Across the Great Divide

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated.

The Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated near the capital, Islamabad, on Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto, who was appearing at a political rally, was fired upon by a gunman at close range, quickly followed by a blast that the government said was caused by a suicide attacker.
– New York Times

The job of succeeding George W. Bush is looking worse and worse.

War Costs are Surging.

The Washington Post quotes Sen. Ted Stevens as saying "the cost of this war is approaching $15 billion a month."

While most of the public focus has been on the political fight over troop levels, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported this month that the Bush administration's request for the 2008 fiscal year of $189.3 billion for Defense Department operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide counterterrorism activities was 20 percent higher than for fiscal 2007 and 60 percent higher than for fiscal 2006.

The Pentagon's most recent estimate for monthly spending for  the war on terrorism was $11.7 billion. Eleven
months ago, it said the monthly costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 would be $9.7 billion.

The article gives several reasons for the discrepancy. The Pentagon figures don't include intelligence operations or congressional add-ons to spending bills for the National Guard and reserve forces. The troop surge in Iraq hit its peak after the latest Pentagon estimate. And the U.S. recently began making payments to Iraqi citizens groups who provide neighborhood security.

It appears more money is also flowing to upgrade, replace or refurbish equipment and supplies that have been depleted during the war effort. Money to beef up defenses might be harder to come by once the fighting winds down.

Just for comparison, the average total sales of existing single family homes in the U.S. was about $1.25 billion per month in 2006.  [Oops. The actual number's about 100 times that.] The state of Maryland records about $1.34 billion in new and used car sales per month. Target Corp. monthly sales come in around $4.7 billion per month. Add the totals, and we're about not even halfway to $15 billion.

Is the surge a good investment? Security is hard to measure, but at least you know the stuff from Target will still be around for awhile.

More Cheery Reading From the Holiday Bookshelf.

In Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, filmmaker David Lynch calls depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity:

It's suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom.

Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they're like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They're like a vice grip on creativity.

No, I'm not inhaling acrid latex, but I think the rest of this suit could use dry cleaning.

Boom Bikes.

One more reason I'm not afraid immigrants will ruin America. And of course, evidence for others they are taking us to hell without even a proper hand basket.

[via Mellow Velo]

Christmas Fire.

Fire only does what it can, never more, never less.

Every fire is a perfect fire.

Where is Hope When the World is Flattened?

Cormac McCarthy's The Road was probably not the ideal pre-holiday read, but I wolfed it down in one sitting.

The novel describes a journey through a blasted nuclear winterscape that is geographically, politically and culturally nonspecific. Few details suggest the country through which a father and son walk on their way to the sea because few familiar details remain. It may be the land formerly known as America, but how, why or where scarcely matter.

The world is flattened.

All creatures save humans appear to be extinct. Not even flies put in an appearance to make life more miserable for the few remaining.

Books, electronics, beauty and gold are irrelevant here. Even music, stories and religion have been cast off. Canned foods are the dwindling sacrament of survival, shoes the precious vestment. Luck, wary ruthlessness and low-rent, MacGyver-like scavenging skills may be all that still separate the living from the dead.

All shelter is temporary unless you can defend it, and because neither blood nor clan ties hold up well in the face of hunger, it's best to keep moving or become a source of protein.

One truck makes a brief sputtering appearance; the rest are useless carcasses of a previous age. A shopping cart is valuable, but only as long as you can find something worth carrying.

Worth carrying means it is something you can eat, use to keep warm or use to kill.

So why did I wrap the book and put it under the tree for my son?

Because one other thing matters in the tale more than bullets, road maps, cunning and canned peaches.

Love.

Christmas Shopping in an Hourglass Economy.

The headline says, "Figuring out the hourglass effect," but it doesn't seem that hard to figure. Luxury stores are booming and sales at low-end discounters are growing. Middle market retailers are hurting.

Sounds like the consumer side of the widening income gap in America.

"Luxury is a unique animal in retail," [retail analyst] Rao said. "It doesn't face the same kind of pressures and vulnerabilities with consumer spending. Outside of luxury, it's more of a mixed-bag results for retail and apparel."

Part of that mixed bag comes from a 21 percent drop in spending from the affluent middle class, those generally in the $75,000 to $149,999 income bracket, according to Unity Marketing.

[...]

In the trade-down world, Target's trend-conscious customers may be moving to Wal-Mart.

Sue Aguilar of St. Paul is one of them. Since getting laid off from Abbott Northwestern Hospital this year, the former Target loyalist goes to Wal-Mart because "prices are better," she says.

"We aren't having Christmas this year," said Aguilar, wiping away tears outside the Wal-Mart on University Avenue in St. Paul. "In fact we bought a couple of small gifts and we just got done returning them so we could buy laundry detergent."

Divorce Granted.

A woman was describing her divorce of 15 years ago.

The judge asked me, will you be changing back to your maiden name? My husband said, no she isn't!

A Cop Shooting Reconsidered.

