The Ugly Un-American: Week 6
Posted by Ray Church on 08.31.2007
Global Warming, abdications at the Whitehouse, moral politics, American casinos in foreign countries and, of course, this week's "Shut the Hell Up" Award. All in this week's addition of The Ugly Un-American.
Tackling the Environment
Enrique and I have been exchanging emails for the last week after he called Environmentalism "just another religion", which I took offence over as both an environmentalist and someone with a keen interest in religion. On the positive side, at least it wasn't Anne Coulter calling me Godless.
He bought up a number of challenges to "global warming" that have come up over the past few years, some of them specious, many of them spurious and some of them down right spaced out.
The first, and most specious claim, is that global warming and global cooling are natural cycles to the earths climate. That is exactly right and perfectly correct.
It also misses the point entirely.
The argument is not whether global warming and cooling are natural cycles; the problem is what creates that cycle. One of the funniest lines in Enrique's column was when he linked the end of the last ice age to the carbon dioxide created by mammoth flatulence. Great laugh line, but terrible for his argument. In away, it totally undermined his argument.
You see global warming theorists doesn't disagree that global warming is a natural cycle; they just ask what causes that cycle. Looking at all the possible sources of these changes over the last few millennia, scientists noticed something: changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lined up almost precisely with changes in global temperature. In other words, carbon dioxide was a "natural" cause of global temperature change.
Now bare with me here. Carbon dioxide, such as that created by the natural flatulence of cattle and wooly mammoths, was enough to create the natural cycle of global warming and cooling. Combined with other things which impact carbon dioxide production (the number of trees, the population of carbon dioxide creating animals on the planet), this was enough to influence global temperature.
What should happen if, over the past two hundred years, an industrious race of civilized monkeys decided to continuously pump gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
All bets are off, hence the urgency and "great demands" of the environmentalist movement.
Now, of course we are not certain about this point. We're only 90% certain from 90% of the scientific community. So, if it's not certain, what do the nah-sayers say created global warming, if not carbon dioxide and mammoth flatulence?
Sunspots.
Yup, the leading advocates for the "natural" cause of global warming believe that sunspots provide a more accurate explanation for the global cycles of cooling and warming. Is there any evidence for it? Sure, but the evidence is more debated and there are plenty of accusations of forged and fluffed of data.
It's also important to know that sunspot data does not go back as far carbon dioxide data. Sunspot evidence relies on human observation and only goes back 400 years, while carbon dioxide data can be collected from other sources, like ice core samples, which allow us to measure carbon dioxide presence over millennia. As such, solar variation theory proves much more tenuous than the carbon dioxide theory.
It's not impossible that global warming is caused by both carbon dioxide and sunspots, which leads to the question of which has more effect on global temperatures, and here the answer is a little more difficult. Even if solar variation theory (the more formal name) is correct, the data can only account for one quarter of the change in temperature over the past 11 years. That means that there is still a huge portion of the changes unaccounted for.
So, on one hand you have a theory which is widely accepted by a large portion of the scientific community, most prominently by the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) which says that it is almost certain that global warming is a man made phenomenon. On the other hand, you have a lesser number of global warming deniers who support a far sketchier theory known as solar variation, which has fewer supporters, less supporting data and significant claims of data bias, and even after all of this can still only account for a small percentage of global changes in temperature.
And this is before I start talking about the number of these scientists are directly and indirectly employed by the captains of the energy industry. This is before we look at the propaganda campaign launched by the energy industry, modeled on the tobacco industries mechanisms of denial, which have muddied the waters and sidetracked the argument. This is before we talk about how the Energy Corporations were given free reign by the Bush Administration to write America's energy policy.
So, yes, I'm worried about the growth of China and India and the potential damage that will do to the global climate, but I'm also worried that the world's biggest polluter continues to throw its hands up and says the "jury is out" when it isn't; says "the science isn't clear" when it is and most importantly says "there's nothing we can do" when they haven't even tried.
