G W Bush, environmental visionary

Cuz now, after he’s been obstructing national and international efforts to mitigate climate change for years, shirking responsibility for reducing the emissions in the number one greenhouse gas producing nation (per capita, about 4x what China produces), he’s willing to encourage his successor (please please please be Obama) to take some steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, I understand that implementing a sustainable energy policy will be hard, and there are those who think that the growing pains will be economically painful.  Especially if you make most of your money investing in  greenhouse gas emitting fuels, I suppose.  So of course, Bush wouldn’t have wanted to be associated with that.  But I’m willing to concede that he meant well all this time, and just wanted to check the figures himself before really endorsing a climate change policy.  And now that his feet will be off the fire, he’s willing to put someone else’s there.  Because that’s just the kinda guy he’s always been.  Uhm, nice and well meaning, I mean, not irresponsible and habitually blameless.

Well, since Bush woulda vetoed it…

NPR reports today, July 9, 2008, the day Congress overruled the 4th amendment, that Bush would have vetoed the FISA update bill if it didn’t include the telecom amnesty provision.  So I guess Congress’s hands were tied.  Except that, what NPR didn’t mention, was that we don’t need the stinking FISA update that was being offered at all.  So the veto “threat” shouldn’t have carried any weight.  Civil libertarians would have been perfectly happy with a veto, and national securitarians (or whomever) would have barely missed the FISA revisions.  Well, they have a bit less work to do now when setting up wiretaps.  Namely, they don’t have to get warrants as often.  And the warrants don’t have to actually be based on anything.  But FISA warrants weren’t hard to get anyway.  Of course, if you really want to use the government’s wiretapping authority to perform illicit, illegal wiretaps on intranational US communications, that’s now much easier to do.  So there’s that, if you’re into that sort of thing.  None of which do I recall NPR mentioning in the past few weeks.

Stellar reporting job, NPR.  Thanks for that.  Very much.  Now go fuck yourselves.

I’m Bitter

Geesh, people are still bringing up Obama’s “bittergate” gaffe.

Let me paraphrase what he was trying to say:

People in small towns want a politician who can stand up for their economic interests, and do what it takes to promote job stability and job growth, e.g. keep their jobs in their towns instead of moving overseas, making good health care available, etc.  But they have become bitter when they vote those issues because no-one’s been doing that for them.  But there are Republicans who will work for other values, such as protecting their gun rights and, i guess, promoting their religious values.  So they have been reliably voting Repub, since Repubs have been reliable on those issues.  If Dems will start being reliable on the economic issues that are important to them, they’ll start voting Dem.

Granted, the way Obama phrased it was open to misinterpretation.

You see the argument, you made it

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Expanding domestic oil drilling is practically pointless, but politically, it makes advocates look stupid.

FISA and telecom immunity don’t protect us from terror

I am totally baffled about why Pelosi, Reid, Obama, et al have caved on the issue of a FISA update and telecom immunity. As I keep hearing, no-one (except a few of us) cares about it. And there is absolutely no need for the expanded surveillance powers in the new FISA update, so there was no need to “compromise” on the issue of immunity. Therefore, they should feel free to do what’s right, i. e. oppose telecom immunity and keep the wiretaps on a short leash. Instead, they are capitulating to those who want broad surveillance powers.

And you know who benefits from broad surveillance powers, of course. Not the ordinary citizen, who’s afraid of terrorist attacks. That’s silly. The old FISA can be tweaked to provide all the surveillance authority we need to spy on legitimate terrorist suspects. It can probably be reined in a bit–the FISA court doesn’t allow much real oversight. The companies that will get the contracts to do the spying, data collecting, and data sifting are the big winners here. But I’m sure that anyone with access to the information will be able to find some ways to make their lives easier by, say, spying on their political opponents or business rivals.