A grand jury has indicted both the shooter and the undercover cop shot in a road rage encounter that escalated into rank stupidity.

Some regard any sanction of shooter Martin Treptow as a miscarriage of justice. Based on available accounts, charging both men sounds about right to me. I'm not hugely invested in either case and am willing to leave it up to the juries who can hear the evidence to determine guilt.

Back in June when the shooting occurred, I put up a post that could've been more carefully considered and better focused. It provoked some howls from people who thought the former security guard acted reasonably in defending against what he perceived as a threat to his family. You can find other related posts and comments  here.

In that first post, I made three statements that I'll revisit here.

Presumably witnesses will surface to sort out what happened, since neither party seems all that reliable.

We would not need a courts system if everyone told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Someone lies or shades the truth in most disputes. After reading press accounts, neither party's reliability has exactly soared in my estimation, but I am less inclined than before to accept the cop's version.

But for sure, there was plenty of stupidity and testosterone at 99th and Woodward that day.

This is still the lesson for today. Road rage incidents almost always require two idiots to reach the point this one did. Unfortunately, both idiots had guns. Did the shooter have other options? I believe so, but I wasn't there. Should the cop have behaved differently? There's no question in my mind that he should have.

So I'm waiting, too, for an official report that fills in the gaps. And if Treptow is blameless, you can be sure I'll admit it.

For "official report," read "jury verdict." I still do not think Martin Treptow is blameless. I'm skeptical about whether he was powerless to avert the situation. A family man with his wife and kids in the car who gets into a road rage situation on a local street is not someone I want driving around with a weapon. 

But neither do I want a cop on the force who gets himself in this situation. If the evidence shows that officer Landen Beard brandished his gun before Treptow fired, then Beard should be out of law enforcement forever.

If you're interested in hearing about this case from people who care more than I do, you can read Mitch Berg and Joel Rosenberg, who has followed it very closely.

 

American Crosscut: Earth Religion vs. Dollar Religion.

 
Our series this time brings together our leftish and rightish views to look at global warming. As usual, it's a wavy line, not a wall, between Joey Monson and me.

Joey: I know that you’re an environmentally-conscious progressive, but I’m wondering if you’ve expressed any doubt with Al Gore’s claims? 

I believe that we should be good stewards of the earth. I also don’t deny that the earth is warming. However, I question the validity of human-induced global warming, and whether or not we can truly have any sort of influence on the earth’s climate, just as I questioned the beliefs of my parents and the people of the church I grew up in. 

I’ve been called an “ignorant denier”, and a “polluter” who doesn’t care about the earth or my children’s future. Just as I was told to embrace the faith of my parents without question, I am being called on to embrace the faith of human-induced climate change. Naturally, I’ve come to see today’s current environmentalism as something of a religion; with its own disciples, sins, penance, high priests, coming apocalypse, and “heaven” (on earth) — so naturally, I’m questioning it.

Do you believe that we as humans can influence the earth’s temperature, and if so, what led you to this belief?

Charlie:  I’m not going to call you any of those names, and I’ll remind our readers that we try here to represent how we have reached our personal views. We aren’t required to apologize for or try to defend what others on our “team” might say.

You’ve hit on a favorite theme of mine. Not the environment, but how we perceive reality according to our values and belief systems. As Anais Nin reportedly said, “We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Human impact on global systems is certainly one area where political values affect our perceptions.

Whether or not Al Gore is making claims is immaterial to me. Linking him to what scientists are saying about global warming just gives some people a reason to reject the message. I agree with you that questioning orthodoxy is healthy. But there is a difference between questioning religious belief — which purports to have discovered the truth in the remote past, without benefit of new evidence — and questioning findings based on the scientific method, which encourages continuing skepticism and testing of assumptions.

Even if you trust the scientific method, as I do, you know it will move toward the truth and away from orthodoxy. People who think we have all the answers now are probably not as wrong as those who think all the answers are in the bible or in market forces. But are they right about everything? Probably not.

So, do I believe humans can influence the earth’s temperature? Yes. What led me there? I’ll give you a chance to respond before I say more.

Joey: I see what you’re saying about people using Al Gore to reject the message. I think that some people have indeed written off the idea of human-induced climate change solely based upon their views of Al Gore.  I’m not one of them, but I can understand your point. 

When you say that religious belief  “purports to have discovered the truth in the remote past, without benefit of new evidence,” I have to respectfully disagree with you. New religions are being formed as I type this sentence, some of which have nothing to do with the remote past or even a “god.” Webster says that religion is “a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects.” Religion could be based on scientific facts, a higher being, or neither. 

As for science, I’m a skeptic by nature. I question everything. My Sunday school teacher wanted to eject me from his class most of the time, because I wasn’t satisfied with his constant answer of “Joey, you just have to have faith.” It made me crazy. I wanted answers to the burning questions in my skeptical mind, and no one seemed to want to give them to me.  Later in life, I decided to research the God of Christianity, and found compelling scientific evidence of God. Not religion, but God. (I despise religion, possibly even more than I suspect you do.)

