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Sam Harris: Science CAN Answer Moral Questions

Please watch and consider this - it's worth it:

‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change | Grist

Environmentalism: The word is not enough. In my opening statement at the debate the other night, I had 60 seconds to reach a half-drunk, half-interested crowd. In those circumstances, you realize pretty quickly that you have to cut straight to the core of things. I hadn't really thought it out in advance, but I realized just before I went on stage that the first thing I wanted to say is simple: I'm not an environmentalist and these aren't environmental challenges.

via www.grist.org

This is a great article by Grist's David Roberts, in which he points out that the issue of climate change requires too broad a change in our society to allow it to be pigeonholed as a purely "environmental" concern. He points out that environmentalists have taken an early lead in pointing out the perils of continuing on the course we have been on, but says the mindset of the environmental movement has been shaped by the movement's early successes as a purely regulatory issue (find polluters and prevent them or make them pay for polluting).

Roberts' article revisits a discussion from 2004, spurred by an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, entitled "The Death of the Environmental Movement", in which they too argued that the environmental movement has become moribund by getting lost in the tactics that brought it early success, and that it has consequently been weak at dealing with the backlash that has been stirring in the American public for the last thirty years. They too argued that the climate crisis is too broad and too important to be stuck with the same myopia. That article caused a lot of fuss when it was published, but it's an interesting discussion, and as Roberts' article indicates, one that deserves revisiting.

Google and Verizon carve up the internet...

Google Turns Its Back on Net Neutrality | Save the Internet.

Please read the whole thing, but here's the nut:

But blaming Google for finding ways to deepen their own pockets is like blaming a tiger for eating a goat. We can hold them to some modicum of social responsibility, but at the end of the day, they're a corporation - it's what they do.

It's ultimately up to the FCC to protect Net Neutrality, and we need to hold them and our lawmakers accountable to us. We need to fight back and speak up to tell the FCC that we want a completely open Internet.

If you value the innovation on the internet, as well as your ability to choose what you read, listen to, and watch, please follow both links and tell both Google and your legislators that you care what they do about this issue. Telecom companies are spending millions in lobbying money to get Congress and the FCC to allow them to control this public resource. Those lawmakers need to know there will be political costs if they get bought by this lobbying money, anmd Google needs to know there will be economic costs that are too high. They've gotten rich on the innovation on the web, and pulling up the ladder behind them to stop other innovators is not acceptable.

The Fear Factor

In an interesting article in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick asks; "What happens to democracy when everyone's too scared to show up?" Apparently, several witnesses in legal proceedings around the gay marriage issue in California have claimed they are too afraid to testify (and have successfully petitioned the US Supreme Court to prevent a local judge from allowing any video coverage of the trial at all), and in one case in Washington, have asked the courts to suppress the public record of the list of signatories to a petition to put a repeal of gay marriage rights on the ballot.

I understand that some supporters of these repeal efforts have been subjected to physical threats, intimidation, and vandalism, and that's clearly wrong (though there's an inescapable irony in the fact that the cause of that ill treatment is their advocacy of the position that it's OK to mistreat others). I'm not aware, though, that anyone has actually been physically harmed in such circumstances (unlike the dozens of people who have been beaten or killed by those who want to lock their gay and lesbian neighbors back in the closet).

On the other hand, one of the complaints from those who supported California's Prop. 8, and those who would like to put a similar measure on the Washington ballot, is that they're being subjected to financial damage from those who will no longer patronize their businesses. Sorry, but that's not a sufficient threat to make me believe that a public record should be made private. While it's not something I say at all often, I agree wholeheartedly with Justice Scalia, who said during oral argument in the California case; "'The fact is, running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage."

They shouldn't be subjected to physical violence or threats of that violence, but if those who want to change the laws aren't willing to stand up and be counted (and risk the rejection of their fellow citizens for their beliefs), they should sit down and shut up.

Missionaries of Hate

Uganda has been considering and continues to consider legislation that would make homosexuality a crime punishable by imprisonment or death. This is a documentary on Current TV about the legislation and the influence that American evangelicals have had in promoting it. The same people who are responsible for inciting outpourings of irrational hatred in this country are hard at the same work in Africa, with what appears to be even greater success.

Those same evangelicals are now distancing themselves from their own work, saying the Ugandans have taken their condemnations of gays too far, but their objections are tellingly limited, and make no attempt to recognize the promoters of the bill as the hatemongers they are. This legislation would criminalize people who are doing harm to nobody, solely on the basis of their homosexuality. It is evil, and not to speak out loudly against it is to be complicit in that evil. Watch:

Madness.