Oops, I let slip a secret about me. I’m not really all that concerned about terrorist attacks. Sure, there was 9/11 in the US. And one in Britain, and one in Spain…a ton in Iraq, frequent attacks in Israel, etc. Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City. There was also Katrina in New Orleans, wildfires in California, flooding in Cedar Rapids and all along the Mississippi, a bridge collapse on I35, a cyclone in Myanmar, earthquakes in China. And auto accidents. 45000 US auto accident fatalities per year since 2001. 4000 US terrorist fatalities in the same time period. You know what? Life sucks. Terrorism, a tiny blip in the general suckitude of life. Not really worth getting upset about (in the US*). So, unlike you, I don’t go out with a bullet-proof vest and gas mask all the time. Oh, you don’t either?

*If you live around Iraq, Israel, Palestine, then your specific fear of terrorism is totally justified, I’m sure. And if you live anywhere besides the US, it’s probably reasonable to be terrified of the US looking at you the wrong way. Because our military incursion into Iraq cost about–who knows how many lives? We didn’t bother to count. Reasonable attempts at counting put it at 200k-1M+ deaths and 2M displaced.

Why I didn’t vote Gore in 2000

I hate the 2 party system. I mentioned the other day that 2 parties are almost as corruptible as a single party is. So, when I have the luxury, I want to vote 3rd party. In 2000, I thought I had that luxury.

In 2000, I thought that the Democrats and the Republicans were both too far right, in the pocket of corporations and unresponsive to the people and the principles of freedom, and not brave enough to do what we need to protect and promote liberty for everyone. There are definitely some people in government who value liberty and equality, and there are those of us who are willing to sacrifice and take some chances for it–I don’t think the risks are all that great for most of us, but they are greater for the politicians, I suppose. But for the most part, legislating for the principle of freedom for all requires doing some things that protect the few against the wishes of some large voting blocks (who may often pretend that they’re being asked to sacrifice for the privileges of some minorities, but really, who loses if there are some people in the US who aren’t Christian? who loses if gay couples can marry?)

After 4 years of Bush, erosion of civil liberties, starting aggressive wars, the withdrawal from the international community; the reality denial, the lies, the wishful thinking, ignoring the climate and energy problems; pandering to the religious right, the racists, the patriarchs, the homobigots, the jingoists; gutting our protections against authoritarianism, interpreting the presidency as a dictatorship; siphoning wealth from the poor up to the wealthy; the selling out of the American dream; I realized that the difference between the Dems and the Repubs was too great to ignore. I voted Kerry, not because I liked Kerry, but because I hated Bush so much.

Now I want to be involved, I want to help steer the Democratic party toward the liberal end…not just liberal for relatively conservative US politics, I want the US to be a shining beacon of liberalism in the world–like Canada, but warmer, maybe. Like those socialist utopias in Scandinavia but with diversity, perhaps. Well, I guess I don’t want the US to be a shining beacon of liberalism so much as I want the whole world to be a shining beacon of liberalism, but I guess I have to start at home. Should be easy, you’d think, what with it being woven into our foundation myth and all.

And now, in 2008, we were offered several Democratic presidential candidates who all looked pretty good. We ended up with Barack Obama. I voted for him in the Ohio primary, too. Sure, he’s about center-center-right, about where most democrats are. Not liberal exactly, but reality based. And a long way from a proto-fascist, like the far right Repubs we’ve been living with. And dying for.

So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that slightly right Obama has decided that it’s just fine to break the law as long as the President tells you to break the law. He’s probably better than McCain, who I expect imagines that it’s criminal to refuse to break the law if the President tells you to break the law. But the president is not dictator. I don’t want a president who thinks it’s ok to play dictator, as long as you mean well. Because sooner or later, you get a president who doesn’t mean well (even if he really means to…) and then we lose our freedom, and we lose our America, and we lose ourselves.

I don’t have many people to vote out of office from here…my Congressman is already a Republican, so he’s not getting my vote anyway. Maybe I won’t support Obama for a second term.

Otherwise, if this pisses anyone else off (and they read this, but no-one does), support Obama ‘08, but don’t like it. Get involved in the Democratic party, help move them leftward (cuz right now, the difference between Dems and Repubs isn’t so much left vs. right, it’s reality based vs. batshit crazy, and I still prefer reality based right to batshit crazy right). And then, once we have two reality based parties in the US, start bolstering 3rd parties. Or work to move 2 parties further left. Do both, it takes all kinds…

Thermodynamics for Climate Change Denialists

Let’s take a look at the latest ideas in global warming denialism (with a screencap, in case the original source ever gets embarrassed by this). It goes something like this:

Greenhouse gasses can’t increase the temperature of the Earth: they don’t add heat to the climate (causing global warming), they just trap what heat is already there, slowing down any cooling. Those are two different things.

