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(This post is going to make some people hate me.  I’m sorry for this in advance.)

I’ve come to some peace about climate change.  I wasn’t obsessing about it before, but I do think about it quite a bit.

The debate rages over the source of climate change – is it something we’re doing, or something natural?  Someone would say the debate is settled, and the only people denying it are people with a vested interest in denying it.  The evidence certainly looks this way, to be honest.  If you’re still denying the causes of global warming, you’re in the vast minority.

But, here’s the thing – it doesn’t matter what is causing climate change.  It could be us, it could be nature.  Knowing the truth isn’t going to change anything.  Even if the evidence for humans causing global warming becomes utterly and completely incontrovertible (some say it is already), nothing will change.

We can’t get any climate change legislation off the ground in the U.S.  The latest attempt is already DOA, and we have a Democratic-controlled Congress (both houses, no less), and a Democratic president.  Since it seems likely the Democrats are going to get slaughtered in the November elections, I think this was their only shot.  Obama is going on two years, and nothing has been done.  If it hasn’t happened by now, it ain’t gonna happen.

On a global stage, it’s even worse.  You think Kyoto is going to do anything?  It’s been in force for five years now, and while the numbers aren’t really accurate for the last decade, do you honestly think we’re going to see a decline?  (Decades from now, we just might realize that by refusing to ratify Kyoto, the U.S. was the only honest country at the table.)

Assuming anything ever happens with the G20 globally, there’s still all the emerging economies to consider.  You think India or China or Brazil is going to slow their growth?  Not a chance.  It’s The Tragedy of the Commons on a grand scale.

What this means is simple: as a human race, we’re never going to put a dent in greenhouse gas emissions.  We can give it lip service all we want, but there’s no chance anything is going to change.  This is sad, sure, but pretending that we can somehow get the whole world to work together on something like this is  pipe dream.  It’s hard enough to get political consensus for it within a single country – there’s just no way the world is going to pull together.

And time is probably short. Some scientists are saying we’ve already tipped, and there’s no going back.  So we’re either on an inexorable slide to oblivion or very close to it.  If it takes 20 years to get the whole world together on this, it might not matter any more.

The end result of this is that perhaps the most efficient thing we could do is simply accept climate change and plan for it.  I have nothing against trying to reduce emissions, but in the end, climate change is going to happen, and we’re either going to be prepared for it or not.  There’s a lot of things we could do to adapt to the new normal, and this might be the most efficient use of our resources right now.

This is depressing, I know.  And I want to reiterate that I believe the evidence that humans are responsible for climate change and that the entire human race should absolutely come together to stop this crisis.

But we won’t.

Why Are the Bush Tax Cuts Expiring in the First Place?: Here’s why Bush’s tax cuts are set to expire – the income tax cuts and the estate tax cuts.

If Republicans love their tax cuts so much, why didn’t they enact them for perpetuity? Because they didn’t have enough votes, thanks to an obscure parliamentary rule known as the Byrd Rule.

The Byrd Rule, first adopted in 1985 and named for the late Robert C. Byrd, allows senators during the reconciliation process to block a piece of legislation if it significantly increases the federal deficit more than 10 years in the future.

Any senator can raise a procedural objection to legislation that does  affect the deficit more than a decade out. If the objection is sustained, whatever provision is at fault for raising the deficit 10 years out is eliminated from the legislation, unless a 60-vote majority says otherwise.

The paradox here is clear.  Conservatives constantly champion supply-side and trickle-down economics.  But if they gave in to the Byrd Rule, they must have been conceding the fact that the tax cuts were going to have a negative effect on the deficit in 10 years.  (Or they’ll just chalk it up to meaningless politically maneuvering to get their desired legislation passed.)

For the record – and before I get jumped on by someone on the Right – I do absolutely believe that tax cuts stimulate the economy.  But they can’t “just” stimulate the economy — they have to do so to such a degree that they generate enough new taxable revenue to offset themselves, and this is trickier.

Example: if you have a 25% tax rate, cutting $1 in taxes means that $1 cut has to generate $4 in taxable revenue in order to replace the $1 you just cut from actual tax revenue (25% of the $4 in newly-generated taxable revenue replaces the $1 we just cut from actual tax revenue).  With a 90% tax rate, your $1 tax cut would have to generate just $1.10 in new revenue.

So, do tax cuts stimulate the economy that much?  At our current tax level, I personally doubt it, but I don’t know for sure.  Furthermore, I don’t think anyone can know for sure because getting an exact measurement on the effect of a tax cut is next to impossible, given all the other things going on in the economy at any given time (for instance, inflation and population growth alone will roughly double our GDP every decade).

In the end, everyone is just guessing.  They all trot out their pet reasons, but our economy is such a massively complex moving target, that no one knows for sure.

National Public Radio: Found these competing claims on the Wikipedia page for NPR.  Funny.

