citizens there are never going to view your troops as legitimate. In fact, the only time you get suicide bombers is when you have a foreign military presence. And the kind of targets Blackwater protects are huge gets for an insurgency, because it makes foreign higher-ups wary of visiting the troops.

If you want to wage war, you have to kill as many people as possible—that’s why soldiers make bad peacekeepers. An occupation like the one we’re running in Iraq requires war crimes. And that is just one more reason we need to leave.

Not So Noble

Videos like this one make me ashamed of our side of the global warming debate:

First of all, I appreciate using a chart and all, but this guy needs to stop talking to people who agree with him, because it’s affecting his ability to make an argument.

The biggest flaw in the argument is the assumption that whatever measures we take will work. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible for us to curb or almost stop global warming. After all, the Montreal Protocol was able to repair the damage to the ozone layer within a relatively short time. However, it is apparent that Al Gore is in fact a pollyanna who’s sugarcoating the situation.

I say this because Al Gore, Nobel and all, is not calling for a reduction in greenhouse gas production. He’s not even calling for a freeze in greenhouse gas production. He’s calling for a reduction in the amount of projected emissions growth. In other words, he believes that the planet can absorb much more carbon without catastrophic effect.

But the range of scientific projections for global climate change scenarios include all sorts of catastrophies, and we’re discovering new ways global warming is going to fuck us every day. I saw a documentary on volcanoes which posited that the 300% increase in volcanic eruptions in the Ring of Fire (home to the majority of the world’s volcanoes, actually) in the past few hundred years may be connected to sea level increases, which put greater pressure on the underground magma chambers causing more eruptions.

If it were truly a moral issue, as simple folk like the guy in this video want us to believe, the answer is simple: stop using gas. I don’t have a car myself for exactly this reason. However, all kind of things I purchase use gas, from transportation to plastic extrusion. The most obnoxious parts of An Inconvenient Truth by the way, re the ones with Gore looking pensive while being chauffeurred around in a stretch limousine.

The reason we don’t get off gas, as the president says, is because we’re addicted, and he should know. The Bush family oil company, Zapata, literally put the “Z” in “Pennzoil” when they merged with Penn Oil. We could raise the CAFE miles-per-gallon standards from the thirties to the thousands (effectively banning gasoline-powered cars)—I just saw a Chevy commercial for a fully electric vehicle, and BMW has ads for a hydrogen-powered car, too. We could even bring back American automobile jobs by following the German model, requiring in-country conversions for all gasoline-powered engines to renewable fuels within a certain time-frame. But then again, transportation only accounts for about 60% of petroleum consumption in developed countries and is actually the minority of petrol use in developing countries, according the Department of Energy’s “Outlook 2000” projections.

When Gore buys “carbon offsets” from a solar plant in India to ‘make up’ for his jet-fuel usage, he isn’t being as clever as he thinks. Then again, neither is his audience; scientists have basically been convinced already. Over the last 20 years, I’ve watched scientific opposition to the threat of global warming wane to the point that the few remaining holdouts have shifted so far from their original position on the issue you can tell they’re just being obstinate.

I’ve watched global warming skepticism (which is important to have, by the way) move from “there is no global warming” to “there may be global warming, but it isn’t human-caused” to “there may be human caused global warming, but it’s insignificant” to “there may be significant human-caused global warming, but let’s wait another generation before we act.” As more data is uncovered (starting with the ice-core samples from Antarctica) the connection between human activity and climate changes since the Industrial Revolution becomes less and less ambiguous.

If Gore is serious about maintaining greenhouse gas emission levels, which is what cap-and-trade is supposed to do, then he should really start talking more about adapting to a world scarred by global climate change instead of pretending we can stop it by flying around the world “raising awareness.”

And this brings me to my second point: let’s grant the other side the benefit of the doubt and pretend that taking action to solve global warming through government expenditure will be bad for the economy (which is patently ridiculous). If regulation is supposed to cause a massive worldwide depression, why is it assumed by the idiot in the above video that taking the same measures while actually saving the planet won’t lead to the same thing anyway? For free-market zealots, it doesn’t matter if government programs work, they’re illegitimate and should therefore be opposed prima facie. (Cf. Bush’s SCHIP veto.)

So you’re not going to peddle this outside of those who have already bought it beforehand, buddy.

Speaking of people who aren’t scientists but pretend they’re just as smart; I’d like to address those people who have glommed onto the fact that the sun has a sunspot cycle which has an effect on the global temperature. Please note—sunspots are not the same as human-caused global warming. They are a separate cofactor in a large and complex system. Climate scientists already know about sunspots. It’s not like there are IPCC researchers who caught the Fox News global-warming-is-a-hoax show and said, “Oh my god! We forgot about sunspots! Erase all the equations from the chalkboard—we have to start again from square one!”

“Forcings,” as scientists refer to them, mean that there are inputs which push a system toward a certain outcome. That’s why the worst of all possible worlds is one where the sunspot-fueled skeptics and the human climate change proponents are both right, and both factors contribute to our suffering. If humans force a natural process to go off the rails, it’s not necessarily a safe assumption to think that we can right the process by contributing as much repair as harm caused. The curve has been irreparably changed.

If you want to talk about the issue with global warming skeptics, you need to talk about the strategic value of renewable energy. I wonder sometimes if Germany is leading renewables research because they remember the Axis was finally brought down by a gasoline blockade. Fossil fuels are strategic resources. Renewables are even more strategic. Everyone has much easier access to them than to oil or natural gas, which, as I’ve pointed out here before, is a major cause behind wars. Even giving our enemies renewable energy helps us, as we are no longer an oil exporter.

Save Arts Education

Has it occurred to these people who are flogging all this increased math and science education spending that the real, enduring legacy of America is cultural—the domain of the liberal arts majors? Even when the DVDs are made in China, they’re still of Hollywood movies. Our culture is the ultimate export. Al-Qaeda sends its video dispatches using American-made software on former Defense Department networks. Can’t we just be satisfied with that and call it a day on all sides?

No, we need to ramp up our math and science programs because lead exposure and television are lowering the collective IQ of American youth.

Now, I didn’t go to college in the U.S., but Elephant is always telling me it’s America’s last real stronghold, our university system. It has become the model for the rest of the world (at least, in terms of secular education). We’ve kind of mortgaged everything else—we’re not the strongest, richest, smartest etc. anymore. Being on top is tough that way, because unipolarity in a system as large as the entire world is very difficult to maintain in the long term. Harvard University, on the other hand, was here before the United States and will probably be here after it, too.