It’s a nonsense argument, so trying to really understand it is impossible, but I think that’s a decent approximation. My first reaction was similar to PZ’s, that it’s true as far as it goes, but omits the effects of any external source of heat.* But really, it’s not even true if you forget about the sun (but remember anything else about the climate). If you slow the cooling of the Earth at evenings and during the transition from summer into winter, you will increase the average temperature of the Earth without increasing the maximum temperature of the Earth. Therefore, the globe will warm.

But let’s see what happens when we don’t forget that big hot yellow Sun that’s heating us up. Generally, as you pour more energy (sunlight, and to a much lesser extent these days geothermal energy) into a system, the system heats up, temperature rising. As the temperature rises, the body (the planet Earth) emits radiation, shedding heat into its surroundings (in the case of the Earth, the radiation is primarily infrared, although atmosphere evaporating into space would count, too). The rate that heat is radiated off is proportional to the temperature of the Earth. The rate that heat is trapped is proportional to the reflectance r (albedo) or absorbance A = 1- r of the object,^† as well as surface area, and maybe some other things that will be constant here. The temperature T equation looks like this:

CdT/dt = AP₀ - kBT

with C the heat capacity, heat per unit temperature, of the Earth, P₀ = the (constant) rate of energy flow into the system, from the sun (I_sun•σ), geothermal sources, cosmic rays, whatever, and kB the constant describing the rate of heat loss per unit temperature due to radiation (and other sources, such as evaporating atmosphere or maybe chemical reactions^‡, which are mostly constant-”conduction” and “convection” wouldn’t really apply to the planet Earth as a whole). Roughly speaking, to determine the temperature of the Earth, you solve this equation for dT/dt = 0, the thermal equilibrium condition where heat flow in is equal to heat flow out. Increasing the absorbance of the Earth by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations increases the equilibrium temperature, which we’ll interpret as an increase in extreme temperatures of the climate, as well as increased average temperature.

Of course, the fine details of weather and climate are MUCH MUCH MUCH more complicated than this–but they’re much more complicated that you’d expect to see on a children’s climate website, too, and they’re more complicated than Kate and Hans Schreuder seem to realize, too.

*It’s amazing to me that they have made fundamentally the same mistake that some people make when they claim that evolution violates the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, i. e. they forget that there is a Sun.

^†Alright, here goes: the atmosphere looks like a thin film, with light shining down, with no transmission through the surface of the earth, some absorption, some reflection; some of the reflected sunlight is reflected by greenhouse gases back to the Earth’s surface, and either absorbed or re-reflected back to the atmosphere to be re-re-reflected, and so on. With each reflection back to the surface, a bit more gets absorbed; each reflection back to the atmosphere a little more gets back out to space; and also, there is a bit perpetually trapped reflecting back and forth between surface and atmosphere (which helps keep us from dropping to near 0 kelvins at nights). Turn the Sun off, and that trapped bit will decay exponentially, but the Sun isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

^‡Chemical reactions and some other things are technically additional degrees of freedom, and change the heat capacity C of the system. More chemical reactions, for example, would slow down temperature rise, but not necessarily the rate of heat gain or loss.

Drilling for US oil

Why is Bush so determined now to drill for oil in ANWAR and the continental shelf? He was complaining in his Sky News interview the other day of people “squawking” about the price of oil, so he thinks it’s a good time to start drilling for more oil in the US.

His estimate is that a US drilling program would supply 18 billion barrels of oil, total. Now, that’s a lot of oil, it would run my Ford Focus for…well, longer than I expect to get out of the car. And since oil is up over $120 a barrel, maybe that would help lower the price of oil…Except, we know of about 1.3 trillion barrels of oil around the world. I am not an economist, but I don’t think the amount of oil we’re exploiting by 1.5% would make a big dent in price. Maybe if we kept all that oil to ourselves, and just live off our own cheap oil? Well, the US uses 21 million barrels of oil each day, so our local reserves would last less than 3 years, if that’s all the oil we used. Not exactly a good long term strategy.

