Water You Saying

Yeah, I know the torture report is hogging all the headlines.  And that it was issued, with unequivocal statements by Senator Feinstein that there was not a single instance in which these barbaric horrific acts yielded any information, and that everybody is forced to face it now--all righteous things.  But as long ago posts here and previous blogs show, it's not new.  We knew all this, if not in such horrifying detail.  And the GOPer response is also not exactly unpredictable, though Borowitz summarized it well in his satiric column claiming that Cheney called for an international ban on torture reports.

But let's talk about something else.  Like water.  It's coming down, East Coast, West Coast.  Changes in the dispersal of water from the heavens over time is likely to be a major effect of the climate crisis.  Deserts will grow, other places will persistently flood.  Food supplies, power generation, transport, health, let alone the human need for drinking water every day, all are disrupted.   It's happening now.

And here's the thing for our vaunted scientific expertise: nobody knows what water really is.  They fool you with that familiar grade school formula: H20.  Two hydrogen atoms and one atom of oxygen.  Sound simple.

But if it is so simple, and so simply described, why can't they make it in the lab?  They make all other kinds of stuff.  Some labs claim they're making organic life out of inorganic material.  But on the most useful possible bit of manufacturing, they come up empty.  They can't make water.  Except by pissing in the wind.

We don't even know where water came from.  There's new research on that--scientists say that at least half of the water on the Earth is not only older than the planet, it is older than the sun.

If not even the Earth knows how to combine two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms,  where did our water come from?  Some place older than the solar system, it seems.  A prominent theory was that comets delivered it, a very long time ago, from cosmic space.

Now there's data from the Euro Space Agency probe that landed on a comet that the water it harbors isn't the same as the water on Earth. (That's the comet up there, real photo, minus tail.)

 Apparently the comet theory has been controversial for some time.  The best story on the whole topic I read today is this one in the NY Times.  It says this kills the comet theory.  Other stories say it suggests it is wrong, but more evidence is needed.

So the prevailing theory now is that water arrived here via asteroids.  The Times story concludes:

In October, in another Science paper, researchers found that meteorites that originated from the large asteroid Vesta, which is believed to have formed inside of the snow line, also possess Earthlike deuterium levels. These scientists believe that ice-rich asteroids from outside the snow line were pushed inward and were among the pieces that combined to form Vesta and Earth hundreds of millions of years before the late heavy bombardment.  In other words, Earth may have been wet from almost the beginning.

So by this description the Earth was originally a large snowball in space. (Asteroids are getting other kinds of attention, too, including the likelihood that one may come this way.)  But the asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, within the solar system.  So that still doesn't explain where the water came from originally.  Or how it came to be.  Or what it is.

Storm Day

It's raining.  We're into a storm that's reputedly to be the strongest in five years, and will last into Friday.  High winds inevitably lead to power outages here, so I'm taking this opportunity now.  That photo is supposedly what the winds look like.  So Van Gogh was a meteorologist?  If this storm really has as much moisture in it as predicted, it's going to help the snow pack in the Sierras a whole lot.  Flooding of course is a worry almost everywhere, including here.  There are also hints that this is going to be a wet winter up here, to remind us of what normal was.  

Tech Deception, Digital Slavery

In a New York Times oped, George Mason University economics professor, Tyler Cowen claims that the answer to income inequality in America might well be more and better computer technology.

Applying technology in smarter ways could bring down the costs of education and medical care. "We can easily imagine medical diagnosis by online artificial intelligence, greater use of online competitive procurement for health care services, more transparency in pricing and thus more competition, and much cheaper online education for many students, to cite just a few possibilities. In such a world, many wage gains would come from new and cheaper services, rather than from being able to cut a better deal with the boss at work."

Income gains, he suggests, are limited now by lack of computer skills. "Not everyone can work fruitfully with computers now. There is a generation gap when it comes to manipulating electronic devices, and many relevant tasks require knowledge of programming or, more ambitiously, the entrepreneurial skill of creating a start-up. That, in a nutshell, is how our dynamic sector has concentrated its gains among a relatively small number of employees, thus leading to more income inequality."

But simpler "human-computer interfaces" such as computers that respond to spoken commands will open up new job opportunities, such as supervising smart robots on the factory floor.  Income inequality could also lessen as emerging nations like China and India begin to innovate products that are now expensive and make them cheaper.

Cowen's argument in general is that income inequality is not structural, as Thomas Piketty famously wrote, but a product of an application lag in technology and the ability of many people to use this technology.  His conclusion: "growing inequality is highly contingent on particular technologies and the global conditions of the moment. Movements toward greater inequality often set countervailing forces in motion, even if those forces take a long time to come to fruition. From this perspective, rather than seeking to beat down capital, our attention should be directed to leaving open the future possibilities for innovation, change and dynamism. Even if income inequality continues to increase in the short run, as I believe is likely, there exists a plausible and more distant future in which we are mostly much better off and more equal. The history of technology suggests that new opportunities for better living and higher wages are being created, just not as quickly as we might like."

