Revisiting 'Dennis Prager on the environment' Part 2

Townhall

The Judeo-Christian responses are clear: Nature has been created for man's use; and on its own, without man, it has no meaning. Dolphins are adorable because human beings find them adorable. Without people to appreciate them or the role they play in the earth's ecosystem to enable human life, they are no more adorable or meaningful than a rock on Pluto.

That is the point of the Creation story -- everything was made in order to prepare the way for the creation of man (and woman, for those whose college education leads them to confuse the generic "man" with "male"). God declared each day's creation "good," but declared the sixth day's creation of man as "very good."

Critics find three biblical notions about nature unacceptable: that man shall lord over it; that it was created solely for man and therefore has no intrinsic value; and that it is not sacred.

Like I stated before, Dennis Prager doesn't appreciate or love nature judging by his tone, and he doesn't want you to, either. I must say, he uses an awful big paint brush. Prager is pushing a heavy pro-consumer (liberal) conservative economic agenda. The omittance that humanity needs some nature to consume for growth, development, and progress, while still being caretakers of the environment as surely God would want, is simply untrustworthy. "No intrinsic value"? Unbelievable.

As regards man "subduing and conquering nature," this was one of the revolutionary ideas of the Old Testament that made Western medical and other scientific progress possible. For all ancient civilizations, nature (or the equally capricious and amoral gods of nature) ruled man. The Book of Genesis came along to teach the opposite -- man is to rule nature.

Only by ruling and conquering nature will man develop cures for nature's diseases. We will conquer cancer; cancer will not conquer us. And only rational beings, not irrational gods of nature, can do so. Judeo-Christian values are the primary reason science and modern medicine developed in the West. A rational God designed nature, and rational human beings can therefore perceive it and, yes, conquer it.

I really do not appreciate or feel comfortable with the "subduing and conquering nature" (without limits?) bit. Prager is being deceitful, and the use of the action word "revolutionary" is an over-exaggeration to sway his readers. There's just enough truth in it to be useful while avoiding any criticisms. A half-truth. For someone who has spent years reading and studying The Bible and Torah, do you expect me to believe Mr. Prager is accurately telling God's plan for nature and humanity? We must conquer it. End of story. I don't even know what to say? The tone is like something out of a brainwashing book. It is so monolithic and insensitive. He actually scares me on the topic.

He also is aligning "irrational" to "gods of nature" while those "rational" to "conquering nature." Uh, is it possible that in some far off faint way those who "conquer nature" without limits and respect for it are also "irrational"? A problem often found in developing nations and conservative-leaning consumer economic agendas.

The notion that it is secularism, not Judeo-Christian values, that enabled scientific inquiry constitutes perhaps the greatest propaganda victory in history. Virtually every great scientist from Sir Isaac Newton to the beginning of 20th century saw scientific inquiry as the study of divine design.

Here Prager wants religion to be above and take credit for science. Scientific fact constantly shows humanity is dependent upon nature, not above it like humanity is atop the food chain in the animal kingdom. A mistake he should know better considering he once said on his program neither can take whole credit for explaining universal existence.

As for the modern secular objection to the Judeo-Christian notion of man as the pinnacle and purpose of nature, one can only say woe unto mankind if that objection prevails. When man is reduced to being part of the natural world, his status is reduced to that of a dolphin. It is one of the great ironies of the contemporary world that humanists render human life largely worthless while God-centered Jews and Christians render human life infinitely sacred. Man's worth is entirely dependent on a God-based view of the world. Without God, man is another part of the ecosystem, and often a lousy one at that.

Man isn't the purpose of nature. If anything nature is the purpose of man. Nature and the environment existed billions of years before humanity stepped upon the earth. Humanity exists amongst it but not above it for survival. How Prager somehow thinks humanity can exist outside it is beyond me because nature and the environment are spread throughout the universe.

(Added later)

If humanity is above nature as Mr. Prager hints at, then can someone explain to me why humanity would die off without nature (natural resources) while nature would continue on without humanity?

So let's say what cannot be said in sophisticated company: Nature was created as the vehicle by which God created the human being, and in order to give emotional, aesthetic and biological sustenance to mankind. Nature in and of itself has no purpose without the existence of human beings to appreciate it. In the words of the Talmud, every person should look at the world and say, "The world was created for me."

More cutting-and-pasting his arguement. Again, nature carried on just fine without human existence. It always has. Why it is dependent on human existence now isn't an accurate telling. Saying "The world was created for me" is bewildering, self-serving, and dishonest to the truth in religious text.

Does this mean that the biblical view of nature gives man the right to pollute the earth or to abuse animals? Absolutely not. Abusing animals is forbidden in the Torah: The ban on eating the limb of a living animal, the ban on placing two animals of different sizes on the same yoke and the ban on working animals seven days a week are just a few examples. To cause gratuitous suffering to an animal is a grave sin. As for polluting the earth, this, too, is religiously prohibited. If the purpose of nature is to ennoble human life and to bear witness to God's magnificence, by what understanding of this concept can a religious person defend polluting nature?

Here Prager is showing a different face to 'cover all the bases' from criticism. He's trying, as one critic put it, to express some form of "duality." Using "to conquer nature" when it fits one agenda while using a speck of compassion and environmental stewarship (found in The Bible) when necessary to portray another image.

We are indeed to be responsible stewards of nature, but for our sake, not its.

Another half-truth which Prager uses for absolutes and not a common middle ground that expresses environmental responsibility.

I'm putting up some of the old quotes because I feel these people expressed their criticisms far better than I ever could:

Middle Ear

-Whenever I'm informed that my life lacks value because it is not eternal, I think that it a strange kind of economy that assigns greater worth to what is in abundance while devaluing that which is precious and rare.

So this guy can pretty much blow me.

-Ugh. To say nothing of the notion of the Covenant in Judeo-Christian tradition (not to the exclusion of similar notions in other traditions). Dolphins, like all nature, are good and beautiful because G-d created them. And we should preserve them, as Noah preserved the animals, because G-d created them. And to say that something is beautiful only if and to the extent that humans find it so isn't religiosity, it's solipsism and nihilism.

Whatta schmuck.

-In the words of the Talmud, every person should look at the world and say, "The world was created for me."

I'm reasonably familiar with this---the original telling is that the rabbi said something along the lines of: "There are two truths, and you should keep both of them in your pocket, to bring out from time to time as you need each of them. The first, that the whole world was created for you. The second, that you are but dust and ashes."

It's one of my favorite religious lessons, expressing duality and goodness, complexity and simplicity, all in one little story. Somehow, repeating only one of them? doesn't seem to me to be a faithful retelling.

-The key notion for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is stewardship. Humans have dominion only as G-d's local managers. The world isn't made for human consumption, but for temporary use in accord with G-d's plan. Since G-d made various creatures, environments, etc., humans are not entitled to capriciously destroy them.

On the science/history note, Prager is a moron. Newton was a Unitarian who was denied a position at Cambridge because he denied the doctrine of the Trinity (and implicitly the divinity of Jesus). Funny who Prager left that part out.