Sharing the "Wealth"

Here's a recently released computer model of the likely future of the oil gushing from the BP blowout. There's a certain poetic justice in where the Gulf Stream ends up, except that of course, the majority of those in Great Britain are no more responsible for this nightmare than are those closer to the source whose lives will be ruined by its consequences.

Oh, yeah, and it will be killing vital marine resources all along the way...

Criminal Negligence and Obstruction of Justice

As time goes on, the number of reports of BP engaging in absolutely indefensible behavior relating to their disaster in the Gulf of Mexico mounts daily. Before the disaster, they cut corners in a variety of ways that several experienced oil patch hands have described as spectacularly reckless. They produced a safety plan for the rig that was manifestly inapplicable to the conditions that apply at the well site (its particulars were boilerplate that got cut and pasted into the application from previous applications in shallower water and less environmentally sensitive areas). They failed to properly test the blowout preventer at the depths it was working at, failed (despite warning signals from the rig) to take the standard precaution of packing the shaft with drilling mud while preliminary volatility tests were run on the composition of the mixture that would be produced once the well entered production (that failure led directly to the explosion and fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and started this catastrophe), failed to properly test the cementing of the linkages in the production pipeline, failed to follow basic safety procedures on the rig itself, failed to provides accurate drawings of the blowout preventer so that they could know what was going on on the sea floor once a problem arose, and even failed to check that the battery in the blowout preventer was functioning (it wasn’t, which helped cause the failure of the preventer).

All through the process of bringing the well online, BP shorted the safety considerations they are obligated to observe in search of some extra profit, on a well that will likely still produce a stunning flow of cash once they finally get its oil headed up a pipe and into a refinery.

Those failures caused the disaster, starting with an explosion and fire that killed 11 people on the rig itself, and continuing with driving ecological and economic devastation that will certainly be the worst from any single event in US history. The area under direct threat from this negligence includes 40% of the coastal wetlands in the country, and the impact on the wildlife and the breeding habitat for the gulf coast fishery will be felt for decades to come, if not forever. The irresponsibility that produced the disaster in the first place would be bad enough, but if anything, BP’s malfeasance has only increased in pace since the disaster began.

In hearings before Congress last week, the senior management at BP claimed that they have made major investments in technology that have made offshore drilling much safer since the last huge offshore undersea blowout in the Gulf, the Ixtoc well in Mexican waters in the 1970s. As the senior management witnesses were making these claims in DC, the engineers were winging it on the ocean floor, trying the exact same ad hoc nonsense that they tried to manage the Ixtoc disaster thirty years ago. That’s not particularly surprising, because what they described as a large investment in safety over the last 25 years ($1.3 billion) equates with approximately 1 week’s profit for the company. They spent that amount over 25 years, and they want credit for that level of investment. It’s mind-boggling.

Since the explosion, BP has consistently underestimated the size and scope of the problem (what they first described as a flow rate of about 1000 barrels of oil per day has been independently estimated over the last three weeks to actually be somewhere between 20 and 45 thousand barrels per day). They have been using dispersants on the oil with no real idea about the actual long-term effects of doing so on the sea life that come into contact with those chemicals and no idea if the dispersants will work to mitigate the effects of the oil fouling the Gulf, because they have no experience with trying to mitigate the effects of a “spill” this size. After getting told by the EPA that they had to change the chemical they used from one (made by a BP subsidiary) that is banned in many parts of the world because it’s too toxic, they continued to use it and are still using it to this day. They claim that they have no other supplies of dispersant in sufficient quantities to make a difference, but again, they don’t know what the effects of the use of the dispersants is anyway – the only thing they do know is that the dispersants make the oil harder to spot on the surface and therefore less likely to produce outrage among the public at large.

BP has claimed that they intend to make everyone who is affected by this disaster whole for their losses, saying that they will “pay all legitimate claims”, but anyone who thinks that’s true is living in a Panglossian dreamworld. Already, after initial checks of $5000 delivered with great fanfare, the flow of those monies is coming way too slowly to save the businesses that are being devastated by this spill now ($5000 is a drop in the bucket to a commercial fisherman in season, and if you find me a shrimp boat captain or a fishing guide who is going to have the financial cushion to wait for a court to judge if the claims are “legitimate”, I’ll show you someone who is working as a hobby). Meanwhile, they are lobbying intensively in Congress to prevent the removal of the woefully inadequate $75 million damage cap that is being considered at present, and they are forum shopping to have all the civil court claims against them heard by a single judge in Houston who is invested in the oil and gas industry and regularly gives speeches to industry groups around the world about legal strategies for oil companies.