This analysis, hardly reassuring to begin with, and clotted with all its meaningless buzzwords, is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin, as should be obvious to anyone who lives in the actual world rather than the economics world.  But for a cogent blast of cold water, there's Jacob Silverman in The Baffler which exposes the actual dark side of the computerization of everyday life, including the rise of digital slavery.

I don't mean digital addiction, I mean working for nothing, or next to nothing, which Silverman describes in detail.  We know about the digital sweatshops but most of those are abroad.  He writes about digital slavery in America:

"Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones. Whether operating a bin selector in an Amazon warehouse or freelancing from a coffee shop, many Americans work long days without having contact with other human beings—neither coworkers nor supervisors. (There are no subordinates for this class of workers.) Everything they do is tracked, because efficiency is the sine qua non. Some of them work for online labor markets like Elance, oDesk, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which offer micro-jobs that can be done remotely, with little to no training. They complete surveys, tag photos, and transcribe interviews, for pay of a few dollars per hour or at a piecework rate of little more than a few cents per task...These labor markets depend on a kind of internalized offshoring."

Contrary to Cowen, computer literacy isn't confined to well-paid professionals.  It is the structure of the market, as well as the devious propaganda of the tech giants, that enslaves people and keeps their incomes down.  And it's all done automatically, without apparent human intervention, as so much in the world as wired now is:

"The software facilitating this transaction acts as the ultimate mediator; the employee and the employer never have to deal with one another directly. Payment can be unreliable and is wholly contingent on the employer accepting the laborer’s product. If the former doesn’t like what he receives, he can simply reject it and not pay the worker for his time. Contract employees have no chance, in this setup, to appeal or to revise their work."

According to Silverman, this is the real meaning of "crowdsourcing." Moreover, it is building into the market an increase in income disparity, by paying a lot of people a little, and forcing them to compete with each other, forever:

Companies begin to think in terms of short-term spending rather than long-term investment, as borrowing and hiring both atrophy. More and more of us are forced to be contingent laborers, freelancers, crowdsourced volunteers, or “permalancers” always on the lookout for more opportunities, always advertising ourselves through social media and public networks, knowing—with a sense of generalized suspicion—that our public utterances on social media may influence our future job prospects. Risk assessment algorithms may already be parsing our social media profiles, pooling information to be used in a future background check."

A lot of this, Silverman writes, is being sold to people as a libertarian ideal, when it is pretty much the opposite: "Workers, in turn, have more mobility and a semblance of greater control over their working lives. But is any of it worth it when we can’t afford health insurance or don’t know how much the next gig might pay, or when it might come? When an app’s terms of service agreement is the closest thing we have to an employment contract? When work orders come through a smartphone and we know that if we don’t respond immediately, we might not get such an opportunity again? When we can’t even talk to another human being about the task at hand and we must work nonstop just to make minimum wage?"

So far in history, capitalism has been unable to survive without slavery somewhere.  With the slaves of the South and elsewhere, slave labor in South American mines, industrial wage slavery, outsourced and piecework slavery in the digital age. Update: Slavery exists in prison labor; the state of California has officially argued it needs prisoners for their slave labor. That's a problem capitalism doesn't even recognize, so of course it has no solution.

Meanwhile, it consumes the planet like the mindless mechanism it is, when people with minds refuse to see the problem.

Can't Breathe

I can only take note of the ongoing actions in cities across America protesting the police killings of young unarmed black males.  I did see that the protests in Pittsburgh shut down part of the Parkway, something that to my knowledge has not happened since the 1960s.

Protests have included members of the St. Louis Rams football team making the "hands up" gesture, referring to the killing in Ferguson, Mo., and now NBA player Derrick Rose, wearing a t-shirt with the symbolic last words of a black man who died after a police officer had him in a choke hold in New York.

While these incidents were in the courts and in the news, a 12 year old black male was shot and killed by a police officer who described him as 20 years old, and an unarmed 33 year old black father in Phoenix was shot and killed by a white police officer while bringing food to his two daughters.  Remind you of anyone?

Lima Update

Silence in the media--what else is new?  Here's an NPR report on the terms of discussion at the climate talks in Peru.  Kyoto only applied to developed nations, but this time there's movement in expanding to all countries.  The big fund to aid developing countries in confronting the climate crisis is an incentive (and a huge business opportunity for clean energy.)

But most nations haven't met Kyoto voluntary goals, but by setting their own goals publicly, there is at least accountability.  The story asks, what happens if even the self-set, voluntary goals don't add up to enough to stop runaway climate catastrophe?  That may be what confronts the treaty-making meetings next year, for which Lima is a crucial preliminary.

Meanwhile, the world is on track for its hottest year in recorded history in 2014, and Antarctic ice is melting faster than ever, and California's drought is the worst in 1200 years.  