-I'm with paul: the description of scientists who are also religious is patronizing in the least, and a blatant mischaracterization. Part of both the study of God (theology) and the study of nature (science) is humility; reading the evidence in a way that conforms exclusively to a preconceived worldview and selectively ignoring the evidence that doesn't fit in is arrogant in the extreme. One has to assume some pretty awful things about the Creator to look at the universe and try to ram it into a form commensurate with the "literal" reading of Genesis. This "literal" reading is based on shoddy reasoning itself, turning two different creation stories (even the name used for God is different, if I remember my Hebrew class correctly) into one narrative.

The scientific evidence seems to say that biodiversity is a good thing for the planet, which is consistent with the religious view of stewardship.

-Jesse, I'm not seeing Prager fall victim to the central conceit of creationism-- namely that it is designed "just so." Rather, Prager seems to be making the argument that as rational beings, we can understand it. Now, his precise theological argument-- that we must use that understanding to dominate it-- is one that you can feel free to argue over on its theological merits, but I don't think he's falling victim to any of the standard creationist canards, and the starting point of his argument isn't anything that simply a generic belief in a god who created the universe would lead to.

The thing he misses, however, is the concept of humans as caretakers of the earth. He seems to be more concerned about the fact that abusing the earth is a personal sin than about the fact that abusing the earth also hurts others and shows a general disrespect for creation in general.

He also misses the truth of other parts of the old testament-- namely that nature will inevitably, inexorably wear us all down-- ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that. His attitude to the world owes more to the conceits of the Englightenment and what classical writers of Greece called hubris. He's just dressing it up in "Judeo-Christian moral values," because he wants to claim that his personal opinions are somehow the same worldview of a millenia-old religious tradition.

Again, do I really believe Prager, with his years of experience studying the various books of The Bible, doesn't know "humans as caretakers of the earth"? That it just somehow slipped his memory? He's pushing a political agenda.

Saint Augustine has more on the matter:

The sin (defined as "missing the mark") of Dennis Prager is to selectively elevate portions of sacred text which justify conservative politics (the death penalty, "defense of marriage", exploitation of the environment) and to ignore the vast witness of both Testaments which, for example, condemn the abuse of the poor by the rich. To paraphrase Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical, in speaking of these believers: "I don't question their good faith; I question their bad theology." To say that scripture is "divinely inspired" is simply to say that God, not the written word, is divine. There is a danger in idolatry, including biblio-idolatry. Such narrow and uncritical reading of scripture leads not to God but to human enmity and strife.

Revisiting 'Dennis Prager on the environment' Part 1

Townhall

In every society on earth, people venerated nature and worshipped nature gods. There were gods of thunder and gods of rain. Mountains were worshipped, as were rivers, animals and every natural force known to man. In ancient Egypt, for example, gods included the Nile River, the frog, sun, wind, gazelle, bull, cow, serpent, moon and crocodile.

Then came Genesis, which announced that a supernatural God, i.e., a god who existed outside of nature, created nature. Nothing about nature was divine.

If the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park are not divine in some way even if not the divinest of the divine, then I'm lost on this one.

(Added later)

Funny again how Prager doesn't mention that a "God" created nature, and we can love and appreciate God's gift to us without the need to have ritual dances for our sacred environmental fixtures.

Professor Nahum Sarna, the author of what I consider one of the two most important commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, puts it this way: "The revolutionary Israelite concept of God entails His being wholly separate from the world of His creation and wholly other than what the human mind can conceive or the human imagination depict."

But if "a" God created the Earth and Nature, how can they be wholly seperate from him to begin with? It is a part of the creators blueprint.

This was extremely difficult for men to assimilate then. And as society drifts from Judeo-Christian values, it is becoming difficult to assimilate again today. Major elements in secular Western society are returning to a form of nature worship. Animals are elevated to equality with people, and the natural environment is increasingly regarded as sacred. The most extreme expressions of nature worship actually view human beings as essentially blights on nature.

Even among some who consider themselves religious, and especially among those who consider themselves "spiritual" rather than religious, nature is regarded as divine, and God is deemed as dwelling within it.

Environmentalists who consider themselves "spiritual" but not "religious" are in my estimation missing the point like I stated above. Since in my mind a supernatural power created Nature (and its powerful wonders), there is no doubt in my mind it is religious as well as spiritual. So to be spiritual is to be religious because of godly creation. It's just that spiritualists are in denial of religious creation in the form of nature.

It is quite understandable that people who rely on feelings more than reason to form their spiritual beliefs would deify nature. It is easier -- indeed more natural -- to worship natural beauty than an invisible and morally demanding God.

Here Prager is trying to say that if you have "feelings" towards nature, they must be irrational. He often uses this scenario when comparing liberals to conservatives and secularists to non-secularists. Of course he never mentions that humans naturally have all kinds of feelings when witnessing some of the more extraordinary wonders of nature.

What is puzzling is that many people who claim to rely more on reason would do so. Nature is unworthy of worship. Nature, after all, is always amoral and usually cruel. Nature has no moral laws, only the amoral law of survival of the fittest.

Theoretically speaking this is where I see Prager using a 'dumbed down' or acts of an unknowing and innocent tone. Frankly, I don't even believe he believes his words. People appreciate nature despite its obvious violence because there is much beauty in it. Prager is presenting his "it's a cruel world" so one-sided, words cannot express my anger for his deception.

Why would people who value compassion, kindness or justice venerate nature? The notions of justice and caring for the weak are unique to humanity. In the rest of nature, the weak are to be killed. The individual means nothing in nature; the individual is everything to humans. A hospital, for example, is a profoundly unnatural, indeed antinatural, creation; to expend precious resources on keeping the most frail alive is simply against nature.

I like my old answer:

"Because those same qualities are found in Nature just as Dennis says they are not. A pack of lions devouring a large prey is vicious and unforgiving. Yet when the meal is over, watching a mother lion clean her younger offspring of blood is "compassion" and "kindness" while creating "justice" in Nature by keeping a balance in the ecosystem for the survival of the fittest."

The romanticizing of nature, let alone the ascribing of divinity to it, involves ignoring what really happens in nature. I doubt that those American schoolchildren who conducted a campaign on behalf of freeing a killer whale (the whale in the film "Free Willy") ever saw films of actual killer whale behavior. There are National Geographic videos that show, among other things, killer whales tossing a terrified baby seal back and forth before finally killing it. Perhaps American schoolchildren should see those films and then petition killer whales not to treat baby seals sadistically.

The need to bring in naive schoolchildren into making ones point isn't convincing and pardon, is cheap. Of course children are not aware of the true predatory nature of whales. Yet adults, the studied age group on nature, appreciate it despite its violence. Guess which age group Prager excluded from his persuasion?

If you care about good and evil, you cannot worship nature. And since that is what God most cares about, nature worship is antithetical to Judeo-Christian values.

Nature surely reflects the divine. It is in no way divine. Only nature's Creator is.

Well, theoretically speaking again, it looks to me like Dennis Prager doesn't want you to enjoy nature at all. And frankly Dennis has no interest in the environment. (He lives in if not the most developed county in America, one of the most in LA. In other words, he doesn't live near nature.) After three years of listening to his program, he hasn't actually expressed any interest other than his passion towards environmental extremism (a leftist reactionary phenomenon). He has no pro-environmental positions (and the key operative, no passion towards the subject). I find much of his column rather self-serving to his party's ideology. No realization, or intentionally not wanting you the reader to realize, that the environment actually benefits humanity in ways (spiritual) other than just as a useful commodity.