Back to our moron brood—wouldn’t you rather live in a country with more defective three-chord country songs and angsty poems than defective bridges and automobiles? Think of the future, people. Think of the children, so they won’t have to.

R.I.P., Dean Johnson

Dean Johnson, lead singer of the New York band The Velvet Mafia died in Washington last week. It isn’t clear what the immediate cause of death was, but Dean was HIV positive; I don’t know whether his death was a direct consequence.

In high school, my friend was a trumpet player in the Velvet Mafia’s “Mormon horn section,” which was code for the fact that the horn players wee mostly straight, while rest of the band was gay. Dean himself was a giant drag queen who would come out onstage in six-inch heels and sing sort of retroish NEw Wave rock songs about David Geffen and picking up boys on the PATH train.

My friends and I would go see him at CBGB’s a lot. We’d be in the front row; I’d be yelling at Dean—”Dean, have my love child!” or “Freebird!” or something else in drunken teenager, and my other friend, who was literally joining the John Birch Society, would hoot and cheer along. We were the band’s most dedicated groupies—not that we were gay or really had much contact with Dean for that matter, but we were very supportive.

It’s so strange to think that CB’s went only a few months before its legendary owner, Hilly Kristal, and then a few weeks later Dean went, too. The New York of my youth is dying out. The Lower East Side where my new, out-of-towner friends drink is so different from the place where I hung out as a handily-mustachioed underage drinker, even though they share the same latitudes and longitudes. No more Second Avenue Deli, no more Rocky Horror at the Village Cinemas, no more squatters and most of all, no more cheap anything.

Dean is gone and we’ll never get him back. And so, in some ways, is New York City.

Sometimes, it’s too easy.

What kind of idiot protests that the surge is working? “AJStrata,” for one, who wrote this charming piece of tripe which I cannot help but “fisk.” So, let’s get into it:

The signs abound that Iraq is stabilizing. The massacres of Muslims that al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Malitia [sic] inflict are because Iraq is the primary front in the global war against Islamo Fascism.

Point for AJStrata—the latest NIE has, in fact, identified 8 signs that Iraq is making progress toward stabilization. Unfortunately, it also cited 10 signs that Iraq is worsening. 4 out of 9 isn’t a great ratio, though.

The mass killings of Muslims would be going on whether we were there or not, just as they did in Jordan and Egypt.

Interesting—which mass killings of Muslims is he talking about? Perhaps the triple bombings in Amman in 2005? Nope, can’t be, because Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for that bombing.

Now, al-Qaeda did have a failed plot to blow up similar targets on New Years’ Eve 2000, but all three worldwide plots were stopped by US and Jordanian intelligence. But then again, that was back in the Clinton administration, so we all know it doesn’t count for the purposes of this post.

As for Egypt, it turns out that all the major terrorist attacks (2004, 2005, 2005, 2006) since the 1997 Luxor massacre targeted tourists rather than Egyptians, although of course more Egyptians were killed by Egyptian terrorists than any other nationality.

So… no, there was not, and would not have been the same mass killings of Muslims had the United States not invaded Iraq.

The Islamo Fascists only know base brutality as their form of political expression.

It’s funny you should mention that in such close proximity to the words “Egypt” and “Mahdi.” Across the Islamic world, democratization has consistently been followed by attempts by Islamist parties to gain representation in government. We need only look to the spectacular electoral success of Mahdi-backed Shiite theocrats in Iraq, or the Palestinian victory of Hamas at the polls to see this in action. Egypt, on the other hand, is consistently cited for human rights abuses and authoritarian defects in its own democracy. But much of the political repression in Egypt is directed at the Muslim Brotherhood and other ‘Islamofascist’ parties, who have been barred from running for office.

Look at al-Qaeda’s current ’strategy’ – kill as many Muslims as they can so as to cower the country back into submission.

This troglodyte clearly doesn’t know very much about al-Qaeda or Iraq.

The brutality of al-Qaeda did something in the Middle East most predicted was impossible – they caused the Muslim street to rise up and ally with America. Take yesterday’s brutal bombings:

Bombings killed at least 76 people in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk on Monday, police said, the worst such violence there in recent memory. Ethnic tensions have been building in Kirkuk, a city with a mixed population of Turkmens, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Kurds, as it approaches a referendum on its future required by the Iraqi Constitution.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombings, but some residents and observers blamed militants linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq who are attempting to sabotage the political process by bringing sectarian tensions to a boil.

Sorry, I didn’t catch the part in the article where the Arab street rose up and allied itself with America. Where was that again?

This incident is in addition to two schools being destroyed in Iraq and terrorists in Iraqi Army uniforms killing 29 in Dilaya[sic] Province. More killing of Muslim women and children here.

Still not seeing it.

Yet the SurrenderMedia refuses to recognize that this is not Muslim sectarian violence but a deliberate and bloody effort by al-Qaeda to create civil war in the absence of one.

How quickly we forget that the sectarian militias (like the above-cited Mahdi army) are the actual Islamofascists—killing people with impunity and discriminate violence. These are the people who have a reasonable shot at establishing an actual sharia-based government. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, are about as good at statebuilding as we are; my criticism of the U.S. Army’s constructive capacities applies pretty well to Al-Qaeda, too, now that I think about it.

Why does the media continue to admit they are wrong?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Armchair ‘experts’ with large audiences seem to always feel their success equates to their omnipotence.

Ignorant ‘chicken-hawks’ with chromosomal deficiencies seldom use English grammar and vocabulary correctly. Hey, AJStrata, where did you study Middle Eastern politics? Lemme guess… Fox News?

But it is a fragile arrogance it seems, one where admitting a mistake is not possible.

Good thing 9/11 killed irony, or that statement would have been hilarious.

It is clear what impact these attacks are having on the people of Iraq. They are shunning al-Qaeda and turning them into authorities every chance they get.

You know, when they’re not planting IEDs for food money. Every other chance.

More and more we see stories like this one, where tips led to the capture of Islamo Fascists preparing to kill more Iraqis:

Soldiers of 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) out of Fort Drum, N.Y., and 4th Battalion, 4th Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, joined forces to clear the villages near al-Owesat and al-Thobat, Iraq, July 14. During Polar Tempest, tipsters gave the Coalition Forces viable information.

