big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Long war and political heat upset people. Doom arrives.
Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
A rare background on the players behind the unsurprising but alarming development in the long campaign to discredit the established scientific fact that burning fossil fuels is causing the world to warm.
This latest escalation fits seamlessly into a decades-old pattern of attempts to deny the reality of environmental ills — smoking, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming. Similar or even identical claims have been promoted for decades by other free-market think-tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and, most persistently, the George C. Marshall Institute.
These think tanks all have two things in common: They promote free-market solutions to environmental problems, and all have long been active in challenging the scientific evidence of those problems.
Michael Smerconish looks at the media’s role in the rapid escalation of extreme opinions; radio and television ‘tombstones in the graveyard of moderate, thoughtful analysis’:
While the most recent polling and voter registration data suggest that political power lies in the middle, it remains largely untapped because it lacks the fervor of the extremes.
Why does this matter? I’d argue that the climate in Washington is being shaped by an artificial presentation of attitudes on cable TV and talk radio. To view and to listen is to become convinced that there are only two, diametrically opposed philosophical approaches to the issues. And yet, working daily in both mediums, I often think that the only people I meet who see the world entirely through liberal or conservative lenses are the hosts with whom I rub shoulders.
Either you offer a consistent, possibly artificial, ideological view or you often don’t get a say.
The American Way of Life is not so charming, but its very sprawling character may prevent a political maniac from controlling enough of a base to hold all the states and regions together in a thrall of fascism — and there are all those firearms to think about.
I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don’t subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It’ll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business — all dangerous places with no adult supervision.
Findings published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by the University of Toronto reveal that compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.
Our data shows that liberalism is more often associated with the underlying motives for compassion, empathy and equality.
Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they’re more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure.
There are costs and benefits to each political profile and both appear critical to maintaining an effective balance in society.
Charles, the Prince of Wales, has blamed a lack of belief in the soul for the world’s environmental problems, and said that the planet cannot sustain a population expected to reach 9 billion in 40 years. He said
The Prince pinned part of the blame on Galileo. Criticizing the profit imperative behind much scientific research, he said:
This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works, and how we fit within the scheme of things.
As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.
The Prince said that he believed green technology alone could not resolve the world’s environmental problems. Instead, the West must do something about its “deep, inner crisis of the soul”.
It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well. Talk of an ‘environmental crisis’ or of a ‘financial crisis’ is actually describing ‘the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul’.
Update. Christopher Hitchens is livid: Where is this ‘vapid talk about the soul of the universe’ actually headed?
A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer.
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. … But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.
Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The ‘vacuum’ will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.
One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.
Now that it’s clear what the Tea Party stands for, more and more Americans dislike them.
Washington Post/ABC News poll reveals Americans who hold an unfavorable view of the movement has jumped from 39 percent to 50 percent. Who can we thank for that? Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin and Dick Armey… the lunacy goes on.
I like to think you know people are not serious when they always have the same solution – no matter what the problem.
For instance there is a faction in the Republican party who think that whatever the problem the solution is to cut taxes. If you are running too big a surplus the solution is to cut taxes. If you are running a deficit the solution is to cut taxes. If you are fighting a war the solution is to cut taxes. If you face global warming the solution is to cut taxes. These people can be effective political operators but are useless at furthering the intellectual debate.
There are similar groups who think the solution is always more government regulation.
Puerile arguments exist on all sides of politics.
If dopamine inducing street drugs were not managed in a morality play of dollars and war, we may have learned a few things over the years such as this vital clue:
Our findings suggest that this compulsive urge to use cocaine and the loss of control that goes with it reflect biological differences in users’ brains…
Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment.
They need to sanctify their rage, a rage that lies at the core of the ideology. They seek total cultural and political domination. They are using the space within the open society to destroy it.
The magical thinking, the flagrant distortion in interpreting the Bible, the contradictions that abound within the movement’s belief system and the laughable pseudoscience, however, are impervious to reason.
We cannot convince those in the movement to wake up. It is we who are asleep.
We also talked about claims. And this is an area where I think everybody has a lot of concern.
My understanding is, is that BP has contracted for $50 million worth of TV advertising to manage their image during the course of this disaster. In addition, there are reports that BP will be paying $10.5 billion — that’s billion with a B — in dividend payments this quarter.
Now, I don’t have a problem with BP fulfilling its legal obligations. But I want BP to be very clear, they’ve got moral and legal obligations here in the Gulf for the damage that has been done.
And what I don’t want to hear is, when they’re spending that kind of money on their shareholders and spending that kind of money on TV advertising, that they’re nickel-and-diming fishermen or small businesses here in the Gulf who are having a hard time.
We’ve assigned federal folks to look over BP’s shoulder and to work with state and local officials to make sure that claims are being processed quickly, fairly, and that BP is not lawyering up, essentially, when it comes to these claims.
They say they want to make it right. That’s part of their advertising campaign. Well, we want them to make it right. And what that means is that if a fisherman got a $5,000 check, and the next time he goes in, because it’s a new month, suddenly BP is saying, well, we need some documentation and this may take six months to process, or 60 days to process — or 30 days to process, for that matter — that fisherman, with all his money tied up in that boat, just may not be able to hang on for another 30 days. He may lose his boat and his livelihood.
So the key point I’m making here is, this has been a disaster for this region and people are understandably frightened and concerned about what the next few months and the new few years may hold. I am absolutely confident about the resilience of this area long term, but if we can make sure that BP is doing the right thing on the front end, it’s going to make it an awful lot easier for us to fully recover on the back end. And by the way, it may end up being cheaper for BP.
The ghastly BP oil spill is not the fault of a small group of evil people, nor would it have been averted if the leader(s) of BP and the other organizations now playing the blame game, cared more about the environment. I am beginning to believe the same is true of all social organizations. The importance of leadership, and of change initiatives, I think, are vastly overrated.