Last Stop, Everyone Off
Liberals and Progressives everywhere have been celebrating this week, as the Bush Administration announced that Karl Rove, Tony Snow and Alberto Gonzalez are all resigning their posts over the next month. Excuse me for sounding a bit vindictive if I'm not singing "Ding Dong, the Witch is Gone" like Greg Allen this week.
We'll ignore Tony Snow for the moment, as his gaffs always seemed to me to be a smart guy being paid to speak on behalf of morons. There are only so many ways you can explain away Bush's foreign policy and Cheney's policy gaffs.
But the loss of Rove and Gonzalez creates a difficulty for people like me. I'm a huge fan of accountability.
With Rove and Gonzalez gone, I'm left to wonder what will happen to the congressional investigations they were at the center of. What motive is there for Congress and the Senate to demand answers on the warrantless wiretapping debacle and the Attorney Firing scandal. With Rove and Gonzalez gone, these investigations cease to be scandals at the heart of the administration. They become the misdeeds of ex-staffers, and the politicians who have dogged the administration to get to the heart of the scandal face a dilemma.
If they continue, they will be labeled as dogmatic fanatics and hopeless partisans. The truth be damned. Justice be damned. The media will yawn, Joe Sixpack will flick the remote to American Idol and the truth will disappear from public consciousness.
As Exhibit A I present Ari Fleischer, who was at the heart of the Valerie Plame scandal and one of Robert Novak's three sources in the Whitehouse (the other two were Richard Armitage and… Karl Rove). He was every bit as responsible for the outing of the other two but was invisible and therefore not a name for the media to pursue.
This week he reappeared, cavalierly representing the organization Freedom Watch, complete with ads which blatantly link 9/11 to Iraq.
Now, my first question to Fleischer in this interview would be "what was your involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame", instead he gets to spin his bullshit as if he's some expert when he's already proven that he was responsible for propaganda and disinformation. He gets to be a proxy spokesman for the Bush Administration when quite frankly he should be serving time in jail.
So here we are, four years down the track, and he returns to the public eye with the credibility of an expert. What happens when Rove and Gonzalez turn up in four years, or less, and get treated like they have any credibility at all?
A Pragmatic Response to Hypocrisy
Another week, another homosexual sex scandal.
As anyone who reads my columns regularly probably realizes by now, I'm not a big fan of sex scandals. Normally they are a distraction from real issues and real matters. Sure, there's the hypocrisy element of someone legislating against their own sin, but that's another one of those areas where people get the facts right but miss the point entirely.
If I were a real part of the media, rather than just one of these amateur commentators from cyberspace, my coverage of this would not mention Mark Foley or Bill Clinton or Ted Haggard or any other sex scandals in the last 20 years.
It would consist of a simple observation. These high profile sex scandals often occur from people with the most to lose. A politician caught in a sex scandal loses their reputation, their job and their family. Even if they don't lose it, their membership is forever tarnished by it. If I'm feeling charitable, I may even acknowledge that such an act also indicates a loss of faith. That's if I'm feeling charitable.
So here's my take: Why would someone with so much to lose choose to sacrifice so much for an act they have decried as immoral? Why would someone risk everything for a short term sexual act?
No matter how you define that compulsion, and whatever you think causes it, it seems clear that you can't control the act by simply believing it's wrong. The idea that such an impulse can be "cured" by a sense of consequence.
When people preach morality, they have often failed, or they set themselves up for failure. As many of these conservatives are Christians, let's address the Christian View. According to that view is that we're all sinners, we've all fallen short. So when you preach to others about "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" on whatever that personal moral stance is, you're setting yourself up to have your own "sins" revealed. It doesn't take a league of vengeful homosexuals waiting to pounce although those people are out there, I'm sure.
It takes cognitive dissonance, or karma, or however you want to define that concept. When an idea is repressed without being addressed, it will reappear in some shape or form subconsciously.
World News: Macau
My home finally hit international news this week when little old Macau, population 500,000 people, announced the opening of the world's largest casino, The Venetian. Macau is known by the moniker "Las Vegas East" due to the copious casinos which dot its landscape.