The night began with Soldiers clearing houses, when an Iraqi man who claimed to know where several terrorists lived in the area led them to various places.

…

The Iraqi man guiding the Soldiers said he believed they had encountered the lead element of a larger group of anti-Iraqi forces. As the U.S. and IA forces continued clearing houses in the area, the man pointed out one of the residents as a terrorist. In another house a male claimed to know where a high-value target lived. As Coalition Forces followed him, several local residents began to flee in vehicles. They were stopped and detained.

When citizens are swarming to turn in the brutal animals living amongst them this is not sectarian violence – this is moderate Muslims battling the Islamo Fascists. In fact, the fascists are so bad that former allies who once dreamed of Jihad turned on al-Qaeda when faced with it in all its cruel reality:

In the pursuit of an elusive enemy the US loosely labels AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), US Green Berets and soldiers in this remote corner of Iraq have enlisted the help of a new ally that they have christened LRF, the “Legitimate Resistance Force.” It includes ex-insurgents, police dropouts with checkered backgrounds, and former Al Qaeda-linked fighters – all united by a desire to rid Diyala Province of the network’s influence, say US officers.

“A lot of them are former Al Qaeda operatives … but when they saw the stealing, murder, and terrorism, they realized it was not the way forward for Iraq,” says Maj. John Woodward of San Antonio.

That’s great, until notice who make up the “LRF”—sounds like they want a piece of the action, not so much to launch a moral crusade. If these are the people we are touting s our new coalition partners, it makes you wonder why we’ve attracted these lowlifes in the first place. AQI is a gang, basically, with political and ideological cover provided by the occupation. The LRF is another gang who wants AQI’s territory.

The SurrenderMedia continues on in this story to create fictional alternatives as opposed to simply admitting the brutality of al-Qaeda is too much for many who once dreamed of Muslim glory – not of killing Muslim women and children.

The problem is this—al-Qaeda doesn’t really need the support of the “Arab street.” They just need enough to supply a steady stream of suicide bombers, preferably women and children.

It seems the only ones who can still stomach al-Qaeda is the news media. Just about everyone else has seen them as the animals they are and provide them little to no credibility as an ‘alternative’ life style.

Did anyone else just get a visual of Bin Laden in a leather outfit at the Gay Pride parade? Just me? Never mind.

The Iraqi people, in combination with our military’s own amazing efforts, have turned the tide in Iraq. Jack Kelley notes how our forces are actually not engaging much at all with the enemy in Anbar – once the capitol of al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq and its center of the modern caliphate they planned to create.

One call was from “Bruce in Upland,” whose son is a soldier currently serving in Iraq. “I will speak for my son who right now is bored out of his mind in Ramadi, because he hasn’t heard a shot fired in combat now in about six or seven weeks,” Bruce said.

There were about 22 enemy incidents per week in Ramadi in April, said Marine Major Jeff Pool. That’s declined to “about two per week.” (An enemy incident is any type of direct or indirect fire, from a sniper to a mortar or an IED attack.) Throughout Anbar province, the number of “incidents” has dropped from about 400 last December to 155 last week, said Maj. Pool, the public affairs chief for U.S. forces in western Iraq.

“Though these numbers are a substantial drop, I believe them to be artificially high,” Maj. Pool said. The increased operational tempo resulting from the troop surge has increased exposure to the enemy as it has increased the number of al Qaida operatives killed or captured, he said.

“Anbar is returning to a state of normalcy, so I consider the soldier in Ramadi being bored a true measure of progress,” he said.

The Surge is working. Anyone but a stubborn fool can see that. I like to find comparisons so I can gauge things against a known example. So I decided to look at NY City’s violent crime statistics and see how things compare. Here is what I found. In 2003 (a low crime year after 9-11) NY City suffered 597 murders and 31,253 aggravated assaults. No, they did not suffer any car bombs (though they have had one in their past and who can forget 9-11). But NY City is, thankfully, a ways away from the front in the war with Islamo Fascism. But if we combine these numbers and divide by 12 we find NY City is quite violent when compared to Anbar. The number of ‘incidents’ per month in NY City (and this is NOT counting rapes, robberies and theft) is 2,654. Anbar is 155. Anbar is smaller in population and the 155 incidents include a lot of deaths. More than NY City’s 50 per month – but not a lot more. (note: here is other data with slightly lower numbers from NY City itself)

So as Anbar settles down into a state of violence that is not too far away from that in one of our largest city (and I would wager similar to many large cities in the world, including Moscow and others) are we really going to continue to pretend Iraq is not turning the tide? Are we going to continue to pretend al-Qaeda’s bloodlust is what is behind all the Muslim killings? Are we going to pretend and the Muslim street is NOT turning against al-Qaeda?

Now, a whole bunch of commenters got to this before I could finish this post, but here are some numbers:

Population of New York City:  8,213,839
Population of Anbar province: 1,170,178
Est. Police officers in NYC:     37,838 (217:1)
Est. U.S. troops in Anbar:       38,000 (31:1)
Attacks on US Troops/month, Anbar:  155 (1 in 245)
Attacks on civilians/month. NYC:  2,654 (1 in 3,094)

(No data on attacks on NYPD available, but 2 cops were killed in the line of duty in 2006).

Just for kicks, let’s follow this moron’s line of reasoning: an incident is defined by the army spokesman as “An enemy incident is any type of direct or indirect fire, from a sniper to a mortar or an IED attack.” Now, neither the U.S. government nor the Iraqi government releases comprehensive crime statistics for the provinces, so we’ll have to assume that these attacks are being made on U.S. soldiers. The Iraqi army may be included in the statistic as well, but Major Pool’s comments don’t lead me to believe that they are.

If my hometown was beseiged by 155 mortar, sniper and IED attacks on the NYPD a month, it would be a very different place, trust me. But then again, there are seven times as many people here. If the Canadians invaded and had to occupy New York at similar soldier to civilian rates as our occupation in Anbar, they’d need about 480,000 troops and we’d be attacking them at the rate of about 2,000 ‘incidents’ per month, keeping to the Anbar ratios.

At any rate, I wouldn’t be posting this if there wasn’t a larger point illustrated by this person’s stupidity.

