Fouling The Nest - Followup

Some reading for ya today - to go with your assignment to search out and watch Gasland & Gasland2.

Bloomburg via Seattle Times:

Riding shotgun in a Toyota 4Runner rigged with a carbon-fiber pipe and a spectrometer, Duke University researcher Rob Jackson trolled through Washington, D.C., searching for evidence that natural gas is not quite the climate champion President Obama claimed last month.

He was replicating a study he did in Boston, measuring leaks from creaky natural-gas pipes. In addition to being a possible safety risk, methane, the key component of natural gas, is 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. And leaks may undercut much of the climate benefits of gas.
“First and foremost this is a greenhouse-gas question,” Jackson said as he drove near the Capitol. “What we are trying to find out is how big a problem this is for cities.”

Obama's cheerleading notwithstanding, the plan seems to be to go forward with Shale Gas, but to look for the drawbacks and (I'm really just kinda hoping here) to push for a real conversion to renewables as we go.

I don't like the way this feels, tho'.  It looks a lot like we're gettin' suckered again, cuz let's see if we can guess what we're up against.

Here's a piece from MasterResource - "a free market energy blog":

Last month, the EPA released its latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory, in which the agency significantly lowered its estimate of the amount of methane emissions from natural gas systems. But even with those dramatic revisions, EPA still has a long way to go to get this right.

So the struggle continues.  Government remains largely captive to Big Bidness, and we get only the slant that the PR Slicksters pressure the feds to give us.

Fouling The Nest

I saw Gasland II on HBO last night and our situation seems not to be any more hopeful than it was when the first installment came out 2 years ago.

One of the really great parts for me was the bit about the mayor of Dish TX.  The guy was deeply involved in the selling (as in selling out) of an entire town in Texas.  They changed the name of the town to Dish in exchange for 10 years of "free" TV service from Dish Network.  Pretty much the classic public/private dick move - altho' a bit more benign than some.  So this mayor was a solid Republican; a guy who was always on about deregulation and getting government out of the way of businesses doing business etc.  But along comes fracking, with all the huge problems with water and air quality - and suddenly this guy's a registered Independent having to sell his house at a bargain basement price and move his family somewhere else because of the risks to their health.

And btw - there's really no such thing as "somewhere else" now.  There are no more Green Spots.  You can't just pack your shit and find some fresh joint.  And y'know what? If you've fucked up the place you're living now, what makes you think you'd be welcome in some place that's less fucked up than the one you just left?  Through your own actions (or by your own inaction), you helped fuck it up - so you get to stay and help un-fuck it up.

Here's a taste from Gasland (the first one):

God Love The Onion

BOSTON—Warning that he was a dark and vengeful God, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick reportedly pulled aside Tim Tebow at the team’s facilities Thursday and informed the backup quarterback that he was his only Lord and savior now. “This is your church now, and you shall worship me,” said Belichick, who sources confirmed clutched Tebow’s throat and slammed the former Heisman Trophy winner against a concrete wall. “If you want to see a wrathful God, then question me on playing time. I will crush you into dust. And if I ever see you on your knees, you better be praying to me or you will be destroyed by my blistering fury.” At press time, Tebow told reporters that he was renouncing Jesus Christ.

The Onion

Connections

I think this guy is trying hard to get "conservatives" to look at things from a perspective other than from inside their own bowels; using his take on John Mellencamp's music to illustrate their basic inability to hear what "the American people" are really trying to tell them.

David Masciotra at The American Conservative:

One of the problems of movement conservatism is a resistance to—and often flat out rejection of—complexity. Too much of the American right is dominated by a mentality that views its country with childlike simplicity and awe. Any invocation of American iconography must be worshipful, and for those who combine Christianity with nationalism to create a civil religion, any sign of the cross must be celebratory of everything American.

Not that I have a lot of confidence in anybody's ability to get these meatheads either into line or out of the party, but I can tip my hat to a guy who's making some effort to move people away from the adolescent insistence that all we need is a little common sense and that every problem (and therefore, every solution) can be reduced to simple 10-word phrases that fit neatly onto bumper stickers; or that can be perfectly reflected in a 3-minute pop tune.

Today's Eternal Sadness

via Addicting Info:

Sgt. Lance McLean of the Hood County Sheriff’s Office has succumbed to his injuries and been pronounced dead after being shot in the head by a gun dealing, child molesting, tactical gear-wearing, heavily modified assault rifle-wielding man after responding to a seemingly ordinary disturbance call.
After injuring two officers, the suspect drove away in a white van, and was eventually killed near the Cranbury City Hall after wounding another police officer in a gun battle.