So, does Bush just mean to placate the squawkers, for political reasons? Pretend he’s doing something useful? Nah. He’s thinking it’s a great time to revisit the issue, because he wants to get that $2 trillion (and climbing) of oil in the hands of his friends in the oil industry. With oil prices high, he’s hoping to convince us that it would solve our energy problems if only we’d give that oil to someone to sell to us. It won’t save us but a few pennies, but whoever gets to sell it to us stands to make a killing.

See how that works?

UPDATE OF MONUMENTAL IMPORTANCE!!!!: Apparently, NYT editors read my blog:O Yeah, must be…NYT editors and no-one else.  How ’bout that.  It was published after my original post here, therefore it must be plagiarism.

Cui Bono?

I’m not shy about it. President Bush and the Republicans are not* fascists, not totalitarians, but they sure don’t care if America slips into authoritarianism of some kind or another. There are probably some forms they’d prefer over others–he’s ostensibly willing to lock the US down to keep Al Quaeda from establishing a Muslim authoritarian empire from taking over the US.^† Quite possibly some don’t realize that an American led dictatorship could be a bad thing…I mean, America, it’s by definition always good, right?

But, why are they so willing to tear away our freedoms? Cui Bono? Who benefits? Cuz really, it’s not making us safe from terrorism, and if it were, well, no-one’s making us safe from natural disasters, and they’re doing more damage recently than terrorists ever have.

So, who benefits? The party. The Republican party mostly. The Republican party strongly supports a well defined social pecking order. Those with the most money win, and get special privileges. Men and whites are higher in the pecking order than women and minorities, and the Republicans like it that way. Clergy like to maintain some control over their flock–no-one else is paying their bills, you know (and since they ain’t even selling anything…). So, if those on top of the pecking order, the wealthy elite, can keep the party of the wealthy and the elite in power, so much the better for them. And so much the worse for the rest of us. So all the police state tactics, intimidation, corruption, vote-rigging, are a means to the end of keeping the Repubs in power (they’ve even on occasion-Nixon, e.g.-mentioned as much), for the good of America, by which they mean the wealthiest people in America.

The same goes for Republican economic policies, actually. Take climate change. A realistic economic assessment of the problem wouldn’t pretend that the globe isn’t warming, or feign ignorance. You don’t get ahead economically on wishful thinking alone. You’d say yep, there’s a problem, now how can we best mitigate it, or better turn this knowledge to our advantage. However, those at the top in the US are so wealthy that they can reasonably hope to live above the consequences; and even better for their relative social status, those at the bottom might even be much worse off.

That said, a solid two-party system is better for both parties than a three party system, or a many party system with enough indie parties at least to force alliances on votes. Ergo, the Democrats are worth propping up, too, if you’re interested using politics to maintain your place in the pecking order. So Democrats aren’t to be trusted as a rule, either…but I find they general actually do handle themselves better, and are more reality based in their policies than Republicans are.

So, I’m voting Obama ‘08!

And will blog something about video game math soon, I promise!!!

*necessarily

^†I don’t care either way, Muslim or oligarchic, I don’t want to live in a dictatorship

The last thing I want…

Is a president of the US who would SLANDER AMERICA!. Watch this! Now what the hell? A Sky News interviewer brings up a couple of our most noble, glorious American projects, and Prez Bush has the gall to say that talking about those is slandering America? Now, last I checked, in order to be slander, the claim has to not only be false (which clearly it isn’t) and also has to do damage to the slandered, i. e. it has to be a bad thing. But this is America we’re talking about, we don’t do bad things! And I won’t let my Prezzie say we’ve done anything wrong without giving him hell about it.

I <3 America! I <3 rendition and torture! I <3 imprisonment without due process! I <3 dissappearing people! These things aren’t things we should be ashamed of! We should be proud of them. Live at all costs, just don’t let them kill me! Freedom isn’t worth it. Or something like that, my memory isn’t always so good.

And that Republican scum would say bad things about America is why I’m voting Obama ‘08.

I will get back to video game math in the near future, I promise x<3