The fact that for AJStrata the Iraq war is viewed in terms of American casualties reveals that he doesn’t give a shit about Iraqi civilians and probably never has. As I wrote before about the multimillion dollar search for three missing soldiers, our priorities in Iraq are SNAFU, which is army slang for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”

Here, I’ll quote myself:

“If we went through the same thing for every missing Iraqi, we’d have something—a police force. But we’re not going to do that, and neither should we have to. As I’ve pointed out before, only a government which is sustained by its own troops and police can be legitimate, and therefore effective.”

It seems that our primary mission in Iraq isn’t nation-building or global counter-terrorism (since we’ve been doing a remarkably poor job at both), but force-protection. Even many of the peace camp cite the number of U.S. troop deaths instead of Iraqi civilian deaths as the reason to pull the plug. We only give a shit about our troops, and basically the army is there to fight an enemy of their own creation. The problem is they’re playing defense in a strange land, which seldom works out well.

As long as CYA is our primary goal, we’ll never be able to stabilize the country. Al-Qaeda in Iraq knows this, which is why their strategy is in fact to prolong the U.S. occupation for as long as possible, in order to bleed us to death. This is the strategy which the jihadists seem to believe (although it isn’t true) brought down the atheistic USSR. Our presence is the only justification for theirs; as soon as we leave, they’ll be fighting to create a Sunni theocracy to which the largely secularized Iraqi Kurds and Sunnis would never submit. Even Iraq’s Sunni tribesmen aren’t that religious. But as long as they’re fighting the American occupiers, AQI will find friends in Iraq and abroad.

We spent decades building up a formidable army, but with that power comes the upkeep. Most of the service people in Iraq are either private contractors or supply personnel; as the New York Times wrote last year,

On any given day, according to military officers in Baghdad, only about 11 percent of the Army and Marine Corps personnel in Iraq are carrying out purely offensive operations. Even counting others, whose main job is defensive or who perform security missions to stabilize the country for economic reconstruction and political development, only half of the American force might be considered combat troops.

The fact that our army, even after (and in part, because of) the modernization drive initiated by former Sec. Def. Rumsfeld, is so expensive to maintain so far from home is no deterrent who say that we must “project power” across the world at all times. It seems that our army needs to be able to handle every international crisis if we are going to base our diplomatic efforts on “strength,” but let’s be serious—that kind of capacity would require a draft.

As a consequence, our army and its neocon commanders leave themselves open to the kind of guerilla insurgency Iran could fund for years for a few days’ worth of oil revenues (which we are hell-bent on making as high as possible for all oil producers—quite ecumenical of us, really).

Fighting a war of attrition against the Soviet Union (which is what our army had been built to do) and fighting an occupational war of attrition are two different things. The whole point of such a war is to outlast the other army with superior productive and offensive power; but if the other side isn’t spending the same amount of money as we are, the calculus of such prolonged war radically changes.

During the war in Afghanistan, I warned that initiating a state-to-state conflict in response to a terrorist incident was 20th century thinking and that it was a totally inappropriate response. Besides killing more Afghan civilians than Al Qaeda did within a few short weeks of the start of bombing, I knew that this wasn’t going to be the end of it, either.

In conclusion, if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, beware of people who do know what you’re talking about.

I can’t quite put my finger on why I’ve singled Republican Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter out as my bête noire, but I have, so deal with it. Hunter isn’t as dangerous to civil rights as, say, Sam Brownback, or as connivingly amoral as Rudy Giuliani, but there’s something about him that just rubs me the wrong way.

Even when he says something halfway decent, I can’t help but take issue with the San Diego Congressman. I’m talking about the following statement he made at the Reagan Library debates:

MR. VANDEHEI: Congressman Hunter, Kenyu Thomas (sp) from Honolulu, Hawaii, wants to know if you watched Al Gore’s environmental documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” (Laughter.) REP. HUNTER: No, I didn’t watch it. But, you know, I think that global warming and the need to be energy independent gives us a great opportunity. I think we should bring together all of our colleges, our universities, the private sector, government laboratories and undertake what for this next generation will be a great opportunity and a great challenge to remove energy dependence on the Middle East and at the same time help the climate. I think we can do that.

We need to take taxes down to zero for the alternative energy sources.

We need to make sure that all the licensing from our laboratories goes to the private sector, goes to the American manufacturing sector for these energy systems. I think we can do it.

Duncan, I was with you until the last paragraph. This is the kind of speech a Democrat might have given, and I think it’s really great to hear this becoming a bipartisan issue, because moving renewable energy to the middle- (and fore-) ground makes it possible for something to be done about it.

Hunter is right to separate the issue of global warming and building a renewable domestic energy supply, because the latter issue has broader implications even if you don’t believe in global warming.

But the Democrats and Hunter, because they are American politicians running for public office in America, have in their proposals one fatal flaw: keeping the patents in the United States.

It’s actually more important for China to switch to renewable energy than it is for Americans. That’s only partly because China has 1.3 billion people. It’s also vital because China is undergoing its own Industrial Revolution—the same kind that set us off in this carbon-spewing, gas-guzzling direction in the first place. China is building a huge amount of coal-powered electric plants and buying cars for families that never had anything worse than a bicycle. China, and the rest of the world, need to build their infrastructure right from the ground up, because it’ll be prohibitively expensive to fix later, if these things are even fixable. Every dollar invested in fossil fuels pushes us backwards and slows down renewable energy’s progress.

That’s the technological aspect, but the meat of this issue are the geopolitical implications of fossil fuels. You may not believe that Iraq was invaded because it sits atop the world’s second-richest oil field, but consider, for a moment, Darfur. 70% of Sudan’s oil exports go to China, who actually trade weapons for oil, thus arming the Janjaweed militias who have been carrying out a genocide against the Darfuris. China’s oil needs are gigantic, and burgeoning. But what if they didn’t need Sudan’s oil?

Notice how politicians who talk about this always have to make it an issue of “dependence on foreign oil” (I would have just said ‘oil’, but I can understand why they need to tar foreigners with our excesses). The United States gets most of its oil from North America anyway; according to a PBS website:

Where does America get all the oil it needs? The U.S. imports roughly half the total — over ten million barrels of crude oil a day. Canada is the top source, at nearly 1.8 million barrels. Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela are numbers two through five, each exporting more than one million barrels a day. Angola, Iraq, Colombia, Kuwait and Algeria round out the top ten; each exports between 273,000 to 641,000 barrels a day.

Oil prices and supply are global phenomena that affect the U.S. (see: price of gas, unrest over). Just reducing our oil dependence is a fine idea, especially considering we consume more than three times as much oil per year and 12 times as much per person as China does, but keeping those innovations to ourselves doesn’t help us as much as we seem to think.