So here's a pretty elementary shot at understanding the psychology of climate crisis denial.  How is it that the so-called science of psychology seems to have actually gone backward in the past 75 years?

The Climate in Peru

Climate talks begin in Peru Monday, and some diplomats are expressing optimism, according to the Guardian:

UN climate negotiations opening in Lima on Monday have the best chance in a generation of striking a deal on global warming, diplomats say.

After a 20-year standoff, diplomats and longtime observers of the talks say there is rising optimism that negotiators will be able to secure a deal that will commit all countries to take action against climate change.

The two weeks of talks in Peru are intended to deliver a draft text to be adopted in Paris next year that will commit countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions without compromising the economic development of poor countries.

Diplomats and observers of the UN climate negotiations said recent actions by the US and China had injected much-needed momentum.

“I have never felt as optimistic as I have now,” said Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which are sinking as sea levels rise in the Pacific. “There is an upbeat feeling on the part of everyone that first of all there is an opportunity here and that secondly, we cannot miss it.”

The New York Times also spots the optimism and emphasizes the stakes:

After more than two decades of trying but failing to forge a global pact to halt climate change, United Nations negotiators gathering in South America this week are expressing a new optimism that they may finally achieve the elusive deal.

Even with a deal to stop the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warn, the world will become increasingly unpleasant. Without a deal, they say, the world could eventually become uninhabitable for humans."

"Unpleasant" is an uneasy euphemism for what may already be on the way.  Besides the long term goal of saving planetary life as we know it,  an agreement on attacking the causes of global heating has another crucial purpose: it makes it more possible to openly acknowledge and deal with these effects that have already begun, and which will increase from now on.

Michale Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor geosciences and international affairs is quoted in the Times piece setting forth what is now the generally accepted future.

“What’s already baked in are substantial changes to ecosystems, large-scale transformations,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. He cited losses of coral reef systems and ice sheets, and lowering crop yields.

Still, absent a deal, “Things could get a lot worse,” Mr. Oppenheimer added. Beyond the 3.6 degree threshold, he said, the aggregate cost “to the global economy — rich countries as well as poor countries — rises rapidly.”

People can extrapolate from the changes they see to what could come in the far future, but increasing attention is inevitably going to be focused on dealing with the effects as they happen.  So it is important to deal with the causes now, for a couple of reasons.

First, because there is not yet an overwhelming clamor to deal with effects that could drown out any attempt to attack causes.  Second, because opponents of attacking causes (fueled by reactionary titans of the fossil fuel industries) cannot acknowledge effects if they deny the phenomenon of global heating caused by greenhouse gases emissions.   An international treaty is a broad acknowledgement of the climate crisis.  It could at least gradually sap the power of deniers, and especially the attention they are afforded by a somewhat captive media.

Effects are already on the agenda in Lima. Peru  is already experiencing effects of their diminishing glaciers, vital to fresh water supplies.

 A Reuters story focuses on these issues, which go by the name of adaptation. "From the Andes to the jungles, communities are doing what they can, but their efforts will never be enough without ambitious global action to tackle climate change,” said Milo Stanojevich, CARE International's Peru director.  He advocates help for poorer countries to deal with effects as part of the international agreement.

Hey Cuz, I Mean Mr. President

Thanks to stumbling on my parents' names in a genealogy online, I discovered for the first time that I've acquired new relatives.

An email exchange to the person who posted it confirms that the daughter of one of my first cousins married into this family.  But in first trying to figure out why my parents were part of this family tree, I followed one of the branches to find some familiar names: George Bush, George W. Bush.  Yeah, those Bushes.

So I am distantly related to the Bushes, which means I am even more distantly related to the Clintons and the Obamas, because they are all related.

So, however distantly, I am related to the last four Presidents of the United States, and maybe the next one.






And not one of them invited me to Thanksgiving dinner.

The Week in Not Bad News

From the New York Times

"For the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and natural gas.

That day appears to be dawning.

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas."

A different perspective to the 2014 elections by a Republican whose analysis is that because the wrong GOPers won, the Democrats are in a position to dominate beginning in 2016:

In a careful analysis, Ladd builds a case: The Midterms of 2014 demonstrate the continuation of a 20 year old trend. Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level where the population is the largest utilizing a declining electoral base of waging, white, and rural voters. As a result no GOP candidate on the horizon has a chance at the White House in 2016 and the chance of holding the Senate beyond 2016 is vanishingly small.

 And on ballot questions, the results were more sweeping than I knew:

Every major Democratic ballot initiative was successful, including every minimum wage increase, even in the red states. AND every personhood amendment failed.

His conclusion:

“It is almost too late for Republicans to participate in shaping the next wave of our economic and political transformation. The opportunities we inherited coming out of the Reagan Era are blinking out of existence one by one while we chase so-called “issues” so stupid, so blindingly disconnected from our emerging needs that our grandchildren will look back on our performance in much the same way that we see the failures of the generation that fought desegregation. Something, some force, some gathering of sane, rational, authentically concerned human beings generally at peace with reality must emerge in the next four to six years from the right, or our opportunity will be lost for a long generation. Needless to say, Greg Abbott and Jodi Ernst are not that force. ‘Winning’ this election did not help that force emerge.”