Dennis Prager's entire writings on the environment can be diffused simply on the basis that God created nature. A religious person persuading people to dislike or to be against or find nothing of value in nature goes against a higher powers plan of environmental creation and the dependency humanity has upon it for survival.

I'm reminded of a beautiful quote Pharyngula once said on the environment:

...dolphins are great and beautiful creatures, as are spiders and sea anemones and scrub pines and E. coli. The universe is a wonderful place, huge and complex and diverse and largely independent of my existence, and I am greatly privileged to be one small but precious voice singing in a mighty cosmic choir. Embracing the majesty of existence does not make me a smaller man.

Bush discretionary spending

I do subscribe to the conspiracy theory that nearly all presidents in history should've been impeached for one thing or another. Sure, they never do, but for the Bush administration it should've not been for WMD, but spending.

Defending Spending: Bush's Bloopers

That's an average annual growth rate of 2.4% during Clinton's eight years, compared to an average of 11.8% during Bush's first three.

'Conservative' Bush Spends More than 'Liberal' Presidents Clinton, CarterL

But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively.

Then...

The White House spinmeisters insist that we keep the size of the deficit "in perspective." Sure it's appropriate that the budget deficit should be measured against the relative size of the economy. Today, the projected budget deficit represents 4.2 percent of the nation's GDP. Thus the folks in the Bush administration pat themselves on the back while they remind us that in the 1980s the economy handled deficits of 6 percent. So what? Apparently this administration seems to think that achieving low standards instead of the lowest is supposed to be comforting.

That the nation's budgetary situation continues to deteriorate is because the administration's fiscal policy has been decidedly more about politics than policy. Even the tax cuts, which happened to be good policy, were still political in nature considering their appeal to the Republican's conservative base. At the same time, the politicos running the Bush reelection machine have consistently tried to placate or silence the liberals and special interests by throwing money at their every whim and desire. In mathematical terms, the administration calculates that satiated conservatives plus silenced liberals equals reelection.

How else can one explain the administration publishing a glossy report criticizing farm programs and then proceeding to sign a farm bill that expands those same programs? How else can one explain the administration acknowledging that entitlements are going to bankrupt the nation if left unreformed yet pushing the largest historical expansion in Medicare one year before the election? Such blatant political maneuvering can only be described as Clintonian.

But perhaps we are being unfair to former President Clinton. After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush's three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.

Bush Budget Reveals Serious Overspending Problems

The biggest spending administration in decades. With Bush's budget plan for FY2004, real non-defense discretionary outlays will rise 18.0 percent in his first three years in office (FY2002-FY2004). That growth far exceeds the first three years of any recent presidential term, including Ronald Reagan's first term (-13.5 percent), Reagan's second term (-3.2 percent), George H. Bush's term (11.6 percent), Bill Clinton's first term (-0.7 percent), and Clinton's second term (8.2 percent). When Reagan came to office and pursued a large defense build-up, he essentially froze non-defense discretionary outlays, which were $150 billion in FY1981 and just $151 billion three years later in FY1984 (in current dollars).

A spending freeze would eliminate the deficit. The FY2004 budget would increase discretionary outlays from $791 billion in FY2003 to $926 billion by FY2008. If, instead, discretionary outlays were frozen at the FY2003 level, the deficit would plunge to just $55 billion by FY2008. The budget could be balanced even more quickly with reforms to cut rapidly growing entitlement costs. If total outlays were frozen at the FY2003 level, the budget would essentially be balanced in just two years (by FY2005).

Spending increases dwarf proposed tax cuts. The administration proposes to increase total federal outlays by $89 billion in FY2004, $114 billion in FY2005, and more than $100 billion each year thereafter. As spending increases accumulate, annual outlays are expected to be $571 billion greater in FY2008 than in FY2003. By contrast, the tax cuts in the administration's growth package have a tiny effect on future budgets. By FY2008, the Bush growth package tax cuts would reduce federal revenues by just $50 billion annually in FY2008.

Only 2 of 21 major departments and agencies are cut. Only 2 of the 21 major federal departments -- Justice and Labor -- would receive an actual cut in discretionary budget authority in FY2004. While most departments receive small increases this year, many have had substantial growth in recent years. For example, the Department of Education budget has jumped from $40.1 billion in FY2001 to $53.1 billion in FY2004. During the same period, the Health and Human Services budget increased from $54.2 billion to $66.2 billion, State and International Assistance from $20.4 billion to $27.4 billion, and Veterans Affairs from $22.4 billion to $28.1 billion.

Almost $400 billion for state and local governments. State officials are demanding a federal government bailout to make up for their poor fiscal management. Yet the budget shows that total federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments increased from $285 billion in FY2000 to $384 billion in FY2003. The administration has resisted as large a bailout as states want, but grants are still expected to rise to $399 billion in FY2004.

Bush vs. Clinton for FY2004. When former President Clinton introduced his FY2000 budget, he proposed that non-defense discretionary spending for FY2004 should be $335 billion, as shown in Figure 1. President Bush is now proposing that non-defense discretionary outlays rise to $429 billion in FY2004, or almost $100 billion greater than Clinton's original plan. The sad fact is that the administration and Congress do not adhere to out-year budget plans, as they always spend far more than originally proposed. Unless the Bush administration pursues major program cuts and terminations, its 2.3 percent proposed annual average growth in non-defense discretionary outlays (FY2004-FY2008) is very optimistic.

Bush Beats Johnson: Comparing the Presidents

-As it turns out, George W. Bush is one of the biggest spenders of them all. In fact, he is an even bigger spender than Lyndon B. Johnson in terms of discretionary spending.

-The increase in discretionary spending--that is, all nonentitlement programs--in Bush's first term was 48.5 percent in nominal terms. That's more than twice as large as the increase in discretionary spending during Clinton's entire two terms (21.6 percent), and just higher than Lyndon Johnson's entire discretionary spending spree (48.3 percent).

-Bush has expanded federal nonentitlement programs in his first term almost twice as fast each year as Lyndon Johnson did during his entire presidency.

Bush Beats LBJ on Spending

...While the data show that all presidents presided over net increases in spending, George W. Bush is shown to be one of the biggest spenders of them all, even outpacing Lyndon B. Johnson in terms of discretionary spending.

An excerpt from the report: "The increase in discretionary spending - that is, all nonentitlement programs - in Bush's first term was 48.5 percent in nominal terms. That's more than twice as large as the increase in discretionary spending during Clinton's entire two terms (21.6 percent), and just higher than Lyndon Johnson's entire discretionary spending spree (48.3 percent).

2005 Budget Proposal

Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies:

The budget proposes to cut 150 programs, but the fine print shows that these cuts will only reduce 2006 spending by 0.8 percent.

The administration is still not serious about cutting spending: 2 of the 5 pages of the budget overview tout 37 new spending initiatives.

The Bush budget underscores how out-of-control federal spending is. The budget is being billed as the tighest yet, but overall spending is projected to rise 3.6 percent in 2006 even without further money for Iraq.

Despite his promises, Bush's budget does not realistically cut the deficit in half by 2009.