Paradoxically, higher oil prices mean that more countries (although this mostly applies to Canada) can now consider producing dirtier oil that wasn’t economically feasible to extract before, like tar sands. At any rate, demand will outpace local production and countries will have to look elsewhere to import oil.

Renewable energy, on the other hand, has the potential to give every country its own energy security. I’m not going to pretend it will bring about world peace, but it will eliminate one of the major contributing factors in wars all over the world. Oil wars are a global problem and they have a global solution. (And once each country is energy independent, we can move on to potable water filtration.)

Competing for limited resources rather than sharing the intellectual property to make the world self-sufficient is a surefire way to incite more oil wars. Remember, World War II was won when the Allies cut off Germany’s gasoline supply; the strategic value of self-sufficiency cannot be overstated. So let’s release those renewable energy patents to the whole world! It can only help us; being selfish in this case is a fine way to ensure self-destruction.

When you watch a White House press conference (or that rarest of birds, a Presidential press conference), you'll notice that tough questions are increasingly being asked as journalists feel emboldened by Bush's low approval ratings. But there is still a line that many refuse to cross, a moratorium on real self-examination about our foregin policy.<br />
<br />
For all the pointed questions, the American press has one inviolable premise–American exceptionalism. Here are some questions we should really be asking the administration about North Korea.<br />

<ol><li>North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty twenty-one days after the Administration invaded the named "Axis-of-Evil" member Iraq. On the other hand, we violated the NPT earlier this year to provide India with nuclear technology. Is North Korea abiding by the rules more than we are?</li><br />

<li>Will we arm any of North Korea's neighbors with nuclear technology in violation of the NPT, the way we did for India?</li><br />

<li>Is there cause for concern that an embargo of North Korea will lead them to leverage their nuclear technology for sale on the international black market, as South Africa did to Israel (and possibly other nuclear aspirants) during its embargo?</li><br />

<li>The Clinton adminstration's Agreed Framework enacted an eight-year freeze on nuclear weapons from 1994-2002. Is it reasonable to assume that North Korea only resumed the enrichment of plutonium after the expiration of that "carrot-based" approach, as Tony Snow called these negotiations?</li><br />

<li>Did the US pressuring banks to freeze North Korean assets and the halting of energy supplies cause North Korea to resume nuclear weapons programs after it had already agreed to stop in May 2005, during the Six Party talks?</li><br />

<li>With regard to a missile defense system, which the administration touts as the difference between Republican and Democratic approaches to defense against the North Korean threat, wouldn't interception of a nuclear-tipped Taepodong en route to a West Coast target mean the irradiation of the Pacific Ocean, and eventually, all the oceans of the world through the ocean current system?</li><br />

<li>How will our diplomatic efforts to secure nuclear disarmament be different than our evidently failed approaches since the expiration of the Agreed Framework, or our approach to Iran's nuclear aspirations?</li><br />

<li>Given that our military forces are currently embroiled in two missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have either been unable to meet or have severely curtailed our recruiting goals in the last few years, will the U.S. military be forced to consider a draft in order to make the threat of force against North Korea more credible? </li><br />

<li>North Korea is still officially at war with South Korea and the United States. Is it ever in the interests of any country with nuclear weapons to disarm during wartime?</li><br />

<li>Would we disarm if the United Nations threatened sanctions?</li><br />
</ol><br />

Turn on cable news at any given moment and chances are good you'll be hearing about either immigration or record gas prices. It occurred to me that although you'd never know it from watching corporate media, these two issues have much more in common than you think, and their causal link goes back hundreds of years and can be summed up in a single word: <b>growth</b>. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I want to talk about global warming.

Let's start with the basics. The worldwide industrial infrastructure is dependent on polluting fuels like gasoline and writing off the effects of that pollution. Only 40% of America's gas goes toward filling up vehicles at the pump; the majority of gasoline is used in other industrial manufacturing. Now, gas prices are at an all-time high and show no sigs of retreating; petroleum is only getting more energy-intensive and dangerous to extract.

The incremental progress called for with intergovernmental solutions like the Kyoto treaty isn't just too little, too late; it gives us the impression that we can do enough to stop global warming without substantial lifestyle and industrial changes. We may have already reached a tipping point in global warming. No environmental proposal being considered by any government has a goal of reducing the actual amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, only reducing the rate at which we are adding to them.

Lately, I've been reading a lot about environmental catasprophes and global warming, because as part of some research for a book I'm trying to write, I checked out Jared Diamond's Collapse from the library.
It turns out that when people overharvest natural resources, shit happens, and this shit ranges from civil war to cannibalism to societal extinction, usually in that order. But the unifying factor in all of the collapses mentioned in the book is that each dying society (e.g., Easter Island, the Greenland Vikings, the Anasazi) overconsumed their available resources.
Now, the greatest impediment to successful implementation of environmental policies in any country has always been the perception of an underlying conflict between the environment and the economy. You've seen the talking heads line up on television–concerned lefty environmentalist saying we need to be environmentally responsible at all costs, arrogant conservative saying the cost to business would cripple our economy and calling the other camp Chicken Littles. The problem is, both sides are right about why the other camp is wrong, and the tragedy doesn't stop there.

For example, let's look at recycling, because it perfectly illustrates the issues involved. A while ago, Penn & Teller's Bullshit (of which I am a huge fan) did an episode on recycling, where they claimed, with characteristic libertarian skepticism, that recycling was actually bad for the environment and amounted to a huge scam. They relied heavily on the works of one Daniel K. Benjamin, who wrote "The Eight Great Myths of Recycling" and the Cato and Competetive Enterprise Institutes, libertarian think tanks notorious for bending other people's scientific studies to their market-driven libertarian wills. The show decries recycling as a feel-good activity which does more harm than good.

P & T's major beef with recycling, and the only one which stands up to scietific scrutiny, is the fact that it costs three times as much to recycle trash than to simply throw it away in a landfill, and he seems particularly agitated at the thought that recycling is mandated and subsidized by the governent. When recycling workers and proponents bring up the point that the extra money being spent on recycling is good for the economy, Penn shouts that recycling workers are doing "unnecessary, shitty, make-work jobs," presumably as opposed to healthy, comfortable miners and paper-mill workers who face no risk of lung disease, cancer, asthma, nerve damage, retardation, or death by cost-saving safety rollbacks.