This is the Daily Kos diary that summarizes it, with a link to the original article in the Houston Chronicle and a followup.

And shhhh, don't tell anybody but the House of Crazy Reps admitted in its own report that everything GOPers have been screaming about Benghazi!  Benghazi! was utter fantasy.  The Associated Press:

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

So how did Faux News react to its hysteria being trashed by facts?  By telling a completely different story.

A Larger Reality

Ursula LeGuin made two different but related points, both vital, in accepting an award.

The first has to do with the literary legitimacy of science fiction and fantasy writers, and the importance of future visions to the future itself:

"And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

The second point is the restraint on the freedom to write and on true authorship that's been growing a long while and has now reached nearly impossible proportions, not because of some fascist or even national security state, but because of the takeover by the institutionalized greed of capitalism:

"Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words."

This is almost her complete speech--it's under six minutes in the video above, and the complete transcript is here.

We Were Strangers Once, Too

It didn't take long for Republican noisemakers to pummel the media with their hypocritical cant and carping, so here is a rare opportunity to hear what President Obama actually said in his 15 minute talk to the American people Thursday on immigration.

He spelled out actions he'd taken to strengthen the southern borders and results that should cheer GOPers if they could accept the facts, and he talked about the efforts to pass immigration reform that have been stymied by Republican leadership in the House.  Like Ronald Reagan and lots of Presidents before him, he outlined a few steps he could take under well-established presidential authority.

But why bother?  That's when this talk rises above policy to get at the American soul, and the soul of our President.  So don't let your ears glaze over before you get there.

"Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger -- we were strangers once, too.  My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal..."

What We Can't See Does Hurt Us

We  can't see CO2 or what it's doing to the thin layer of atmosphere that enables life as we know it on Earth.  But a NASA satellite has been looking back at the planet to study what its instruments can see.  Video with narration (and music) from NASA that shows the flow of carbon dioxide and other gases over the planet in a year.  National Geographic supplies some further explanation.

Mega$+MegaFear=GOP 2014

Another Monday, another Doonesbury instant classic from yesterday's papers, and here on the Internet.

Taking It To the World

The Maldive islands off India as seen from space. They are among the world's most endangered from climate crisis sea level rise.

Update early Sunday: Reuters reports that the G20 summit voted in favor of addressing the climate crisis, as President Obama advocated. 

 Reuters: "The United States and other nations overrode host Australia's attempts to keep climate change off the formal agenda. Australia is one of the world's biggest carbon emitters per capita. The final communique called for strong and effective action to address climate change with the aim of adopting a protocol, with legal force, at a U.N. climate conference in Paris in 2015."

"The most difficult discussion was on climate change," an EU official told reporters on condition of anonymity. "This was really trench warfare, this was really step by step by step. In the end we have references to most of the things we wanted."

Saturday:
Following up the US agreement with China on reducing global heating emissions, President Obama challenged the G20 meetings in Australia to make an international climate agreement next year.  And he backed it up with a new contribution to a UN fund that helps poorer nations confront the climate crisis.

The Guardian story begins: Barack Obama has stared down both Republican hostility at home and the reluctance of his Australian G20 hosts to insist that the world can clinch a new climate change deal next year.

The story quotes his speech in Australia, referring to the pledges that China has made in the new agreement: “So them setting up a target sends a powerful message to the world that all countries, whether you are a developed country, a developing country or somewhere in between, you’ve got to be able to overcome old divides, look squarely at the science and reach a strong global climate agreement next year.  And if China and the US can agree on this then the world can agree on this, we can get this done and it is necessary for us to get it done.”

The LA Times reports that President Obama is pledging a US contribution of $3 billion to the UN Green Climate Fund, which funnels funds from the world's largest economies and biggest greenhouse gases polluters to nations most endangered by the climate crisis.

The story notes that "The fund is essential to getting developing nations to sign on to a climate pact international negotiators will present in Paris in December 2015."  Though other countries have pledged, US pledge is the largest to date.

The story quotes “A $3-billion U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund would be an important show of American leadership to help the most vulnerable people in the world protect themselves from dangerous climate impacts and to ensure a coordinated global response to climate change,” said Heather Coleman, climate program manager for Oxfam America, who noted that the pledge is similar to American commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Obama Traded To Canada

The Republican majority in Congress has wasted no time, not even waiting to be officially sworn in.  GOP congressional leaders have announced that they've made a deal with the country's chief trading partner, Canada.  They've traded President Barack Obama.

"It was their idea," Senate Majority Leader Ted "Tailgunner" Cruz claimed, pointing to a letter to the editor published in a Canadian newspaper.

"Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections," wrote Richard Brunt of Victoria, British Columbia. "Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country's adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there's no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money."