Allegations of conservative bias
In a December 2005 column run by NPR ombudsman and former Vice President Jeffrey Dvorkin, allegations that NPR relies heavily on conservative think-tanks were denied. In his column, Dvorkin listed the number of times NPR had cited experts from conservative and liberal think tanks in the previous year as evidence. However, according to MediaMatters, a liberal media group, the numbers he reported indicate an overwhelmingly conservative bias. His own tally showed that 63% of NPR experts from think tanks came from right-leaning organizations while only 37% came from left-leaning organizations.

Allegations of liberal bias
A study conducted by researchers at UCLA and the University of Missouri found that while NPR is "often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet", "[b]y our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet. Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post’s." It did find NPR to be more liberal than the average U.S. voter of the time of the study and more conservative than the average U.S. Democrat of the time. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive media watchdog group, also disputes the claim of a liberal bias.

Well, we know NPR is biased.  But in which direction?

Filibusters and arcane obstructions in the Senate: This is an article that will probably just make you sad.  It details all the ways the U.S. Senate has degenerated into a utterly dysfunctional body which exists solely so that the two parties can obstruct each other and avoid compromising on anything.

Like many other aspects of senatorial procedure, Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5 is a relic from the days when senators had to hover around their desks to know what was happening on the floor during the main afternoon debate. […] In the press lounge, McCaskill said, with light sarcasm, “Somebody told me the rule is to make sure people pay attention to what’s happening on the floor during debate and not be distracted by committee work. Clearly, it’s an old rule.”

The Republicans had turned this old rule into a new means of obstruction. There would be no hearings that afternoon; the general and the admiral would have to come back another day. Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

Now, this article was written when the Democrats are in power, so it’s largely about how the Republicans are the ones doing the obstructing these days.  But don’t think for a second that the Democrats are any different.  When the shoe was  on the other foot (and will be again), I have no doubt the Democrats were every bit as divisive and obstructionist.

You can’t compromise on anything these days.  The media will crucify you. The only way to get re-elected is to ensure that nothing gets accomplished.  The media has turned it into a zero-sum game.  For someone else to win, someone has to lose, so let’s just make sure neither thing happens.

The Boy Who Cried Cal: Last year, I caught a short item on the news about a high school football player in Nevada who claimed to have been recruited by a big college football program.  Problem was…he hadn’t been.  I remember thinking, “How do you get caught up in a lie that big?”

Pretty easily, it turns out.

By January 2008, with national signing day only a month away, Kevin had to decide whether to finally to tell the truth. He says he’d lay in bed "just about every night," playing out scenarios, and he came to an absolutely ludicrous decision: hold a news conference.

And he did hold the conference, complete with local TV stations, a pep rally, and his dramatic decision of which collegiate ballcap to put on before the flash bulbs when off.

This is a long article that details the strange story of Kevin Hart, who carried this charade all the way to its bitter, embarrassing conclusion.  It’s a story of bravado, a runaway lie, getting backed into a corner, then taking a long road to partial redemption.

What collapsing empire looks like: This is a short post which is really a roll-up of links to other things, but it illustrates what I’ve been feeling for a long time.  The current financial crisis and overwhelming U.S. debt is going to force unprecedented changes how we live.  Many state, country, and local governments are just accepting that the money is gone, and our standard of living will drop.

Consider (all from the article):

• Hawaii eliminated school for 17 Fridays during the year
• Camden, New Jersey is closing its entire library system
• Clayton County, Georgia shut down its entire public transportation system
• Utah is considering making 12-grade optional
• Colorado Springs shut off one-third of its streetlights

Nothing in here about California, which I find surprising.  Marijuana is almost legal, and crack sentences have been reduced, which means that a massive percentage of people who would have gone to prison will not.  Additionally, Oakland lost a significant percentage of their police officers – a city which could ill-afford cuts in that area.

This is what it looks like when the money is gone.  And I don’t think there’s any coming back from this.  This is the new normal.  The relationship of the citizen to the state is being redefined, forever.  We just need to accept that things like public transportation, libraries, and even public education are not ever going to return to what we grew up with.

Sports, sex, and the runner Caster Semenya: Interesting article about an athlete who is a woman…sort of.  South African runner Caster Semenya was dominating her event (the 800 meters), when it was determined that while she appeared to be a woman, she was kind of…in the middle.  Certainly not a man, but not 100% a woman either.

Semenya is breathtakingly butch. Her torso is like the chest plate on a suit of armor. She has a strong jawline, and a build that slides straight from her ribs to her hips. “What I knew is that wherever we go, whenever she made her first appearance, people were somehow gossiping, saying, ‘No, no, she is not a girl,’ ” Phineas Sako said, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin. “ ‘It looks like a boy’—that’s the right words—they used to say, ‘It looks like a boy.’ Some even asked me as a coach, and I would confirm: it’s a girl. At times, she’d get upset. But, eventually, she was just used to such things.” Semenya became accustomed to visiting the bathroom with a member of a competing team so that they could look at her private parts and then get on with the race. “They are doubting me,” she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.