The episode also claimed that recycling costs more energy than it saves, contrary to the often quoted statistics from the EPA which assign huge energy savings to recycling as opposed to virgin extraction. The discrepancy is a bit of (appropriately enough) sleight-of-hand: when Penn says,
"It takes more energy to recycle a plastic bottle than to make a new one" he's ignoring the costs of extracting, transporting, and refining petroleum and converting it into virgin plastic. Similarly, capitalism depends on exluding the costs and hazards of waste disposal as "externalities," making the true costs of production disappear from the purchase price.

And this brings me back to the point of this essay (and it's a good thing, too, because I could go on and on about the problems with the anti-recycling claims made in that episode). Benjamin and company make some good points about the efficiency of the recycling industry, because much of the machinery the industry relies on is fossil-fueled and contributes to pollution even while saving other resources.

Now, speaking of gasoline (as I've been trying to do for several paragraphs but not quite succeeding), a perfect example of an actual feel-good/do-little problem is the phenomenon of the hybrid car.

As we all know, the average gas mileage of American cars has been steadily dropping for the past twenty years, since the end of the 1970s politically motivated oil crisis. With the introduction of the SUV, which was expressly designed for the purpose of guzzling more gas than government fuel efficiency standards had allowed for passenger cars. The average mileage for American cars has declined to about 20 miles per gallon. (The Bush administration raised CAFE standards for SUVs by about 1-2 mpg last year for 2011 models, a move widely hailed by environmental groups as not going nearly far enough.)

There are two major reasons for this; we pay less for gas than any other industrialized country, and we are addicted to more horsepower. The auto-industry shills will bring up the canard that increasing CAFE standards makes for unsafe vehicles (because of the decreased weight of the resulting cars). Of course, the weight of the vehicle isn't going to help you if there are no safety features like seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones, which are much more important towards keeping consumers alive. Keeping vehicles "safe" by increasing the weight of the car is the worst way to do it because you just make the cars deadlier for anyone they hit, regardless of the safety of the people inside the thing.

Along comes the hybrid car, which, don't get me wrong, is a great engineering idea, but has little practical benefit when it comes to reducing actual consumption relative to the rest of the world. A hybrid might get comparable mileage to a car with two fewer cylinders, but the Prius, for example, gets worse mileage than any European-manufactured compact car. Buying a hybrid vehicle is almost, but not quite, an offset for the increased fuel consumption of the supremely powerful needs of Western consumers. It makes us think that a small increase in efficiency can make up for our incredible consumption. But if we had all kept driving the smaller cars people bought during the 1970s gas crisis, we could have dramatically lowered fuel consumption. It reminds me of the tobacco companies who spend more money promoting their charitable donations than the actual charity itself.
Hopefully, you're noticing a theme here. Our economy is sustained by externalizing–the developed world is inside the SUV and the rest of the world is outside. And it's not like we care about emissions or accidents or the implications of our gas guzzling; our economy needs the horsepower! And the truth of it is that there is no way that the present renewable energy technology can supply a world full of first-class energy consumers like those of us who maintain American-style consumption. We use 24.4 barrels of oil a year per capita. Over 40% of the autos sold in the U.S. are SUVs. The rest of the world coming even halfway towards our levels of consumption and emission would unquestionably melt the icecaps.

Even if we had been getting a worldwide average of 40 miles to the gallon, the fact that we consume so much leaves us with no means to undo the damage we have done to the environment. As I said before, we have no hope, under the current economic program, of reducing global warming, only of slowing down the rate at which we are making it worse.

It isn't that our economy couldn't support more economic regulation (which it could) or that environmental efficiency isn't good for business (it is), or even that the transition costs to a so-called 'carbon-neutral' economy wouldn't create jobs (it would, even in the developed world); we lack the political will to change our way of life in time. Instead, we have increased interest in half-measures (like Kyoto), but so far, no radical solutions to the radical threat faced by climate change.

The tide may have turned, however, in the United Kingdom. An article on ZNet entitled "From A Dying Planet –
The Media's Aversion To Addressing The Juggernaut of Economic 'Growth'" caught my eye a while ago. It details a British Government report on global warming which draws some shocking conclusions:

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Colin Challen, the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, sets out the case for abandoning the "business as usual" pursuit of economic growth, which has been the basis of Western economic policy for two hundred years.

…

Note, however, that 'growth' should be placed in inverted commas because standard measures of economic activity externalise – in plain terms, ignore – the often enormous attendant environmental and social costs. As Colin Challen warned:

"No amount of economic growth is going to pay for the cost of the damage caused by a new and unstable climate."

[Michael] McCarthy expanded: "the pursuit of growth, which essentially has not changed since Victorian times, is misleading, and the terms need to be redefined. Instead, we need a different policy which looks at how much carbon we can afford to emit."
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The central tenet of capitalist faith–that growth is good in and of itself–relies on externalizing the consequences of that growth, not to mention the fact that it assumes there is no practical limit to which wealth can be extracted from the earth. In the case of gasoline, oil companies are making record profits based on record demands for their product, which will only increase, no matter how many hybrid SUV getting 24 miles to the gallon Americans might buy in 2011. The only thing which has spared us total global environmental catastrophe is the incredible poverty to which we have reduced the rest of the world in our quest for resources and cheap labor.

Immanuel Wallerstein (about whose work I have written before) described the method by which the 'developed nations' dependended on impoverishing the rest of the world to create their relatively fantastic wealth. His work is called 'World Systems theory,' and it constructs a three-tiered network of 'core', 'semi-periphery' and 'periphery' in the international economic system. You can read more about the theory here, but the one sentence summary I'll give here is that developed countries needed to export the awful working conditions of the industrial revolution to developing countries in order to maintain capitalism. The wealth of these often resource poor developed countries is built on the exploitation of less developed but resource-rich countries.

The 'money quote' from the ZMag article I mentioned above is this (empahsis mine):
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"We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world's resources. <b>Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.</b>

"Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world."
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Whether you recognize the history of colonialism as genocidal itself, it is clear that the wealth of Europe was built on the booty of its colonies. It's a familiar story; in order to satisfy the demand for growth (and free-market types will always assume that economic growth, rather than redistribution, is the only morally right way to better the lot of the non-rich), rich countries decided to take what they needed from others, consequences be damned.

And it is this institutionalized pursuit of growth and wealth that leads me to the second issue I had promised (so long ago, it seems) to address here: immigration.