America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden. So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason."

"All that leftist socialist Kenyan uppity Nazi stuff was pretty disgusting," Cruz claimed.  "But he had one good idea that he ended his letter with."

Brunt's final sentence was this: "When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?"

Cruz could hardly control himself when he saw that, he intimated loudly.  So he got his GOP colleagues together, they contacted Canadians they knew (mostly in the oil industry) and quickly made a deal.

In a post-midnight session they traded President Obama for Doug Ford, Jr. who they described as Canada's Prime Minister, and a bagman to be named later.

Douglas Ford is a Toronto city councillor, the brother of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford and part owner of Deco Labels and Tags. He was recently defeated in his electoral bid to become mayor of Toronto.

When a US reporter informed the GOP officials that Ford is not the Prime Minister of Canada,  GOP senator-elect Joni Ernst of Iowa said, "That's your opinion."

A Step Towards Saving the World

The New York Times:

"China and the United States made common cause on Wednesday against the threat of climate change, staking out an ambitious joint plan to curb carbon emissions as a way to spur nations around the world to make their own cuts in greenhouse gases.

The landmark agreement, jointly announced here by President Obama and President Xi Jinping, includes new targets for carbon emissions reductions by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions from growing by 2030.

Administration officials said the agreement, which was worked out quietly between the United States and China over nine months and included a letter from Mr. Obama to Mr. Xi proposing a joint approach, could galvanize efforts to negotiate a new global climate agreement by 2015."

"It was the signature achievement of an unexpectedly productive two days of meetings between the leaders," the Times story continues. "A climate deal between China and the United States, the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 carbon polluters, is viewed as essential to concluding a new global accord."

"Unexpectedly productive" is an understatement.  The conventional wisdom has been that the US and China were global antagonists with few common goals.  Now apparently they have one--the biggest one, the one that counts more for the future than any other.

The Times story is long and informative, and worth the hit it might make on your month's free views.  The Guardian continually updates their story, and it includes supportive words from Secretary of State John Kerry, and Al Gore--but also promises of Republican congressional opposition. "Our economy can’t take the president’s ideological war on coal," said Mitch McConnell, bowing down to his fossil fuel overlords and their millions in dark campaign money.

The Guardian also quotes President Obama from his statement in China: "He said the US emissions reductions goal was “ambitious but achievable” and would double the pace at which it is reducing carbon emissions." The new US goal is reducing emissions by 26 to 28% by 2025, compared to 2025 levels.  Greenpeace calls this a floor, not a ceiling for reductions.  

The Guardian continues: Obama added: “This is a major milestone in US-China relations and shows what is possible when we work together on an urgent global challenge.”

He added that they hoped “to encourage all major economies to be ambitious and all developed and developing countries to work across divides” so that an agreement could be reached at the climate change talks in Paris in December next year."

According to the New York Daily News: "China’s pledge to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, if not sooner, is even more remarkable. To reach that goal, Mr. Xi pledged that so-called clean energy sources, like solar power and windmills, would account for 20 percent of China’s total energy production by 2030."

The News also reports that the final agreement was produced during a recent trip to China by Obama adviser on climate John Podesta.

These meetings, characterized as a breakthrough in US-China relations, also resulted in a a technology agreement favorable to US businesses.  The San Francisco Chronicle estimates that this deal could add a trillion dollars a year to the "global trade in information technology."

Corruption By Any Other Name

If you missed this in the Sunday paper...here it is.  Read it and laugh/weep.
It's Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau for Nov. 9, 2014. I saw it online here.

Cold Comfort in Nightmare Nation

High in the Department of Cold Comfort is Gary Younge's analysis in the Guardian that it really wasn't a wave election for the GOPers, the Dems didn't lose as badly as it seems, etc.

Or that (according to New York Magazine) liberal candidates lost while liberal policies won.  Or that a numbers analysis shows that GOPers did not disturb the Obama base very much.

Or that  "Denton, Texas became the first city in Texas to ban fracking with a locally led ballot initiative. Two counties in California did the same. Richmond, California defied massive spending from Chevron to elect a Mayor ready to take on Big Oil in their backyard," according to 350.org.

That's about all the analysis I'm going to read, frankly.  Yes, the demographic and historical deck was stacked against the Democrats.  Yes, the billionaires bought themselves a Congress and more states, bought themselves noise and turmoil to upset the confrontation with the climate crisis, as well as other matters.

Did it make any difference in the end that Democrats were timid, running on tested single issues and running away from their President?  Maybe not, but it's going to matter now.  Does anybody know what Democrats stand for?  I guess we'll find out.  But I am sure that today would feel better if Dems had gone down fighting FDR style, i.e. "I welcome their hate."