Cato Institute

Total federal outlays will rise 29 percent between fiscal years 2001 and 2005 according to the president's fiscal year 2005 budget released in February. Real discretionary spending increases in fiscal years 2002, 2003, and 2004 are three of the five biggest annual increases in the last 40 years. Large spending increases have been the principal cause of the government's return to massive budget deficits."
"Nondefense discretionary outlays will increase about 36 percent during President Bush's first term in office."
"In FY2005, total outlays will be up an astounding $547 billion from FY2001, when Bush came into office.

Hit and Run

Over the past two weeks, I've written or co-written a couple of things about how George W. Bush outspent Lyndon Baines Johnson in his first four budgets. To recap: When it comes to inflation-adjusted increases in discretionary spending (comprising most defense and nonentitlement spending), Dubya beats LBJ like Sam Houston beat Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto.

The gap becomes even bigger when you stretch the comparisons out to the first five years of each prez's budgets. Here are numbers for all recent presidents who oversaw at least five budgets prepared by American Enterprise Institute analyst Veronique de Rugy. All are based on Office of Management and Budget and all are adjusted for inflation. The Bush figure for fiscal year 2005 is based on OMB midsession review numbers; the figure for fiscal year 2006 is based on the OMB midsession review of the budget Bush submitted earlier this year (if anything, the final figures will be higher than his provisional budget):

First Five Years, Percentage Changes in Real Discretionary Spending

LBJ: 25.2%
Nixon: -16.5%
Reagan: 11.9%
Clinton: -8.2%
Bush: 35.2%

Read 'em and weep.

On Spending, Bush Is No Reagan

Journalists and Troops divide

Fred On Everything

Soldiers And Reporters
By A Well-Known Traitor
November 29, 2005

Much email comes my way, from military folk both current and retired, assuring me that the press consists of leftist commy anti-American liberal tree-hugging cowardly backstabbers who probably like the French and would date Jane Fonda. It is an old song. Having spent decades covering the armed forces, I have seen much of the Pentagon and the press. Things are a tad more complex. A few thoughts:

The military, particularly the officer corps, wants not reporting but cheerleading. The very idea of an uncontrolled press is repugnant. Thus officers try to keep reporters away from enlisted men, who are less political and tend to say things that, while true, are not policy. Thus the edgy, wary hostility in the presence of reporters. The truth of what a reporter writes doesn’t matter to them, only whether it is “positive.”

The reasons for this sensitivity are in part practical, given that wars cannot long be fought without the support of the public. There are deeper reasons. First, there is the military’s stark with-us-or-against-us outlook. Second, the intense loyalty to the group that characterizes military men. Third, an authoritarian structure to which reporters seem an uncontrolled rabble. “Uncontrolled” is the key word.

The military believes that the press should be part of the team. Its job should be not to report but to support. “Are they Americans, or aren’t they?” To see what the command thinks the press should be, read a base newspaper. It will be a cross between a PR handout and a Weekly Reader.

Reporters do not see their job as cheerleading, this being the work of PR people, whom they despise. Correspondents by nature are not team players but salaried freelances who compete with, instead of cooperating with, their colleagues. Glory hounds, they want to break the big story themselves. Instead of being loyal to any group, they are suspicious of all groups. They do not respect authority. Frequently incompetent, they are pushy, demanding, and irritating. The military is afraid of them. You hate what you fear.

In short, they are everything the military detests. If they did their jobs perfectly, which neither they nor soldiers do, the military would still loathe them.

Further, soldiers with exceptions are insular, reporters greatly less so. Consider. A kid who goes to West Point lives for four years, in formative late adolescence, with relentless military indoctrination. This is not in all respects bad. It tends to produce a personally honest, public-spirited, responsible man who makes an admirable citizen. These same men can run a carrier battle group, as difficult and impressive a thing as I have ever seen done, and they can do it only because they obey, make sacrifices, and respect the group.

The young cadet then goes to Fort Hood, say, for three years in which he is almost exclusively in the company of other soldiers. Next, three years in an armored division in Germany (the rotations may have changed) during which he is again constantly with soldiers and, since GIs don’t learn languages, unable to communicate with Germans other than bartenders. The Army is his entire existence. By the time he is thirty he is deeply imbued with a bird-politics leftwing vs. rightwing view of things. He is by no means stupid—the academies get bright students—but he is simple-minded. He believes profoundly that one is either on the team or one is with the enemy.

Reporters aren’t on the team. They report what they see, or think they see. Many do not know what they are talking about, but the military detests even more those who do. In time of war, truthfulness makes them traitors. Soldiers often use the word, and they mean it. You are with us, or you are with the enemy.

The two groups live in sharply differing mental worlds. While reporters are more insular than they should be, they are much less so than the military. They see a broader slice of the world and rub shoulders with more kinds of people. The overseas correspondents see more wars than do soldiers. The result is a certain cosmopolitanism which, whether good or bad, is much at odds with the clarity of the military’s outlook.

For example, many in Washington who actually know how the press works (the military actually doesn’t) believe that the press supports the war in Iraq, has until recently given the White House a free ride, and has been adroitly controlled by the government. I agree. If newspapers had been against the war, they would have published countless photos of gut-shot soldiers who will never get a date, paraplegics doomed to a life on a slab, and more Abu Ghraib photos (which they have.) Soldiers don’t know this. In any event, anything but unqualified support is treason.

The military usually regards journalists as cowards. (“Coward” and “traitor” are their gravest pejoratives.) This is questionable. When the 2000th US soldier died in Iraq, I checked the site of Reporters Without Borders and found that 72 reporters had been killed there (with two more missing), or 3.6 percent of the military total. I don’t know how many troops have served in Iraq. Just now it is about 160,000. To be conservative, let’s call it 130,000 on average, making 347,100 for two and two-thirds years of war. By the equation 2,000/347,000 = 72/x, one finds that there would have to have been 12,500 reporters in Iraq to have equal rates of death between reporters and soldiers. Otherwise, the press is taking casualties at a higher rate than the military. The calculation is rough, but makes the point.

Further, reporters can leave any time they choose. The government forces soldiers to fight under penalty of long jail sentences and, in many times and places, death. If you dispute this, tell the troops that they can fly home tomorrow without punishment and see how many remain. They would not leave from cowardice, but from lack of a stake in the outcome. (Would you leave your children fatherless because you wanted democracy in Iraq?)

More than most professions, the military lives in a world defined by idealism. Being a dentist does not carry an ideology with it. Being a soldier does. The dedicated soldier thinks in terms of honor, valor, loyalty, sacrifice, and heroism, of righting wrong and defeating evil, of proving himself in combat, of glory and exaltation and defending the fatherland. The reporter sees the dead lying in the street, the flies crawling in shattered craniums, the bombed-out cities for year after year without change. He hears this described as progress. To him it is pure bullshit.

Maybe, maybe not. But it is how he thinks.

Journalists are not idealists. Cynical, weary of being lied to, having seen the fraud and self-interest that underlie, as they come to see it, almost everything, they regard the soldiery as a riverboat gambler might regard the Boy Scouts. The soldiery regard the press as a Boy Scout might regard a riverboat gambler. Different mental worlds.

Ambiguity disturbs soldiers. Few of us can kill and die for ifs and maybes and on-the-one-hand. Thus every war is described in apocalyptic terms, whether Vietnam, Granada, Korea, or Iraq: We must defeat them there or we’ll have to fight them in California. Usually this is nonsense. Journalists may suggest as much. And so, again, they become traitors.