OK, you know this isn't an Ugly Un-American column without some comment about the economic or political implications of this.
Imagine a city going through rapid change. In the decade or so since it was handed back to China, American Casino Companies have flocked to Macau with the promises of access to the largest population of gamblers on the planet. Gambling is very much part of the culture of China, but the only place it is legal is this one small city on the South East Coast. The last 5 years have seen the opening of 4 major casinos and the expansion of several others.
Now here are the externalities. House prices have risen by double in the space of 3 or 4 years. Students happily drop out of high school on the guarantee of a job in the casino industry, leaving a gap in the educated population. Traffic has become treacherous with the introduction of a hundred or so tourist and casino busses to the roads. As such, pollution has increased as well. Simple things like food and rent have risen rapidly.
The everyday realities of life have suffered as well. Try getting a plumber when they're all installing pipes in the new hotels. Try getting someone to build new schools when they're all laying the foundations for new casinos.
There are externalities to rapid social change. For me, this is not too much of an issue, although we're kicking ourselves for not buying a new house a couple of years ago. I'm happily middle class and my wife and I both make a comfortable living. Our standard of living has gone down, and it's sped up plans to jump ship.
But what about those living below the poverty line? What happens to the elderly who have to make do with what they've always had but have to stretch it further?
The glitz and glamour of rapid economic change have a cost.
Shut the Hell Up Award
The difficulty for moral conservatives is that they have to defend indefensible positions when it comes to their definitions of morality. This tied Pat Buchanan in knots this week when he tried to defend the conservative approach to homosexuality.
He took part in a debate over the role of homosexuality in the GOP on Live with Dan Abrams.
Abrams took the lead, recalling the last 10 years of political sex scandals in the US, identifying the 10 prominent Republican scandals and 5 prominent Democrat scandals that have played out in the last ten years.
Buchanan responded.
It's six to one, half dozen to the other
Uh, no Pat. It's ten to one and five to the other. If you want to turn that into a ratio, it's 6 to one and a dozen to the other, or 2 to 1.
Now, there are some explanations for this, which the other members of the panel responded to. When Republicans were attacking Bill Clinton, they set themselves up for a counter attack.
Pat Buchanan then tried to equate Barney Frank to Larry Craig.
[Barney Frank] had a full service whore house running out of his basement
OK, it's always strange how people retell the Barney Frank story. Like Buchanan, they leave the inference that Frank was running the prostitution ring, so let's get the facts straight. Frank is an openly gay Congressman. He did have a relationship with a male prostitute. He did once pay for sex, although after that the relationship became mutual, which is basically where Frank's part of the scandal ends.
The rest of it was purely the prostitute himself, who continued to see clients without Frank's knowledge. When Frank did find out, he kicked the man out.
So here's the thing. There were plenty of "sins" for Buchanan to pick out. He did use a prostitute. He did have a relationship with that man. Frank was reprimanded by Congress for that relationship.
Buchanan, however, took the most tenuous accusation you could make and insinuated that Frank was responsible for the prostitution ring. Once again, it's Buchanan the hack on the spot.
It continued.
He may not be a hypocrite, he may be a man with a drive and a compulsion
Is it just me, or might he just be both? We need to check Buchanan's definition of hypocrisy. You stand up and call homosexuality immoral and vote in ways that insure that homosexuals do not receive equal protection under the law, then your drive and compulsion makes you a hypocrite.
The Section formerly known as Pimping
To show there's no hard feelings after I ripped on Enrique this week, he takes a look at Hugo Chavez this week. I agree that Chavez gets a free ride for some downright viscious activities, but I have to say he was a bit harsh on Cyndi Sheehan. I'd like to know who he thinks was cynically manipulating her.
I referenced Greg Allen this week, so go see the real thing here
Justin Baragona also looked at Larry Craig this week I've tried to avoid talking directly about the event and deal with the ideas, so get the facts from him.
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