We are, each of us, just the space through which stuff passes. No one is that important, or consequential, and no one is in control.
This is just who we are, collectively, doing our best and discovering that we can do no better than bring about the sixth known great extinction of life on this planet.
Robert Parry:
In watching TV news accounts of the recent American disasters – a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a fatal mine explosion in West Virginia, continuing economic fallout from Wall Street excesses, worsening fears about the impact of the massive U.S. debt – I was struck by the absence of one name: George W. Bush.
Journalists were following an unwritten rule: that is, the former President was not to be mentioned as a culprit in these catastrophes.
References to how problems had been getting worse for 10 years at the Mineral Management Services, the federal agency which has been rubber-stamping plans for deepwater oil rigs, it was as if no one was willing to do the math and calculate who was in charge during most of that time.
Similarly, when the nation’s $1.2 trillion budget deficit was discussed as a grave threat to the economy, it was never mentioned how the nation got to this point, how the Congressional Budget Office had been projecting $850 billion annual surpluses when Bush took over in 2001.
April, 2010, New York Times survey of Tea Party supporters found that they skew toward male, white, and old. They live the legal, political, and moral authority of a patriarch. They demand to have their “country back.”
The tea party movement represents resistance to and resentment over waning power in rural America.
Obama is a symbol of a shift toward urban interests. Rural America senses that he represents a major shift in the political landscape, one that will no longer put the white male ‘farmer’ at the center of the American political landscape. Even though the majority of the population moved to cities long ago, the rural myth persisted in American politics. The small town values that politicians pay so much attention to is a reflection of this, and Obama is a signal that the special place rural America holds in American politics is coming to an end.
Politics as religion sucks.
Our greatest leaders have always used the argument of better angels to move us toward pragmatism, toward principles over ideology… Lincoln did that. Roosevelt did that. Obama does that.
Slavery in Texas textbooks is now taught as triangular trade.
Brochure Civil War with Lincoln’s treachery on the side.
Thomas Jefferson’s church-state separation is deleted.
No Cesar Chavez. No Malcolm X. Wait, there’s less in the curricula than you can imagine: Hip-Hop will get no mention.
Pandering hurts. Pandering merely for large corporations is greedy and silly. Outrageous pandering we can call stupid, we can laugh, we can throw the man out.
Sen. Lindsey Graham said last night that the climate bill he helped author does not allow enough new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s why he won’t support it.
“You’ll never get my vote,” he said, without more allowances for fossil fuel extraction.
People seem surprised that no leviathan Dutch boy has magically appeared to plug his cork-like finger into the torrential oil leak currently greasing-up the Gulf of Mexico.
Some commentators are even calling this viscous catastrophe a mere “spill,” as if British Petroleum had accidentally knocked a cup of hot tea over Louisiana’s lap, rather than incontinently urinating their horrible product into the state’s helpless face, as seems to be the case. “Why don’t they hurry up and do something?” is a common response to the ongoing and so far unfixable crisis. Apparently we believe there is no man-made problem that cannot be fixed by the indefatigable efforts of previously anonymous federal agencies armed with sacks of cash.
No matter how much we criticize our government and their industrial allies, most of us expect it to do the right thing in the end and save the day,
like one of those drunk sheriffs in old westerns who finally pull themselves together, shave, and stride purposefully out of the saloon to deal with Dodge’s bandito nemesis.
Of course, that only happens in the movies, but then this is America.
Obama plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets. Merely to Clinton levels. Health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals.
This and more will amount to a significant financial hit to CEOs, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.
Oh woe.
Don’t cry for these people. They are doing extremely well, contributing little more to our country than they did in the 1990s.
Tax increases they’re facing are reasonable, but that doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry. Rage against regulation seems bizarre, but what did they expect?
“The primary cause of blowouts, spills and uncontrolled releases of gases from offshore operations is drilling into methane hydrates, or through them into free gas trapped below.”
Who said that? You don’t know?
In September 2009, an environmental investigator submitted a 60-page report on the risks of deepwater drilling as a public comment to the federal government’s proposed rule for oil and gas leasing between 2010 and 2015 on the outer continental shelf.
“The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations.”
Political spending by banks goes to Republicans. Securities and investment firms give more money to Republicans. Oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their spending on Republicans.
The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.
Now, don’t cry for these people: they’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s.
Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry. From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect?
We are utterly silly terribly wrong. Nothing is more important than a citizen’s vote. Assemblies are our best effort and only prize. There’s blood for that. Walk on it.
Billionaires captured rulemakers to arrange their base tax rate at just 15%.
The Challenge of Closing Tax Loopholes For Billionaires
The House has already tried three times to close it only to have the Senate cave in because of campaign donations from these and other financiers.
Aw, crap. We are crops of convenience. We are living day to day. Not to forget at work and going to work. Gas and sales and eats. Endless fees. Extractive penalties. Bad habits of budgets. Hidden habits of bonds. Crumbling results.
The entire nation seems to function at 25% efficiency managed by 90% nuts.
The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.
Bet you didn’t know God has a plan for Canada – a very specific, pre-ordained role for the end times spelled out in the seventy-second psalm, verse eight, written long before Canada was discovered, long before Jesus was born: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” They call it the Dominion of Canada. No?
When the invasion of Iraq was first debated, one couldn’t fail to notice the preponderance of left-wing men of a certain age who came out in support of the war. Radicals as adults, but often from conservative backgrounds, now beginning to confront their own mortality, and preoccupied by masculinity and legacy, their palpable thrill about military might suggested that, deep down, they secretly feared progressive principles were for pussies. Now here was their chance, before it was too late, to prove their manhood.