The moral ambiguity of war is especially painful. While military men as citizens are at least as moral as the rest of the population, as warriors they are not, and can’t be. Because of this conflict they therefore have to believe things about themselves that are not true. Consequently you may hear a soldier saying with perfectly sincerity that the US military goes to great lengths to avoid killing civilians. Furious accusation of treason arise when reporters point out that they are in fact killing civilians.

For example, while a case can be made that the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were militarily desirable, they cannot well be described as attempts to preserve civilians. The bombings of cities in WWII were intended to kill civilians, hundreds of thousands of them, to break morale. In war utility invariably trumps decency.

Reporters, being traitorous, will write of these things. After initial cheerleading while the war goes well, they will note that it isn’t going well any longer. Soldiers, who are being killed and mangled, come to hate them, seldom distinguishing between being against a war and being against the troops. After the hell of combat, who wants to hear that maybe it wasn’t really a good idea after all?

On and on it goes.

Oil peak: I enjoy a little alarmist doom, frankly

That way I don't have to hear the government telling me "Rest assured we are looking into the matter" or some other spokespersonian tone that makes me... well, nevermind. Anyways, some of the assumptions by James Howard Kunstler are rather staggering, and I'd rather keep these in my back pocket just in case some of them were to come true, or even remotely so. Greed does some pretty wonderous things, and it's for the first time why I have started to believe the war in the Middle East is in fact over oil just as much as anything else. US independence on oil isn't exactly homegrown, and it's either getting (taking?) it from somewhere else or face the consequences of Kunstler's theories even earlier without imported oil. For the record though it should be known I continue to support the war even though I question where the exit strategy is. And also I prefer to have the memory of the fallen written in stone with the words "terrorism" and not "oil for economics." This all could be outlandish claims, but when push comes to shove over economic welfare, I wouldn't pass the notion up on any country in dire need. It says to me time and again conservation is and always will be the ideal. That in fact people generally are happier when consuming less. I am open to comments with supported data though.

True North

Kunstler has been accused of being overly pessimistic and gloomy about the future. That's not surprising given the emphasis on state sponsored scientism by the Bush regime. Not being overly fond of religion (he once said "Religion is a kind of low-grade showbiz for that half of the nation under the median IQ") hasn't improved his standing with the Theopublicans either. Saying things the petro-jihadists don't like doesn't mean he's wrong.

So what is "peak oil"? I'll let Kunstler explain that himself.

"The few Americans who are even aware there is a gathering global energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That core states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems.

The term "global oil production peak" means that the time will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year, and after that production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. Peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total fossil fuel endowment.

The best estimates of when this peak will actually happen are somewhere between now and 2010. In the past year, after revelations that Shell Oil misstated its reserves, and the Saudi Arabians proved incapable of goosing up their production, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time peak production.

It will change everything about how we live.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly under stood by the public and even by our leaders.

The first is that this is going to be a permanent energy crisis. It's not going to go away this time. We will not over come it. We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

The second explains the first: no combination of alternative fuels or systems will allow us to keep living the way we do. They will not even allow us to keep running a substantial fraction of what we are currently running. This is particularly true of the so-called hydrogen economy. There isn't going to be any hydrogen economy. The idea is a fraud. It represents the wishful think thinking of American leaders in politics, business, and even technology. I call this the "Jimmy Cricket Syndrome,” the notion that wishing for something makes it come true.

The peak oil idea is based on the theory that oil is a finite resource. It was created by certain organic and tectonic processes millions of years ago, and there was only so much of it formed - a lot, but only so much. The earth does not have a "creamy nougat center" of inexhaustible "inorganic" oil, as some of the wishful would like to think."



This is not about running out of oil. There will always be some oil left. That isn't the problem. The problem is that we have skimmed off the cream (so to speak) in the form of easily accesible, sweet, light crude.

"The oil that remains, meanwhile, the second half of Earth's all-time total endowment, is the oil that is harder to get out of the ground. The first half was easy to get to. Most of it was accessible on land, in places where the weather is pretty good and the working conditions favorable - in Texas, for instance. Much of the remaining oil lies in forbidding places, in the Arctic, or deep under the ocean. It will be much more difficult and expensive to get out. Quite a bit of it will never be extracted because it will take more than a barrel of oil in energy to extract a barrel of oil."

James Howard Kunstler books:
The Long Emergency
Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

A "tech" company offering environmental advice?

I first heard of Steven Milloy (Tech Central Station) through Front Page Magazine's environmental archives section. I tired of the one-sided environmental extremists expositions, and my general cynicism towards politics (and environmental bias) kept asking telling me to look elsewhere. More importantly to me, it doesn't follow a common sense flow. Granted there are environmental organizations with motives, but hiring a "tech" company to give out valid projections on the environment is odd to say the least. Because tech company's usually concentrate on, well, technology. I understand the need for some development, but this breaks the common sense law that the environment need not some form of environmentalism to protect the environment. I would assume the last thing Nat'l Park protection needs is human interference of any kind. But simply to leave it alone and let nature run its course. A columnist once said the environment needs technology to better protect it. That may well be true given technology breeds the need for more technology, and once poverty is removed from the globe, so to will the need to mistreat the Earth for human survival. However, this certainly isn't a sacrosanct postion, and I for one am a 'back to basics' kinda person. When administrations tell the new media we need to remove trees from Nat'l Forests to prevent further fires, I know this isn't factual. Not because I knew the exact details that trees have fire protections naturally built in them in the form of thick barks, but because my generally applied understanding of life is a naturalist look. Therefore, human-induced (for a lack of a better word) removal of trees makes fires more prone because the Earth (and the Universe) was already created in a perfect state before humanity conquered it. Trees have built in survival mechanisms just like humans to disease.

Anyhow, after my ramblings what I'm trying to say is I don't disagree with all of Steven Milloy's assertions because he does have some fine points. But the Middle Ear will not tolerate those who discredit science and the environment for the sake of political gain. And it isn't as important to me to read every word of his as it is to know his final position will always be anti-environmental.

Crooked Timber

But worst of all is when think tanks deliberately propagate inaccuracies, misinformation and downright lies in order to muddy policy debates, and create the appearance of doubt where there isn’t real grounds for it, not only engaging in suppressio veri but suggestio falsi. It’s this that Mooney identifies as having happened thanks to Exxon’s funding of global warming ‘skeptics.’ There are grounds for debating the appropriate policy response to human-caused global warming, but not for debating whether it’s a real phenomenon. Exxon’s funding of think tanks and astroturf groups has had the (presumably intended) effect of creating an appearance of debate, through whistling an opposition into existence out of thin air. However, there isn’t any serious scientific debate about whether human-caused global warming exists and is important – quite simply, these organizations are being funded by Exxon to cloud the public debate, and block political action. Not to further the real debate, but to prevent it from starting.

Jim Norton's Correcting Myths from Steven Milloy
Environmental Defense: Guess Who's Funding the Global Warming Doubt Shops?
ExxonMobil's $8 million in donations

Is America a democracy?

The Education Forum

America is a democracy all right. And Americans vote on the wallets just as soldiers march on their stomachs.

Life is good here. Maybe it is a Matrix-like existence and maybe it isn't. But evena modest school teacher like myself can afford more than I should and live in calm and security.