Police have learned that the gunman, Ricky McCommas, was an avid gun enthusiast who sold guns from inside of his home. After obtaining a search warrant, authorities seized more than two dozen guns and about 20 cases of ammunition, along with a computer and other evidence.

Adding insult to injury, court records have revealed that McCommas had recently been charged with sexual assault of a child in July 2012, after being accused of raping his wife’s niece behind a grocery store. Gun in hand, he had traveled to the location of the victim in order to convince her to drop the charges, leading to the original 911 disturbance call.

And the tyranny of large numbers:

The truth is, there is no good reason why America should continue to allow these dangerous kinds of assault weapons to be owned by millions upon millions of citizens. Yes, the large majority of gun owners are very responsible, but what about that miniscule portion that is unhinged and unfit to own such dangerous weapons? With millions of gun owners, there are bound to the tens of thousands of “bad apples” that have no business being near nor selling any of these military grade weapons.

Holy Crap

I had no idea this thing still existed.

On "Age of the Earth":

See also Counterexamples to an Old Earth.

The Age of the Earth has been a matter of interest to humans for millennia. The subject is still debated today, particularly between young-Earth scientists, who believe that the Earth is only approximately 6,000-10,000 (8 × 103 ± 25%) years old, and most scientific organisations who believe that Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years (4.54 × 109 ± 1%).[1][1] The scientific evidence points to a young age of the earth and the universe, and the biblical creation organization Creation Ministries International published an article entitled 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe, which further argues for the young age of the Earth.

Old Earth advocates rely on one flawed assumption to the exclusion of other evidence, similar to how an investigator may mistakenly rely on one eyewitness's opinion to the exclusion of all else. In fact, eyewitness testimony is proven to be less reliable to than other indicators, just as the assumption by Old Earth proponents that the rate of radioactive decay has always been constant is flawed. In fact, a large number of physical processes, such as neutron capture and fluctuations in solar radiation, can affect the rate of radioactive decay of elements in the Earth's crust and render radioactive dating measurements unreliable with errors up to 5%, depending upon the specific methods used.[2] Even so, such an error will not cause a calculation of the age of the Earth based on radiometric dating to be off by up to five orders of magnitude.

A test to quantify openmindedness:

1. Do you resist admitting the possibility that a conservative approach to education is far more effective for students than a liberal one?
2. If it were proven to your satisfaction that some idea you've been using to bolster a political argument was false, would you keep using that idea in your argument?
3. Do you resist admitting that something you accepted for over a decade is, in fact, completely false?
4. Do you resist the possibility that Hollywood values result in significant harm for those who believe in them, and to innocent bystanders?
5. Do you think it is impossible that increased gun ownership reduces the rate of crime?
6. When President Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, would you have thought that it was politically impossible for the Berlin Wall to be torn down?
7. Did you think, or still think, that the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") is impossible?
8. Do you think that it is impossible that the Shroud of Turin is authentic?
9. Do you think that there must be a purely material-based explanation (such as magnetism) for remarkable homing and migration behavior of birds and butterflies?
10. Do you think that it is impossible for the speed of light in the Earth's atmosphere to have been measurably different in the past?
11. Do you think that it is impossible to measure openmindedness?
12. Do you think that evolution[2] must have occurred?
13. Do you think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2, to be more precise with an exponent that is slightly different from 2, such as a gravitational force proportional to 1/r2.00000001?
14. Do you resist admitting that some things taught to you in school are completely false, and even known to be false by some responsible for the material?
15. Do you deny that some widely required theories of science, such as the theory of evolution, may actually impede the progress of science?[3]
16. Do you deny that the imposition of socialism and same-sex marriage on a nation could harm its competitiveness at international events like the Olympics?
17. Do you refuse to consider the possibility that "experts" may not have all the answers, and that the best of the public may have valuable insights to which experts are blind?
18. Do you think that if you read parts of the Bible years ago as a child, you can claim to "have read the Bible" and that you have no reason to read it regularly now?
19. Do you believe that because the Earth's orbit and rotation are what they are now, they are guaranteed to remain stable for billions of years?
20. Do you refuse to consider the possibility that Hebrews might have been authored by Jesus?

The above questions can be asked, and one's closed-mindedness can be scored based on how often they answered "yes" above. Answering more than half as "yes" reflects acute closed-mindedness.

That's what passes for intellectual inquiry and insight from our friends way over there on the far end of the spectrum - except I get a bad feeling sometimes that maybe it's not considered all that far out.  When I talk to some people, they seem to accept this nonsense; or at least have it in their minds that this is nothing more than a difference of opinion.  And the main problem I have with that thinking is that an awful lot of  "conservatives" are not willing to leave it as a matter of differing opinions - they're actively seeking to turn this shit into law.  And the people who shrug and give me the standard "comme ci, comme ça" response are the ones doing nothing to counteract it.