In addition to all of this, they have been playing games since the beginning of the disaster with access to the image stream of the blowout since they first got cameras down to the site of the breach, and they are still restricting access to the shorelines under threat and the cleanup operations that are underway along the Gulf coast and out at sea, despite the fact that the areas they are “closing” are public lands and waters, to which they have no conceivable right to control access. Moreover, they have been busy trying to deny the existence of plumes of oil underwater that have been spotted by several separate research vessels doing damage assessment for NOAA and other academic institutions (Univ. of Southern Mississippi, Univ. of Mississippi, Univ. of Georgia, Univ. of South Florida, among others), claiming that oil is lighter than water and therefore all the oil is on the surface or soon will be. They make this claim in the full knowledge that the one certain effect of the dispersants they’ve been using is to slow the ascent of oil through the water column, making the existence of undersea plumes much more likely. They’ve been claiming that oil that has appeared on several beaches is not from the blowout, claiming (without providing any supporting evidence) that it is from other sources in the Gulf.

The assistance they have received from local, state, and federal authorities in effecting a good deal of this dishonesty and obstructionism has been very troubling, and the lack of thundering outrage on the part of media outlets about BPs control of the information coming out of the area is a disgrace. I can understand the reticence of local and even state governments about challenging BP’s control of the response to the disaster, in light of the fact that they are dependent on BPs response to save their economies and finally stop the well. What is utterly incomprehensible is the federal timidity in the face of this disaster, and equally outrageous is the equanimity with which the national media have acquiesced to being taken on company tours of whatever BP would like them to see, instead of being allowed into the area to go and look for themselves.

Finally, after the “top kill” charade played itself out last weekend (it becomes increasingly apparent that BP waited as long as possible before releasing the news about which they were pretty certain several days earlier, namely that the techniques they were trying weren’t working), the president made a speech that began to capture some of the national anger about this mess, and the Justice Department finally announced that it would investigate whether BP or its management had engaged in criminal behavior in regards to the disaster.

The Coast Guard, though, is helping BP to control access to the site of the blowout and the areas that are under threat, and NOAA has just recently signed onto BP’s skepticism about the existence of underwater oil plumes, despite the fact that its own researchers are among those who have noted the presence of oil throughout the water column, including both chemical testing and visual confirmation of what can only be described as plumes of oil below the surface of the Gulf.

I can understand some of NOAA’s caution in reaching final conclusions about the extent of the plumes their researchers have found, and the Coast Guard may have some interest in making sure that there isn’t a traffic jam in the disaster area from reporters making overflights, but they seem to have gone considerably farther than that in abetting BP’s damage control PR effort. Reprimanding scientists who speak to reporters about what they’ve found isn’t the same thing as being cautious about final conclusions, and preventing access to beaches being cleaned up is going too far to preserve the interests of the culprits in this nightmare.

Charles Krauthammer has apparently opined recently in the Washington Post that for the Justice Department to investigate BP’s responsibility for and response to the catastrophe is tantamount to “declaring war” on BP. That’s arrant nonsense, but it does raise an interesting point, i.e., that it’s about time that the federal government DID go to war on BP. Robert Reich has suggested that the federal government act under its emergency authority to place BP in temporary receivership, to make certain that all necessary resources are brought to bear on BP to force it to start (way too late) behaving responsibly about this flood of poison into our natural heritage and the economic and ecological consequences of their criminal negligence. James Carville, whose cries of anguish have been much in the news lately, has been making statements that are difficult to support about the reaction to this crisis carrying a unique burden of prejudice against his home state, but among those accusations is at least one very good idea – that prosecution of those responsible would go a long way to focusing the minds of those at BP who are still working on behalf of their shareholders on the fact that they have a greater responsibility to the general public at this point.

In addition to bearing down on those whose negligent policies have brought us this disaster, it’s time the federal government started acting unequivocally in support of the public interest, without regard to the interests of BP, whose management long ago forfeited any right to consideration of its interests in this matter. The company's US assets should be frozen until everyone who has been damaged by this blowout has been as fully compensated as money can provide (which still won't begin to cover the damage they've caused). Finally, it's time to stop hiding the extent of the disaster, since to do so is to directly damage the public interest in knowing what happened and what is happening now to respond to this crisis. Anyone in government who restricts reasonable access to covering this spill should be fired on the spot, and anyone who works for BP that tries the same thing should be jailed. It’s long past time that we stopped worrying about the delicate sensibilities of those who caused this tragedy and started deciding which of them gets to do some hard time for presiding over this cavalcade of incompetence, negligence, and deception.

Here We Go Again...