Americans have the power to change their government whenever they wish. Here in America you are considered a bore if you harp too much about politics. We generally learn about politics as things go wrong and react in outrage if the mood suits us.

I don't believe in the Matrix and a range of other ongoing conspiracies. People are just too inept to have a master ring of control over everything. Look at how accurate the CIA was about Iraq and then rethink its ability to shape the world the way it wants to.

We are a complacent people. We need to see real damage at home before we will react. We like short speeches, and Americans react a lot more strongly to "let's nuke 'em and turn it into a glass desert" then we do to "In order to stave off terrrorism for the long run we need to better understand 'why they hate us'. It is far easier to paint the threat as evil and leaving it ill-defined.

But make no mistake about our political system being a democracy. Just because our first past the post system makes it difficult for smaller voices to be heard, does not mean that populism cannot shake people out of their seats in Washington.

We are also a capitalist system, and as in any other society I can think of, people with lots of money have an inordinate impact on the policies of our country.

Complacency lets the milionaires club rule through influence peddling. The people get the governmnet they deserve. That is democracy.

Working with John's definition of democracy: A government in which the supreme power is exercised by the people directly or indirectly through a system of representation involving free elections… the absence of class distinctions or privileges; then no. If "the absence of class distinctions or privileges" is part of the definition, no reasonable person could define America as a democracy.

America is more accurately defined as a capitalist society (for better or worse). Money buys political influence, favors, and power. This is true on both sides of the political aisle in America- left and right, democrat and republican. Though we elect our officials, they are/become subordinates of corporate wealth and desires. Money talks. Protest all you want. Vote with your head and your conscience. But have no illusions, your voice, the will of the People and the good of the population buys rhetoric and lip service. Money buys legislation. Money buys action. Money buys policy decisions.

I hate to sound so cynical, but even if an elected official starts out as an idealist with higher values and a broader, more enlightened vision, he or she quickly learns who signs the checks in America.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but IMHO, a more accurate description of today's America would be a plutocracy.

Plutocracy:
1. the rule of power of wealth or of the wealthy.
2. a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.
3. a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.

Government by the rich and powerful. "A weapon in that struggle [between democracy and plutocracy] is the Court system, more often than not used to greatest effect by the plutocracy. An example is the series of injunctions taken out by European Pacific to prevent these matters being exposed [in the Media or Parliament]." [PCW p326]
www.embassy.org.nz/encycl/p5encyc.htm

Rule by wealth
wordmentor.placementor.com/vocabulary_powerkit/02.htm

a political system governed by the wealthy people
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

A plutocracy is a government system where wealth is the principal basis of power (from the Greek ploutos meaning wealth).

The word "democracy" has come to be nothing more than a corporate marketing buzzword employed by politicians as often as possible, preferably with the flag waving in the background and a patriotic score playing in the throughout. And the masses gobble it up like crack-flavored pringles, slapping American flag bumper stickers all over their cars and basking in their self-righteous, ethnocentric world view.

Of course the alternative would be to turn off the TV for awhile, start thinking critically and independently, and face the today's realities with a more educated and open-minded world view. I frankly can't see that happening.

Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Karl, meet today's entertainment industry (television, Hollywood, professional sports, consumer electronics). The greatest ally the plutocracy has had, aside from the media, is the distraction, errrr... entertainment industry. We're sheep. Sheep who have become all too comfortable and do not wish to be inconvenienced by today's political and economic realities.

Of course, that's just my opinion. Sorry about the rant.

Sheehan Gets Surprise Visit from Woodstock Artists

Here.

An Iraq War without a plan

These are two obvious differing sides to the war. What I would like to see (and will email fellow bloggers on) is there needs to be some type of plan or timetable set in motion that states some parameters on how long or when American troops should come home. There are different variables to this, and no one answer is perfect. So with that in mind, I suggest we set a timetable in the future, a marker point, for the supposed war strategy to improve, assuming it has declined. Opposers of the war cannot expect our troops just to drop everything and head home immediately. Supporters cannot expect frustrated family members to wait out a campaign without a hint of any Iraqi seperation.

Anti-war

The real dagger pointed at the heart of the War Party isn't the Democratic mobilization that is even now gathering to bring down the GOP, it's the people Hagel's been talking to back in Nebraska, all of them rock-solid Republicans. They will prove decisive in putting the war plans of the neocons on indefinite hold:

"Hagel said even some who had previously backed Bush strongly on Iraq now felt deep unease. 'The feeling that I get back here, looking in the eyes of real people, where I knew where they were two years ago or a year ago – they've changed,' he said. 'These aren't people who ebb and flow on issues. These are rock-solid, conservative Republicans who love their country, support the troops, and support the president.'"

The neocon radio screamers and the Fox News bleach blondes are always carrying on about how it's "the Left" and "the leftists" who are driving rising antiwar sentiment across the country, but if you look at the polls, it just isn't true. Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and a Democrat running in a heavily Republican district, almost beat the GOP candidate in a special congressional election in Ohio, winning 48 percent of the vote, against the 52 percent won by Rob Portman, the Republican incumbent in 2004.

Victor Davis Hanson

Third and most important, is the battlefield, the final adjudicator of political disagreement. War more often creates political reality, rather than politics determining the course of the war. If the United States winds down its presence, curtails its losses while Iraqis beat the terrorists and ensure a democratic government, then the victory, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, will still have a thousand fathers. WMD controversies will be a distant memory.

But if the insurrection increases, topples the government, and we withdraw from a new Lebanon, then the Iraqi defeat will be an orphan.

My own view remains absolutely unchanged — that we were right, in both a practical and a moral sense, in removing Saddam, that despite depressing lows and giddy highs, the democratic reconstruction of Iraq will work out, that an emerging constitutional government will make both Americans safer and the Middle East in general more stable, that preexisting jihadists are flocking to Iraq and being defeated rather than being created ex nihilo, that anti-Americanism will gradually subside in the Muslim world as millions see that we are consistent in our support of democratic reform, that the United States military has proved itself the preeminent fighting force in the world today and is on the offensive in Iraq and winning a difficult asymmetrical campaign, and that old allies in Europe and Japan and new ones from India to Russia will slowly come to appreciate American constancy and leadership as never before.

But I am not naïve enough to think that most Americans at this moment would agree with all — or any — of that.

Cindy Sheehan: I'll be glad when this passes over

Townhall

It is embarrassing and inhumane for the media to expose this poor women’s unbalanced behavior. Somebody needs to step in to provide her with a quiet place to rest and, one would hope, regain her rationality and emotional balance. It is terribly sad to see the press ¬¬–– bored from a slow-news August and the forced inactivity in Crawford, Texas –– exploit someone who has become a crackpot.

Lengthy indictments:

Michelle Malkin
Front Page

Media Matters: Hard Right

Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens also implied that Sheehan is anti-Semitic, accusing her of repeatedly making a statement "to the effect that her son was killed in a war run by a secret Jewish cabal within the administration." Hitchens then asserted that Sheehan was being manipulated by "hysterical paranoid ideologist[s]" who have turned the "Camp Casey" protest into "Camp Fruitbat and Nutbag."