The KrugMan Speaks

Dispatches from Derpistan.

Paul Krugman, NYT:

Josh Barro has made a very useful contribution to policy discussion by adapting the term “derp” for a certain kind of all-too-prevalent stance in economic debate, which Noah Smith somewhat euphemistically describes as “the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors”. In other words, people who take a position and refuse to alter that position no matter how strongly the evidence refutes it, who continue to insist that they have The Truth despite being wrong again and again.

Nobody can get off into the weeds like a Nobelist, but Krugman works hard to make it understandable for me, and the parts of what he says that I can understand are almost always pretty great.

Are We All Indians Now?

Nope - sorry - this isn't going to be a rant blasting The Lone Ranger.  I've heard lotsa bad things about it, and maybe I'll get to have some fun with it later, but right now I just  don't care much about some dumb movie.

This is about what's happened to the economic boom in India.  You remember - the one that Lil Tommy Friedman told us was the very model of this new fabulous economic system in which everybody becomes a plucky entrepreneur and go on to reap the riches of Croesus as we all thrill in "the race for the top" blah blah fucking blah.

From William Dalrymple at New Statesman, about a new book dealing with what's gone wrong:

...The economic boom, which began in 1991 and took off in the late 1990s, provoked a miniboom of New India books, some far better than others. First off the blocks was Gurcharan Das, a former CEO of Procter & Gamble, whose India Unbound in 2001 became an international bestseller and made a convincing case that the future was India’s: all that was needed was further deregulation and a stripping away of the economic coils – the “licence Raj” – that were tethering the Indian elephant to the ground and the country’s future as an economic superpower was assured.

You caught that, right?  Deregulation.  Git da gubmint out da way.

But of course, The Mustache of Understanding wasn't at all alone in his thinking.  And btw: these guys are never alone in their thinking - the herd is everything for these guys - as long as they're all wrong together, they never have to admit they have their heads all the way up their wealthy benefactors' asses.

Anyway, the thing goes on at length about how everybody was totes agog over the prospects of China and India overtaking the US as the world's economic superpower by mid 21st century.

But guess what?

Their thesis is simple: India’s failure to equal the success of China’s hyper-development is due in large part to the failure of the state to provide “essential public services – a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth”:

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people. India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians seven or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate . . . India’s health-care system is an unregulated mess. The poor have to rely on low-quality – and sometimes exploitative – private medical care, because there isn’t enough decent public care. While China devotes 2.7 per cent of its gross domestic product to government spending on health care, India allots 1.2 per cent.

So here's one take-away:  We were perfectly content to do fuckloads of business with China, even though we needed to be reminded to "hate" the Chinese government because of all the free stuff they kept giving their citizens under their dirty commie regime.  (they definitely have some pretty bad shit coming their way because of some of the fucked up government building projects, but that's a slightly different angle)

Meanwhile, the Indians were far more to our liking because they were doing it according to the Uncle Miltie Friedman formula - plus of course, if they could find jobs in Mumbai, maybe they wouldn't all be over here owning all of our 7-11 stores.

When Government is shut out completely;  when the people who are supposed to be doing the governing in a system of self-governance aren't allowed to do any actual governing, then we're volunteering for nothing less than to wear the chains of an old-style aristocracy from the 18th century that the flag-wavers and chest-thumpers keep telling us we're supposed to be so proud of having thrown off.

What the fuck, Murica!?!

Our Mr Brooks

If I may take just a bit of license with David Brooks's piece in NYT:

Those who emphasize process have said that the government of President Mohamed Morsi almost any Republican-dominated government was freely elected and that its democratic support has been confirmed over and over. The most important thing, they say, is to protect the fragile democratic institutions and to oppose those who would destroy them through armed coup.

Democracy, the argument goes, will eventually calm extremism. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood Tea Party (or any of their Christian Nationalist minions) may come into office with radical beliefs, but then they have to fix potholes and worry about credit ratings and popular opinion. Governing will make them more moderate.

Those who emphasize substance, on the other hand, argue that members of the Muslim Brotherhood GOP's Far Right Wing are defined by certain beliefs. They reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity. When you elect fanatics, they continue, you have not advanced democracy. You have empowered people who are going to wind up subverting democracy. The important thing is to get people like that out of power, even if it takes a coup.

In the end, even a Master Propagandizer like Bobo flies himself into the ground.

big hat tip = driftglass, cuz all I'm doing here is paraphrasing the best Brooks Buster in all of Blogistan.

Today's Pix