Parts of the story are heartbreaking, because Semeneya seems to be an innocent bystander in all of this.  She certainly believed she was a woman, but lack of a uterus and ovaries, and a pair of undescended testicles, really cast this into doubt.  She seems sadly caught up in the middle of something she barely understands and doesn’t want any part of.

While we tend to think of gender as a simple binary category – you are either male or female – this article explains that for a very small percentage of people, it’s not quite that simple.

Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus.: A great article by a sport writer who happens to be the great-great grandson of Abd el-Kader.  el-Kader was an Algerian Muslim who fought the French occupation in the late 19th century, and became a legend for it.

He was eventually captured, but not killed for fear of creating a martyr.  He was resettled in France for several years, then eventually moved to Damascus, Syria.  It was there that he saved thousands of Christians from an angry mob in July 1860 by sheltering them in his own home, and refusing to hand them over.

“Give us the Christians,” the crowd shouted after he had quieted it by his silent presence.

“My brothers, your behavior violates the law of God. What makes you think you have a right to go around killing innocent people? Have you sunk so low that you are slaughtering women and children? Didn’t God say in our holy book, Whoever kills a man who has never committed murder or created disorder in the land will be regarded as a murderer of all humanity?”

A brave man, and a fine human being.  Trivia: the city of Elkader, Iowa is named after him.

It’s a long article, but reads quickly.  Absolutely worth your time.

Forget Shorter Showers: This article presents a sad truth, which I have suspected for a long time: decreasing individual consumption does very little for the environment, because the overwhelming majority of consumption is at the industrial level.

Even if every person in the United States did everything [An Inconvenient Truth]suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

[…] More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings.

[…] Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

The article laments the fact that we’re reducing individual consumption at the expense of organized political resistance against the real culprits of environmental damage.  We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that turning off a single light bulb equals meaningful change.

The article gets more and more extreme in the end, discussing things like getting rid of electricity and even that the ultimate attempt to reduce consumption should logically end in suicide.  But the general message is clear: as much as we love the idea of making an individual difference, reducing emissions, waste, and environmental damage has to be large-scale political resistance.

But, I wonder, isn’t industrial consumption driven by personal consumption?  If we all stop drinking water in plastic bottles, this article assumes that doesn’t matter because the plastic bottle factory keeps right on pumping them out.  But wouldn’t lack of demand put it out of business?  So, couldn’t reducing personal consumption “bubble up” and affect industrial consumption?

The Onion has a couple articles related to this, presenting opposite viewpoints:

• I’m Doing My Inconsequential Part for the Environment
• ‘How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder

I get annoyed when people “applaud” the Supreme Court for decisions, or vice-versa.  John Thune just did it on Facebook:

I applaud the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in McDonald v. Chicago. The decision affirms that Second Amendment protection for individuals’ right to bear arms also extends to state and local governments, not just the federal government. This decision will help protect the rights of law-abiding citizens across the country.

This annoys me as much as when Obama used the State of the Union speech to chide the court for their ruling on corporate sponsorship of campaigns.

In a perfect world, no one should congratulate or condemn the Court, because the Court shouldn’t be allowed to think for itself.  The Court exists to interpret the Constitution.  Assuming they do this, then what is there to congratulate or condemn?  The Court, or the Constitution?  You don’t shoot (or reward) the messenger.

Generally speaking, I trust the Court to apply the Constitution.  So, in the case of Obama’s ridiculously inappropriate and childish swipe at the Court during the State of the Union (decorum, people, decorum), what did he want from the Court?  Did he want them to ignore the Constitution and make a ruling for his agenda?

I’m almost as frustrated at Alito for even bothering to defend himself by mouthing the words “Not true.”  You shouldn’t have to defend yourself – the Constitution is what it is.  Even if you don’t agree with it, you need to apply it, and if that’s what you did then you have nothing to apologize for.  By even stooping to defend the Court, Alito opened the door that the Court might need defending, and that’s a slippery slope.

But…this is all idealist crap, and we all know it.  The Court does apply their own biases and feelings to the Constitution, so I guess they should be held somewhat responsible for the rulings.  But I still find it odd when people take sides with or against the Court.  In doing so, they’re sort of admitting that the Court fails in its central role of impartially interpreting the Constitution, and is simply offering random opinions. If the Court’s opinions coincide with one’s own, then it’s to be congratulated.  Otherwise, it’s to be condemned.

When Obama lashed out at the Court, he may as well have been saying, “You suck because I didn’t get my way.”  And Thune may as well have posted, “You’re awesome because I got mine.” If this is truly the case, then abolish the stupid Court and find something better.