Maybe the numbers will show that President Obama pulling back from action on immigration didn't hurt Dems in the end, but I suspect it's going to hurt from now on.  Timid Democrats kept Obama quiet, which didn't work out too well.  He and we missed the chance to define what matters and what's really happening, with the ultra-rich fossil fuel magnates, the Koch Brothers and their ilk, buying turmoil and killing the future.  It doesn't look like that electoral chance is coming again soon, not with the likely candidates for 2016.

The best news was that "President Obama did not appear chastened" by the outcome. 2015 is going to be a very important year for the future, it's going to be a lot more difficult now, but it will be all but lost if President Obama loses courage and leadership.

So we woke up to a nightmare country, with Tailgunner Ted as Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.  It turns out that Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was actually a vampire, and he's got a promotion.

But at least this guy

beat this guy

to become governor of Pennsylvania.  Or something like that.

How Can You Mend A Broken Heart

From 2001, this has to be one of the last Bee Gees performances of this song. Great picture and sound--you almost have to see this to get how unique they were.

Hold Your Nose and Vote

It's not much of a slogan.  But it's about how I feel this year: Hold Your Nose and Vote.

Monitoring headlines over the past couple of days, it's clear that the media has decided that the Republicans have won the election that--not to put too fine a point on it--isn't over until tonight.  The NY Times and Washington Post seem sure that even the White House has decided the election is lost.

An amount of money has been spent that likely will never be totally known, but is certainly well beyond obscene.  Unsurprisingly it's estimated that the Republicans have won the contest to spill the most billions in "dark money," courtesy of our Supreme Republican Court.  But then if money is speech, how can I be talking?

My email inbox has been stuffed every single day with pleas to donate $3, $5, $200 from every Democrat with a name, plus some that look made up.  I used to get a thrill when I saw President Obama's name as the sender, but this time around I just got embarrassed, and felt really tawdry sending him to junk mail.  The mailers sent in his name did him no favors--there wasn't even the pretense of a presidential message, just check boxes for cash.

Today I got around to sorting through the piles of campaign mail on behalf of candidates and propositions.  None of it made me feel good about anything.

  Nationally, the Democrats seem to have too many mediocre candidates.  But their Republican opponents are far, far worse.  If Iowa actually elects Joni Ernst to the US Senate (and media has decided it already has), the state and the US Capitol both deserve to fall into the sea.  And I'm well aware of Iowa's location when I say that.

Find me a candidate, incidentally, who even noticed the epic UN climate report on Sunday.  It didn't even last as a news story until Monday.  But then it's only about the fate of the planet, the future of the human race and how the lives of everybody on Earth who expects to live more than another twenty years is going to change significantly... but of course that can't be important in an election.

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans succeeded in making these elections about President Obama (even though they dropped their plan to sue him, and stopped insisting they would repeal Obamacare), and because the world not being perfect enough is his fault, they will win.  A few writers were a bit more cautious, noting for example the radio ads Obama made for black radio stations that could affect turnout and therefore outcomes in some highly contested states.  But basically, this is part of the post-election narrative that--like it does just about everything--the media has delivered in advance.

Conventional wisdom is that the Senate is lost to Dems, and except for the dramatic and inflated headlines that the media will joyfully hype, that it doesn't make much difference anyway.  Jonathan Chait's argument is probably the most sophisticated, and maybe the most reasonable.  After noting that "the Republicans in the House are, by and large, barking mad" and oppose everything, including the concept of governing, and without the House, nothing gets passed, therefore the Senate is superfluous. "If the House could make a deal with Obama, the Senate would sign on to the deal if it were controlled by Republicans or if it were controlled by Democrats. Gridlock will continue through the next Congress regardless of the Senate race."

Of course, legislation isn't all that's at issue--there are judicial and executive appointments, treaty ratification etc. Plus the joy of seeing McConnell's face more often.  But basically Chiat is among those who are essentially saying this election means nothing.

My prime political consultant Andy Borowitz agrees that nothing will change, although he sees the impact a little differently, in his story headlined Midterms Prediction: Billionaires to Retain Control of Government.

And yet, on Tuesday afternoon I'll walk a quarter mile or so to my polling place (which is itself pretty dull--nowhere near as interesting as any of my Pennsylvania polling places, with their kibitzing pols and bake sales) and I will (figuratively) hold my nose and (actually) vote.

I will vote.  Why?  Because I'm a damn citizen that's why.

It Starts: The Fossil Fuels Endgame

From the Guardian:

Climate change is set to inflict “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and the natural world unless carbon emissions are cut sharply and rapidly, according to the most important assessment of global warming yet published.

The stark report states that climate change has already increased the risk of severe heatwaves and other extreme weather and warns of worse to come, including food shortages and violent conflicts. But it also found that ways to avoid dangerous global warming are both available and affordable.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in the message,” said the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, attending what he described as the “historic” report launch. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.” He said that quick, decisive action would build a better and sustainable future, while inaction would be costly.

Ban added a message to investors, such as pension fund managers: “Please reduce your investments in the coal- and fossil fuel-based economy and [move] to renewable energy.”