As the developed world impoverished the rest of the world, it became inevitable that people would flood follow the flow of resources established by colonialism (and in the case of the United States, our particular flavor of neo-colonialism). Colonialism, the building block of the fortunes of the north, leads to immigration. A multicultural society may not have been the intended consequence of the race for world domination, but then again, history is replete with unintended consequences. Speaking of the Third Reich, it's doubtful that Hitler thought he would end up being the liberator of Africa (and India) from the Allies' colonial rule, but nonetheless World War II touched off an irreversible tide of postcolonialism. Likewise, a new wave of immigration to Europe was touched off by the demand sof rebuilding a ruined economy, and so the periphery returned the favor of invasion, one low-paid worker at a time.

As we look at the devastating impact of the pursuit of growth, we can't help wonder if the tide is reversible. Can industrialized nations, whose wealth is built on the exploitation of natural resources and people both at home and abroad, reverse the backlash which inevitably follows, whether it is a rising tide of immgrants or the sea itself?
For those who concern themselves with these consequences (although they seldom realize it, the question becomes, Can we give it back? The answer is that we couldn't, even if we wanted.

Those who sound the racist alarm about the "immigration crisis," no matter which country they're in, would scarcely conceive of regaining national racial purity by renouncing the benefits of racist exploitation. What you get instead are people like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson:
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Fox News' John Gibson again responded to criticism of his comments that advised his viewers to "[d]o your duty" and "[m]ake more babies," before citing a report that found that nearly half of all children under the age of 5 in the United States are minorities.

…I said people in this country should make more babies, particularly those groups whose birth rates are not as high as others. Why? Because we see what is happening in Europe. … [W]hen people stop having babies … populations cease being self-sustaining, end up filling population gaps with immigrants who then make demands on the culture the homies might not like, such as demands for Sharia law in some parts of Europe."
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You have to wonder which concerns besides outright racism actually motivate supporters of otherwise free-market policies want to restrict the free flow of people as well as money (the libertarian Cato Institute is notably pro-immigration). Businesses love illegal immigration because they need ways to lower wages (and subvert minimum-wage laws), and it makes screwing with their employees easier if they know illegals can't complain about their treatment. All of which is supposedly good for economic growth, you see.

I mentioned Diamond's "Collapse" way back in the beginning of this post, and I want to remind you, dear reader, of one of the important lessons from collapsed societies. The wider the disparity of elites from the rest of the population, the less able they are to recognize (or desire to implement) the crucial measures that would have been necessary to save their civilizations. What they did, in Diamond's words, was to "buy themselves the privelege of dying last." As the elites sequester themselves in gated community and SUVs (which, as my friend Sherwin noted, are like gated communities on wheels), the less able and willing they become to save anyone else, whether it is the victims of auto accidents or catastrophic climate change.

The consensus that we can maintain our levels of consumption and growth is slowly beginning to crack. Even if we assume that fossil fuel consumption has reached its saturation point in the US (which I cannot), when the rest of the world catches up to us there's going to be hell to pay unless we build a sustainable path to economic development. And whether the developed world betters their living standards by moving to the developed world or developing their home countries, it is clear that they cannot do it the way we did.

So, Saturday (May 6th) marked the third anniversary of Casual Asides. Faithful readers, I know you've been waiting breathlessly for the past month for me to update, and all I can tell you is that I've been working on a non-fiction book proposal instead of blogging. And don't worry, this week I'll break out that extra-long political analysis a month in the making that would ignite a firestorm of blogospheric criticism if only I posted more often and garnered a wider readership. In the meantime:

<b>Is There A Doctor In The House?</b>

While trolling the National Review's Corner the other day, I came across this little nugget (emphasis mine):
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VICARIOUS HYPOCHONDRIA [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Harry Reid, earlier today, on taxpayer funding for stem-cell research that kills human embryos: "[W]e cannot deny 100 million Americans the hope of eventually finding a cure for a wide range of illnesses and conditions." <b>Who knew that one-third of Americans were sick?</b>
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That's funny, because just last week there was a study which came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association which concluded that American white males aged 55-64 were in significantly worse health than their counterparts in Britain. Now, the study made a point of saying that only non-Latino whites were compared, "to ensure that health differences are not solely due to health issues in the black or Latino populations in the United States, the analysis is limited to non-Hispanic whites in both countries." (Let's not forget that blacks and Latinos comprise just over a quarter of the U.S. population, for those running the stats in your head.)

The study found "that those in the top education and income level in the U.S. had similar rates of diabetes and heart disease as those in the bottom education and income level in England." You can imagine the implications for the country as a whole, especially considering that one-third of Americans (there's that magic number again) are uninsured and therefore have limited access to preventative medicine. By the way, the study quoted the following comparative rates of sickness:
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<pre>Diabetes
USA – 12.5%
UK – 6.1%

High Blood Pressure
USA – 42.4%
UK – 33.8%

Heart Disease
USA – 15.1%
UK – 9.6%

Cancer
USA – 9.5%
UK – 5.5%

Lung Disease
USA – 8.1%
UK – 6.3%

Stroke
USA – 3.8%
UK – 2.3%

Heart Attack
USA – 5.5%
UK – 4%
</pre>
The study looked at the health of 6,400 Americans and 9,300 British people aged 40-70.
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Now, I don't have the datasheets for the study, but my quick not-quite-statistical analysis consisted of adding some percentages: the non-heart disease numbers yield an upper limit of 33.9% incidence of stroke, lung disease, cancer or diabetes. Up to 57.5% of those surveyed might have one heart disease and/or high blood pressure (I assume that if you have a heart attack you also had one of the other two already). Now, diseases are more likely the older you get, but the group surveyed has the best access to healthcare of any group and as the study morbidly points out, minorities have much worse health on average than whites (hmm, I wonder why).

But why just bother with JAMA when you can just go straight to the source: the Center for Disease Control? Why, their Report on Health in the United States is a free download in pdf format and since the CIA insists that 99% of Americans are literate, you could easily peruse the charts with pretty colors therein showing that large numbers of Americans suffer from kinds of illnesses; not to mention that 30% of American adults are obese, and 6% of adults 18-44 as well as 21% of adults 44-64 self-report that chronic illness limits their day-to-day functionality.