Well, I think that it's true that there are Americans who feel the way Cindy Sheehan does. Unfortunately, they are Americans who are very anti-Israel and, in some ways, anti-Semitic. She uses the term how the "neocons" are doing this thing -- that's code word for "the Jews in the Pentagon." -G. Gordon Liddy

To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush's Crawford ranch. It's the strangest method of grieving I've seen since Paul Wellstone's funeral. Someone needs to teach these liberals how to mourn. -Ann Coulter

Media Matters

Olbermann named nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh "today's worst person in the world" for saying on his August 15 radio show that "Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real." Commenting on Limbaugh's remarks -- which Media Matters noted on August 16 -- Olbermann said, "I guess she made up that dead-son-in-Iraq business! He [Limbaugh] also referred to her supporters as 'dope-smoking FM types.' I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics. Rush Limbaugh, today's worst person in the world!"

Iraq The Model's appropriate Message to Cindy Sheehan

Bush energy bill not suprising with a few token fuel alternatives

Bush Green Watch

According to the EIA, gasoline prices will increase by 6.45 percent by 2010. If the energy bill becomes law, however, EIA says gas prices will increase by 6.6 percent by 2010. Over the long term, by 2025, the energy bill would result in a price jump of 10.3 percent, while under business as usual the increase would be only 8.2 percent.

The energy bill would also fail to reduce oil imports. According to EIA, oil imports are projected to increase 24.7 percent by 2010 under current policies. If the energy bill passes, oil imports will increase only slightly less, 23.8 percent. Over the long term, the energy bill would only modestly affect imports. If the bill passes and is signed into law, imports will increase 82.9 percent by 2025, compared to an increase of 84.8 percent without the energy bill.

Finally, the energy bill would have a devastating effect on our environment. Most notoriously, the bill would open the spectacular Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and production. Drilling in the Refuge would have no affect on today's gas prices, because oil from the Refuge will take 10 years to reach the market. Moreover, oil from the Refuge would provide the nation at best with only a 180-day supply – a miniscule amount in the big picture.

Washington Post

-Despite repeated calls by President Bush and members of Congress to decrease U.S. dependence on oil imports, a major energy bill that appears headed for passage this week would not significantly reduce the country's need for foreign oil, according to analysts and interest groups.

The United States imports 58 percent of the oil it consumes. Federal officials project that by 2025, the country will have to import 68 percent of its oil to meet demand. At best, analysts say, the energy legislation would slightly slow that rate of growth of dependence.

-The United States consumes more than 20 million barrels of oil a day, an amount forecast to grow steadily. The House-Senate conference committee rejected a measure calling on the president to reduce oil consumption by 1 million barrels a day by 2015. The Bush administration opposed the provision, saying it would require increasing fuel-efficiency standards beyond what technology would allow at an affordable price.

The provision that would have the biggest impact, analysts agreed, is a requirement for the United States to increase the amount of ethanol and other agriculture-derived fuels. That would offset some gasoline use, they said.

The Senate version, which requires more ethanol or agriculture-derived fuels than the House bill, would cut oil imports by 80,000 barrels a day by 2012, according to government estimates. That would mean oil imports would be about 0.8 percent less than they otherwise would have been in 2012.

-Bush has pushed to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, to tap what geologists say is one of the few remaining areas of the country that hold promise for major new production. Without that new drilling, net oil imports would be 68 percent in 2025, according to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration. With drilling in the refuge, net oil imports would account for 64 percent of consumption in 2025, according to the EIA.

-The energy legislation also calls for money to be spent on research into hydrogen, alternative fuels, efficiency and technology, which supporters said could ultimately help reduce oil consumption. The Senate version of the legislation calls for tax breaks for hybrid vehicles, which supporters said would help reduce oil demand.

Environmentalists cited a provision included in the legislation that they said would result in more oil consumption and greater imports: extension of a provision designed to encourage auto manufacturers to produce vehicles that can run on either gasoline or a fuel blend of 85 percent ethanol.

The provision allows automakers to receive fuel economy credit -- and increase production of less-fuel-efficient vehicles -- even if owners use only gasoline, environmentalists said. Few gas stations sell the ethanol blend, and many of the cars end up being fueled by gasoline, they said.

Reuters

Most Americans will feel the impact of new law in 2007 when daylight-saving time is extended by one month to save energy.

Consumers will also be able to claim tax credits for installing more energy-efficient windows and solar panels on their homes and purchasing hybrid fueled vehicles.

Business Week: Bush Is Blowing Smoke On Energy

FOLLOWING A SCRIPT? Want to take a real step to prevent gasoline shortages and keep a lid on energy prices? Easing regulations on refineries may sound good. But the Administration could make things truly easier for refineries by requiring that the nation use just one blend of fuel, instead of the current dozens that various states require. Of course, that wouldn't be a hit in many of the red states, which currently don't use the cleanest-burning fuels. It would be a bold step that would make a real difference, however.

Want to increase supplies of oil and gas? Instead of drilling in the ANWR or adding a few LNG ports, Bush could open up areas like the Gulf coast of Florida or the Rocky Mountains, which has a 60-year supply of natural gas, to exploration and drilling. But that wouldn't be popular in Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, or in some of the Western states that are strong Bush country.

The President's failure to propose any meaningful solutions, while claiming to "do the right thing for America" makes it hard not to conclude that the Administration's main goal is not energy independence, but rather improving its standing the polls. Indeed, what's most striking about Bush's Apr. 27 speech is how closely it follows the script written by Luntz earlier this year. A few examples:

• The pollster recommended emphasizing that the nation's energy problem "has been years in the making, and it will take years to solve." On Apr. 27, Bush said: "This problem did not develop overnight, and it's not going to be fixed overnight."

• Luntz wrote that in advocating drilling in the ANWR, the Administration should say that "using modern techniques, only a very small area will actually be impacted by the development." In his speech, Bush echoed that, saying: "Because of the advances in technology, we can reach the oil deposits with almost no impact on land or local wildlife."

• The pollster stressed that Republicans should have a positive message, appealing "to American ideals of invention and innovation" and tapping "into feelings of American exceptionalism and ingenuity to seal the deal with the swing voters." Any surprise, then, that Bush emphasized in his address that "technology has radically changed the way we live and work"? He added: "Our country is on the doorstep of incredible technological advances that will make energy more abundant and more affordable for our citizens."

Stirring words. Americans can only hope the President is right. But the goals of energy efficiency and independence won't be spurred by anything this Administration is currently proposing.

Salt Lake Tribune

The bill includes $14.5 billion in incentives, but the true cost is more than $20 billion because the law includes a tax credit for nuclear power that is worth $6 billion, said Anna Aurilio, Washington, D.C.-based legislative director for U.S. PIRG.

Tax breaks for renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean vehicles totaled $5.3 billion. But the $3.2 billion for renewable energy, an extension of an existing production tax credit mostly geared toward wind energy, now includes subsidies for geothermal, biomass, hydropower and development of coal on Indian tribal lands.

"Obviously coal is not renewable in any sense and hydropower can have [environmental] problems," Aurilio said. And with just 26 percent of the subsidies going toward nontraditional energy, renewables are at a disadvantage, she said.

The bill gives nuclear power $7.3 billion in tax breaks, including a 20-year extension of limits to the nuclear industry's liability in case of an accident.

That's an unacceptable handout for a mature industry, said Salt Lake City activist Jason Groenewold, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.