The report, released in Copenhagen on Sunday by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is the work of thousands of scientists and was agreed after negotiations by the world’s governments. It is the first IPCC report since 2007 to bring together all aspects of tackling climate change and for the first time states: that it is economically affordable; that carbon emissions will ultimately have to fall to zero; and that global poverty can only be reduced by halting global warming. The report also makes clear that carbon emissions, mainly from burning coal, oil and gas, are currently rising to record levels, not falling."

The BBC hones in on the specifics that also led what US media reports there were:

The unrestricted use of fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100 if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, a UN-backed expert panel says.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in a stark report that most of the world's electricity can - and must - be produced from low-carbon sources by 2050.

If not, the world faces "severe, pervasive and irreversible" damage. The UN said inaction would cost "much more" than taking the necessary action."

Anything new here?  Mostly that the UN Panel is officially saying these things, in a reported vetted by governments--the process that typically waters down the final reports.  And by providing numbers in terms of years, it goes a long way in setting the agenda for the next and absolutely crucial international meetings next year.

It emphasizes what Bill McKibben wrote in another of his thoughtful reviews of the recent literature on the subject in the New York Review of Books this summer:

"We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check."

Ebola Wars

The war of fear and fact continues in the US.  Fear is apparently winning on the streets.  The New York Times reports that health care workers who simply work for the same institutions that are treating Ebola patients are being stigmatized, in Atlanta, Omaha, Dallas--and New York City.

There hundreds of health care workers at Bellvue are being materially stigmatized, including nurses losing their second jobs, one lost a teaching position and one nurse's child has been thrown out of daycare--all for simply working at the same hospital where an Ebola patient is treated.

It doesn't help that early symptoms of Ebola are reportedly similar to the flu that is in fact the epidemic that is spreading in America, as it often does at this time of year.  Here in far northern California, people reporting those symptoms are being told to get a flu shot.

One major victory over fear: a Maine judge rejected the governor's request for a court order to force Kaci Hickox, the Doctors Without Borders nurse and epidemologist, to continue her house arrest, otherwise known as quarantine.  He did so in no uncertain terms, basing his decision on science.

But no one is taking Ebola lightly in all of this.  Hickox is monitored daily for symptoms, such as fever.  Ebola victims are only contagious when they show symptoms, and only through direct contact with bodily fluids.

The irrational fear, fed for political gain and money by politicians and media, is only obscuring the real dangers of Ebola, which are considerable.  Stupid efforts need to be stopped, and more smart efforts begun and maintained.  Not nearly enough is known about the disease or how to stop it spreading and mutating in the parts of the world with poor medical care where it thrives.  If it is not controlled there it could become a much larger and more potent threat in the rest of the world.

Two recent articles in the New Yorker summarize the problems and the state of medical knowledge.   The real Ebola Wars are being fought in laboratories and on the front lines in Africa, with contributions from what is being learned in treating the few patients in US hospitals.

 The heroes of this war, who are putting themselves in harms way to save people and to accumulate knowledge that can save many more, are precisely these medical workers who are being stigmatized, and injured financially, socially and psychologically.  It's time to grow up.  And to revolt against the politicians and media institutions feeding this self-destructive hysteria.

Congratulations San Francisco Giants!

Congratulations to the San Francisco Giants, who won the seventh game of the World Series behind five innings of scoreless relief by--who else?--Madison Bumgarner to become the 2014 World Champions.  Tonight the city of San Francisco began celebrating, with the big parade likely later in the week--on Halloween.  It's the Giants third championship in five seasons.  More photos and links at American Dash.  (These photos from San Francisco Chronicle.)

 

More Ebola Facts, More Fear

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On Wednesday, the furor over quarantines in the US continues, as the Governor of Maine requests a court order to force Doctors Without Borders nurse Kaci Hickox to remain under house arrest, and California announced its own quarantine guidelines that would seem to apply to others like her who return from the front lines battling Ebola.  Having issued its own guidelines, the federal government is opposing piecemeal state quarantine orders

Providing a factual overview, President Obama spoke forthrightly about the current situation, the danger of discouraging health workers from battling Ebola in Africa where it is truly dangerous, and about reacting based on facts, not fear.

Ebola Hysterics in High Places

Between Friday and Monday, two major East Coast governors panicked, and it wasn't a pretty sight.  The governors of New York (D) and New Jersey (R) made this a bipartisan hysteria.

They both declared they would quarantine health workers returning from West Africa.  They did so without consulting health officials on any level (including federal), and without consulting or even informing the local governments and hospitals that would be expected to enforce the quarantines.

Thanks to a doubly courageous nurse, the whole thing unraveled.

Courageous because Kaci Hickox, a nurse and epidemiologist was out on the front lines with Doctors Without Borders, which may well be the most effective organization in dealing with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.  She returned from Sierra Leone Friday, was detained at Newark International Airport and incarcerated at University Hospital.

She was doubly courageous because (despite Christie's belief she would "understand") she let the world know what was done to her.