Recently, Congress heard testimony from medical experts to the effect that
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More than 45 percent of adults struggle with a chronic health condition that affects their daily activities. From diabetes to asthma, heart disease, depression, obesity, and AIDS, more and more Americans are living with chronic illnesses. More than 90 million Americans live with one or more chronic illness; at least 22 million live with three chronic illnesses.
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So, Ramesh Ponnuru, it looks like only those who truly give a shit about the health of Americans figured that a third of them are probably sick right now. But getting back to baby-killing (oops, I meant embryo-killing) stem cell researchers, Reid may be overstating the case with regards to their effectiveness. The JAMA study is careful to note that the fact that Briatin has universal health coverage and America doesn't isn't the sole factor in the difference between populations; it has much to do with lifestyle factors as well.

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Health insurance cannot be the central reason for the better health outcomes in England because the top socio-economic status tier of the U.S. population have close to universal access but their health outcomes are often worse than those of their English counterparts.
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I suppose this means that unless stem-cell research finds the cures for America's aversion to public transit or addiction to high-fructose corn syrup as a food additive, we should just be throwing those embryos away instead of using them for medical research, the way Jesus would have wanted us to. Of course, Harry Reid might have been talking about 100 million americans who could be stricken with preventable diseases in the next ten or twenty years, but hey, The Corner is on a roll and ought not be bothered with, you know, thinking things through before writing them down. (It's only a blog, after all.)

On the other hand, the study may be interpreted as saying that America's real problem is clearly that we spend too much on healthcare–twice as much per capita as the British, who are much healthier than we are.

You see, that's the argument advanced by Allan Hubbard, President Bush's free-market evangelist-cum-economic advisor, in a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece. The piece begins:

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IN the past five years, private health insurance premiums have risen 73 percent. Some businesses have responded by dropping healthcare coverage, leaving employees uninsured. Other employers pass the costs on to workers, both by raising co-payments and premiums and by denying workers the wage increases they need to afford these higher prices.

What is driving this unsustainable run-up in health insurance costs, and how can we make things better?

Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free.
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I suppose this means the insured, because being uninsured actually is free, and the Health Savings Accounts Hubbard ends up pushing in the op-ed show the consumers the true value of their health care by removing the already fucked-up health care system we have and replacing it with a suggestion to deposit a certain amount of their declining real wages in a separate savings account so they can buy doctor's visits retail.

Leave it to the Bush administration to suggest burning the village in order to save it. Speaking of our current system, I think it is quite clear to every American that HMOs are a classic swindle. How classic? Would you believe <B>Nixon tapes classic</b>?

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John D. Ehrlichman: "On the

<b>Abuse of Civil rights and Procedures</b>

The lovely and always well-researched Ren has a really remarkable piece on the Nation website about the recent South Dakota Abortion Task Force, which was basically a front for a single State Rep's plan to challenge Roe v. Wade ASAP. The extended version of the piece is here, there's much more detail about the abuses of democracy and procedure. It reminds me a lot of my old student government, actually. And don't miss her take on the infamous Britney Statue.

By the way, one of the reasons a real abortion ban will never pass muster with the majority of Americans is because to make it enforceable, you can't have rape or incest provisions, which South Dakota did not. Apparently, emergency contraception will still be legal (really?), but then this offends the sensibilities of Catholics 1869-present (the Pre-Pre-Vatican II Church, if you will, believed that the life of the fetus begins at 16 and one-half-weeks instead of "at conception").
<P>
<b>Listen to the Power, People</b>

It occurred to me that the nation has finally begun to turn the tide against the President in large numbers. Part of it is that there are finally going to be some trials and sentencings here, and it's high time it happened.
<P>
With Straussians in the White House, you have to read the subtexts, the subtleties in the administration. Karl Rove is like a magician: the White House always trying to distract you with one hand while they pick your pocket with the other.

But that's just Bush's handlers. Consider the recent townhall meeting the President gave.

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"Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse? And if not, why not?," she asked.

He went on to discuss his oft-stated feelings about how the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made him realize that the United States was entering a global war on terror.
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I mention this because while Bush may be top banana, he doesn't write his own speeches or talking points. And that's what I wanted to talk about.
Murray Waas has a new article about Bush–Waas is one fo the best journalists on the beat, and is always coming up with breath-taking revelations about the administration. Now he writes about the careful policy used to insulate the president:

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Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
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(HT: Kos)

Reading Bush's speeches are like listening to jazz. You have to listen for the notes he's <b>not</b> playing to really appreciate it. Notice how here the President interjects "suitable" into "aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons production." WAKE THE FUCK UP, AMERICAN ELECTORATE. It's how you know he's lying. And by the way, you need the straight, unadulterated junk here, people, not just that stuff his producers make him read, like State of the Union speeches. You need to listen to the things he says off the top of his smirking head. If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed this, but instead you didn't watch or read the speeches as carefully as they were crafted and instead were fed a steady diet of the stormier clips getting spun on Fox News or CNN.

Now, Bush is an executive, our first CEO president, as Peggy Noonan crooned pathetically. I always found that claim outrageous, by the way, if we call him our "CEO in Cheif" we better look at his record before recommending him for hire.
Bush is running the family business for a while, and he's got lots of people watching his ass, for a living.

Bush was warned and went ahead with a version he might be able to fall back on if he got in trouble. The administration's curious language is some time unequivocal from officially lower-level stooges, e.g., Cheney:

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Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002
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but with Bush, it's always something carefully designed to protect his liability towards, I dunno, impeachment?

<b>Chris Owens for Congressional 11th District</b>

This leads me to my next point: I'm gonna reregister as a Democrat for the sole reason of electing Chris Owens to Congress. I've lived in the 11th District for the vast majority of my life, and Chris is without a doubt the best candidate to represent me for a variety of reasons, but most importantly–IMPEACHMENT. If the Democrats want to win, we have to see candidates come out for impeachment the way Owens has. The Democrats have a problem with, say it with now, the perception of weakness. There is nothing the Democrats can lose, really, so we should go ahead and do it. With Bush's popularity nearing the freezing point, we need to put him in a cell block before he screws anything up any further. Now, I hear what you're saying–if we impeach Bush, we get Cheney. That's why we need to prosecute this like a federal corruption case: IMPEACH BUSH AND CHENEY. I bet he sings to get out of hard time, too. This would make the newly Democratic Speaker of the House the President, which would at least give the Democrats a chance to save us before we go over the brink of apocalypse, as our President suggest might be possible.
And, of course, <b>Tasini for Senate</b>.