On November 2nd, Mainers will vote on "Question 1", which is an effort to overturn the legislature's decision to make same-sex marriage legal in the state. Here's an ad that the groups that support the measure are running:

Look familiar? If you watched the ads that the folks supporting Prop 8 in California ran last fall, it should:

If totally phoning it in as an ad producer made a difference, this vote wouldn't even be close, but creativity apparently isn't as highly valued by the opponents of gay marriage as fear, and this vote might well be close. If you can spare it, the folks at Vote No on 1 could use your help.

Principle vs. Pragmatism at Justice

There has been a steady tension in the executive branch since Barack Obama took office between the principle of prosecuting what have become obvious crimes committed by the previous administration and the pragmatic political effects of such a prosecution on the president's agenda. It's an unfortunate reality of polarized Washington that a prosecution will be played by Republicans as a blatantly political act, and in an administration that is still seeking to work with Republicans on Capitol Hill, that act would likely poison the waters and finish off any semblance of cooperation.

So far, it seems that the pragmatic imperatives of passing the ambitious and incredibly important agenda that Obama has set forth (attempting to deal with health care, energy policy, education, and the economy all at once would be no mean feat even if the Republican party hadn't decided its narrow political interests would be best served by doing everything they could to wreck his plans). At several turns, the administration has come down on the side of at least deferring, if not completely ignoring the crimes they should by rights be at least investigating, and probably eventually prosecuting.

This has been a source of considerable frustration for those of Obama's supporters who wanted the president to add one more task to his plate, that of moving the USA back toward being a constitutional democracy which holds the bill of rights as a sacred document.

I'm one of those supporters, and I realize that this post's assumption of the prior administration's guilt sounds a little like the old western movie line about how "we're going to give you a fair trial, followed by a fist class hangin'", but it really isn't. At several points, officials of the previous administration have admitted openly that they committed acts which by any fair reading are violations of both US and international law. They assert (on the basis of very little evidence) that the national security interests of the country were served by doing so, and that they were empowered to break US law by their constitutional mandate, but most constitutional scholars have dismissed that as a wholly specious claim.

What remains is to see if that claim carries any more weight in court than it does in the academy, and to establish who was involved in making the decisions to carry out such acts as torturing people, detaining them indefinitely without a hearing, invading the privacy of American citizens without any restrictions, misinforming Congress about all of the above, and a variety of other crimes and misdemeanors. So far, the administration has been moving very slowly to investigate those matters and act on what they find, and the frustration about that pace that's welling up among those who hold the Constitution dear isn't because we don't understand that there may be a cost to pressing forward with investigations, it's because we think that cost will be worth paying to preserve what we hold dear about our country.

For some of us (myself included), it's also a matter of practical political calculation. If Democrats don't stand up for principle in this case, Republican policymakers will have no reason to respect either the law or their opposition, and the voters who have to choose from among them will have no reason to respect Democrats' spines either. If the voters don't believe Democrats will stand up for principle, they won't trust them to make policy, and the sacrifice of principle for pragmatic political considerations will have been wasted.

All of which is why I was very heartened to read this Newsweek piece by Daniel Klaidman, which describes the dilemma being wrestled with by Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder too is mindful of what the effort to investigate might cost, and is suitably worried about endangering all that the Obama administration needs to accomplish. Fortunately, he has apparently also been as aware of the damage the previous administration did to the rule of law, and has enough respect for that rule to find it unpalatable to let that damage go unremarked.

The irony here is that if an investigation is to go forward (and it should), the best practice will be for it to proceed as speedily and independently as it can; to quote Lady Macbeth, "If t'were done, t'were best done quickly." (another irony may be quoting Lady Macbeth in a post about the excesses of state power, but I digress...) The more the administration is seen to be agonizing over this decision, rather than letting the law take it's course, the easier it is to paint the whole thing as a political exercise, something the Republicans will attempt to do regardless.

In addition, it has become clear that the Republican leadership is committed to a course of obstructionism that makes it a fool's errand to keep going hat in hand to the minority to try to develop a governing consensus. They're just not that into you (or governing, something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has lived through the last eight years). The good news is that their posture, in it's current form, looks to be wholly self-destructive, and is being carried out by a cavalcade of clowns that make the hapless Washington Generals seem like the Harlem Globetrotters the Generals made a living by losing to in embarrassing fashion. These guys aren't just the gang that can't shoot straight, they are shooting themselves and each other at a furious pace.

Principle's cost is declining daily as the revelations get worse, and it looks like AG Holder may be ready to pull the trigger on doing his job. It can't happen soon enough, and if it's explained as a matter of letting the law take it's course, I don't think the cost will be as high as leaving the crimes uninvestigated. I hear that, like Obama, Holder likes a game of basketball. Time for a full court press, General.