So I guess what I’m saying is that the belief in a higher being does not necessarily exclude science, and religion isn’t always about a higher being.

As for human-induced climate change: I don’t know if humans can influence the earth’s temperature, but I’m extremely doubtful. My claims against the environmental movement have more to do with current issues of human suffering that we can help right now, rather than what I perceive to be some far-off possibility (reversing global warming). This is without touching on the economic harm that attempting to reverse global warming (through legislation) could do to the people of earth.

Charlie: So what has led me to the belief human activity can influence the earth’s temperature? I’ll confess I haven’t studied the science deeply, any more than I understand exactly what keeps my airliner aloft or precisely how my geothermal system works. But I grasp the concepts and I listen to other people who have dedicated themselves to understanding the challenge. I choose to believe the majority of scientists, just as I choose to believe my airplane is unlikely to crash.

I’m also persuaded by the fact that humans have already had an impact on various subsystems and microclimates in the world. We have ruined areas, we have left time bombs for future occupants, and we have also restored areas when the damage was bad enough and the political will — not the market, please — was strong enough. I think the time is approaching when we won’t have many good choices left. Nuclear energy, for example, may be a far better choice than other alternatives we can produce as oil and coal run out. Waiting to solve big problems until we know everything is a very dangerous strategy.

Finally, I’m very suspicious of purely economic arguments on behalf of leaving action up to the free market. The so-called religious environmentalists have very little to gain for themselves compared to the mining and manufacturing industries. As we’ve seen with automakers, they’ve worked much harder to resist new mileage standards than to embrace innovation. On the other hand, ethanol seems to me to be a “solution” being driven by the farm states

I don’t think we can be right about everything that will happen, and we need both market and regulatory mechanisms to address our energy consumption and its corollary effects — whether one of those is global warming or not. And we also need to take personal responsibility for our impact on the earth, as you suggest.

Joey: I think we can both agree that we don’t know a whole lot about the intricacies of climate science. I do know that there are a good deal of scientists and climatologists who don’t agree with the idea that humans can change the earth’s temperature, however. Many of them were listed on the IPCC report. I also know that scientists have been threatened to have their names destroyed by opposing the idea of human-induced global warming, and that there are many grants to be had for studies and what for, if you agree with the “consensus.”

As Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist said: “If I wanted to do research on, shall we say, the squirrels of Sussex. What I would do, and this is from any time from 1990 onwards, I would write my grant application, saying I want to investigate the nut-gathering behaviour of squirrels with special reference to the effects of Global Warming, and that way I get my money. If I forget to mention Global Warming I might not get my money.” 

Yes, I agree with your statement that humans have had an impact on our earth. I also think that we’ve done a lot to fix the damage that we’ve done, and yes, much of it has come through legislation. I also agree with your opinion on nuclear energy. But I don’t think that we can necessarily justify crippling our economy – and possibly giving up our sovereignty to the UN – on the idea that we, as humans, can impact the climate of earth. We must be positive of the impact that we will have before we can justify the economic suffering that is sure to follow.

I believe that the true environmentalists – people like you – don’t have anything to gain monetarily from global warming legislation. You honestly mean well and want to help create a cleaner planet. However, the forces that are driving this sort of legislation have a lot to gain, mostly in carbon offsets and carbon trading  (Al Gore included). The company I work for is attempting to capitalize off of this sort of legislation, as well. The way I see it, honest environmentalists like you are being (pardon the expression) pimped out. 

Charlie: I want our readers to note my conservative colleague’s link features an interview by Amy Goodman of the progressive Democracy Now! Carbon offsets have been compared to the selling of indulgences — where the people with the money could sin but didn’t have to pay the penalty in hell. Personal carbon trading schemes can raise awareness about the impact of our personal actions, but that knowledge has limited effect unless we actually modify our behavior as a result.

On global pacts and legislation, it sounds like you’re applying two different standards. We’re supposed to be positive about the effects before acting on climate change. But why are “we” already positive that climate action will cripple our economy? Are we also positive about the future economic impact of non-action? Would economic catastrophe go unaddressed if we saw it actually start to occur because of our investment in warding off climate change? Of course not.

The marketplace is an adaptive human system that can respond to change relatively rapidly compared to natural systems. It’s human nature to accept the need for change only when something forces us, but it’s wise investment practice to plan ahead and let time work for you. With a large, complex and dynamic system like the earth, we are asking for trouble by waiting for proof to satisfy the skeptics.

Rather, we’re asking for trouble for our grandkids. And when it comes, the economists’ grandkids will be just as screwed as the environmentalists’ grandkids.

Back to your religion of the environment point. I don’t think of myself as an environmentalist so much as someone who tries to act morally in the world, considering how my actions affect others. Until more of us are willing to think that way and act in accordance, the “forces” you mentioned will be the ones driving the planet.