She showed no symptoms, contrary to what Governor Christie stated publicly. Christie has continued to lie about this.  She was confined in a situation that pretty much describes a small town lockup, only maybe worse.  It's not clear if as this LA Times story says she was lodged in a tent essentially outdoors--other stories suggest it was indoors.  But basically it tells the story.

Federal officials immediately criticized the quarantines as medically unnecessary, and sending the wrong messages. Medical experts including the New England Journal of Medicine called them "more destructive than beneficial."  The new CDC guidelines don't recommend quarantines except in closely defined high risk cases.

Whatever case could be made for quarantine, these were so rushed and unconsidered on any basis other than political, that they were clearly the result of panic.  Not what you want to see in leaders.

Now the "quarantines" are officially to be served at home.  House arrest, essentially. Kaci Hickox returned to her home in Maine.

As usual the definitive words come from the Borowitz Report which "reported": "Saying that he was “sick and tired of having my medical credentials questioned,” Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.) had himself sworn in as a medical doctor on Sunday night.

Dr. Christie acknowledged that becoming a doctor generally requires pre-med classes, four years of medical school, plus additional years of residency, but he said that the Ebola epidemic compelled him to take “extraordinary measures, as we say in the medical profession.”

A few days earlier Borowitz also reported:

"Amid concerns that the spreading fear of Ebola has become a greater threat than the virus itself, a new poll shows that a majority of Americans favor a quarantine of the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

While poll respondents supported quarantining more than a dozen cable-news personalities, including the entire cast of “Fox & Friends,” a full seventy-two per cent gave the nod to a quarantine of Blitzer.

At the Centers for Disease Control, a spokesman said that a Blitzer quarantine was “very much on the table,” and that the C.D.C. had come up with a workable plan.

“Essentially, we would do a lockdown of ‘The Situation Room’ and provide Wolf with food and water until the crisis passes,” he said.

Perhaps they'll find room for the governors of New York and New Jersey, and their egos.

Top of the World Series

Congratulations to Madison Bumgarner for a commanding performance on Sunday, pitching the first shutout in a World Series game in over a decade, and to the San Francisco Giants for their 5-0 victory in the fifth game and their last appearance in the home park for the year.  They're up in the Series 3 wins to 2.  Follow the World Series at American Dash.  Photo: San Francisco Chronicle.

Catching Up with the Dalai Lama and other matters

Over the past week or so I've bookmarked some items that caught my eye:

Speaking of eyes, fans using powerful laser pointers to distract opposing quarterbacks risk causing blindness--a problem that would seem to transcend this particular use.

The latest alternative weekly to bite the dust: the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

This is from a few weeks ago but it got little attention: South Africa denied a visa to the Dalai Lama for a peace meeting by Nobel Laureates--and the other laureates rebelled, causing cancellation of the event.  Stories suggest it was to mollify China--which may seem surprising, except that China is investing heavily in Africa, which is beginning to attract notice in the West.

Apparently, certain problems within the Secret Service are not at all new, but have long been part of its culture.  A very troubling report of the impact on the JFK assassination.

Unconventional Wisdom

I read Profiles in Courage in high school.  I wouldn't be surprised if Barack Obama read it in high school as well.  I wonder if he remembers, as I do, the signature quote of the chapter on Thomas Hart Benton: "I despise the bubble popularity."

As the 2014 elections approach, Democrats are supposedly in trouble because the Obama bubble has supposedly burst.  An unpopular President, the media drones, a failed presidency.  Reporters are quick to detect any secret sign that a candidate is "running away" from the President.  As First Read pointed out, Democrats who run away from the President are fools.  First, they are Democrats and they are going to be identified with a Democratic President anyway.  And second, they'll alienate the very Democrats who gave Barack Obama two big majorities.

But there are contrarians out there who beg to differ with the premise.  One of them is Paul Krugman writing in Rolling Stone.  First of all, he takes issue with the idea that Obama is all that unpopular:

"Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn't mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn't happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn't what you'd expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down."

So much for the bubble popularity.  He continues:

"More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn't be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes."

 Krugman wasn't an Obama enthusiast and has criticized some of his actions as President.  But after 6 years he's taken the long view:

"Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy."

Read the piece.  It may cheer you or change your mind.  There's a companion list for the text averse:55 figures that prove President Obama has accomplished more than you may realize.

President Obama hugs a nurse who survived Ebola

And there's a different article that takes an overview of Obama's accomplishments in rolling back the rabid right Republican takeover of the judiciary.  This one may surprise you even more--it's by one of the best in the business, Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, and it includes an interview with the President.

Meanwhile, major Republican candidates are trying hard to hide how extreme they actually are.  And failing.  Look no farther than Colorado.  And the polls say she is ahead.  I don't pretend to understand what's going on in voters heads in these states.  But Democrats need to get their brains out of the bubble and their heads back up where they belong, and get to the polls.  We've got a President.  Don't let him down.