-The bill alters the National Environmental Policy Act to allow the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to take shortcuts when granting permits for oil and gas drilling and essentially cuts the public out of the process, said Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

-The bill also repeals the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, a New Deal reform aimed at protecting consumers from market manipulation, fraud and abuse in the electricity sector.

"Repealing it will now leave electricity customers vulnerable to some of the shenanigans we saw with Enron in California, and it will allow foreign companies to own utilities," said U.S. PIRG's Aurilio.

-Hurwitz also extolled the bill's provisions that enable the federal government to trump states, local governments and communities that have objected to electric transmission lines and liquefied natural gas terminals, which coastal cities have resisted due to safety concerns.

FOX News

"As oil prices reached another new high today, President Bush signs into law an energy policy that his own Department of Energy says actually increases gas prices," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. "This energy policy is yet another example of Republicans catering to corporate special interests at the expense of the public interest."

"Eventually, someone will find some really clever substitute for oil, but I guarantee it won't be the federal government that will do it," National Review editor Rich Lowry told FOX News.

Weekly Standard, 12-1-03

The president and Congress have missed a golden opportunity to do something about our large and increasing dependence on imported oil. Saudi Arabia, our second largest supplier after Canada, is teetering on the brink of chaos; Venezuela, our fourth largest supplier, is in the hands of a Castro sound-alike; Nigeria's production, our fifth most important source of imports, is periodically interrupted; Iraq, if and when it gets back into full production, has promised to rejoin the OPEC cartel that provides over 40 percent of our imports and that is now keeping prices above the growth-retarding $30 per barrel level; Iran's mullahs aren't eager to make it easy for us to buy oil from their large reserves should we ever want to do so; Libya isn't exactly likely to prove a friend in need; Russia is still a minor supplier, with an oil sector that has been destabilized by Vladimir Putin's jailing of one of his nation's "oiligarchs." And China is now a major competitor for any new sources of oil that might become available.

As a result, the American economy remains at risk of oil supply interruptions and price spikes that can stifle economic growth. Ask this: Should a radical terrorist group seek to depose the House of Saud, would we be in any position to stand idly by, or would we once again face the necessity of sending troops to the Middle East, in this case to secure the Saudi oil fields? We would, of course, do the latter. Understandably. But what is less understandable is our politicians' failure to initiate the programs that will in the long run reduce--not end, merely reduce--our dependence on foreign oil.

Bye bye National Parks and Forests

There have been artists and other like-minded individuals who have talked about leaving the country on political grounds. I am now making the same gesture on the basis of our National Parks. According to these links below, I have no reason to believe the American government or the private sector believes in these natural monuments. America essentially has no plan, no guide for the environment.

I suggest our National Parks be kept off limits while the bulk of the rest of the world, unfortunately, be open range. This way we also have some semblance of a guide for consumption that the supply-and-demand world readily needs. Consumption-driven societies primarily do not believe excess can exist in the same markets they are a part of. Humanity may be at the top of the food chain, but we are not above Nature.

About National Parks

1992

There is nothing new about politicians helping friends to raid commonly owned wealth. What is new in the past decade is the weakening of the federal agencies charged with preventing that from happening. Says Mintzmyer: "The politicians, congressmen, and executives have ... taken over the upper parts of the agency.... There is no longer any abiity on the part of the agency to protect its lower level people. They can be targeted and neutralized without real resistance."

The Forest Service is a main target. Clearcuts in the Targhee National Forest go right up to the border of Yellowstone Park, creating a straight-line edge that can be seen from outer space. Logging in many national forests is proceeding at rates well above the sustainable cuts mandated by law. Overcutting, hidden by what one Wilderness Society spokesman calls "a carefully orchestrated Forest Service coverup," is now coming to light in forest after forest.

Handouts to logging companies cost us not only our forests, their wildlife, and their protection of water tables and streams, but also our tax money. The Forest Service charges below-market fees for timber concessions and obligingly builds logging roads at public expense. The network of federal logging roads is now longer than the interstate highway system -- 6600 miles, with another 900 planned. The Forest Service earns from timber concessions 34 cents for every dollar it spends supporting loggers. In the Yellowstone area in 1990 it lost $12.6 million.

Salvage Rider affects fisherman

Salmon fishermen! Imagine -- if you can -- that Congress has just passed a bill requiring the destruction of the Northwest’s last best remaining salmon spawning areas and banning any further public participation in public lands management. Imagine also that Congress required this destruction to proceed regardless of the environmental consequences by suspending every single environmental law on the books. Imagine also that, under this new law, citizen’s will no longer have the right to appeal federal agency decisions on public lands, even though these lands were paid for by their tax dollars. Finally, while you are at it, imagine that you will be forced to help pay for this destruction, in effect using your own money to put you out of business.

You say Congress would never do any such thing in a democratic society? Think again. Congress just did! This abomination is called the “Timber Salvage Rider,” and its full effect is just about to bite you where you live.

Most salmon (and coho salmon in particular) need old-growth riparian forests in order to spawn and thrive. However, the Northwest has already lost between 90% and 95% of all its original old-growth forests as a result of a timber harvest feeding frenzy that lasted several decades, ending only in the early 90's when finally halted by court order. Just about all old- growth on private lands is long since gone. What little remains is almost entirely on public lands.

For years the US Forest Service and BLM pumped up timber survey figures to show far more available old-growth timber than was really there, and violated their own laws to make sure as much as possible was cut regardless of the consequences to old-growth dependent fish and wildlife. After seeing species after species go extinct as whole watersheds were literally strip- mined of old-growth, concerned citizen’s in the Northwest finally filed suit to stop this wave of extinctions -- and to their surprise, they actually won! The species that finally caused the courts to draw a line in the forest duff was a small little bird called the “Northern spotted owl.”

These court victories became the “spotted owl” cases, now used perpetually by timber industry propagandists to press for the total repeal of the Endangered Species Act. Yet none of these cases were ever based on the ESA -- the injunction that from 1990 to 1993 closed down most public timber harvesting west of the Cascades in the Northwest and Northern California was won on the basis of agency violations of their own laws, the National Forest Management Act (16 U.S.C 472a et. seq.), not the ESA. The spotted owl was only the indicator species anyway -- its plunge toward extinction was merely an indication that something was very, very wrong with public forestland management. In fact, what was going on was simply not sustainable. In the 80's public forestlands were being cut down at about 8 times what we now know to be a sustainable rate.

One of the tragic results of these decades of overcutting was the decimation or extinction of quite a number of the region’s best salmon runs, particularly coastal coho salmon (the most dependent on federal lands). Fishermen are literally the victims of years of illegal agency timber giveaways fueled by bottomless timber industry’s greed and a pliant Congress.

After the owl injunctions, President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan was finally adopted in 1993 and approved by the court as a (barely) legal plan. What the federal court (Judge Dwyer) actually said in the owl case injunction was that no more public timber giveaways could proceed until a legally acceptable plan for a sustainable harvest was adopted. The timber industry, of course, screamed bloody murder -- and still does today. They have devoted much of their efforts in Congress and in the courts to turning back the clock to the “good old days” when Congress, rather than scientists, set timber harvest targets based on timber lobbyist clout rather than the biological needs of salmon and other forest dependent creatures.

While there is no doubt that it was pretty hard on innocent mill workers caught up in the sudden forced closures, even today nobody gives much thought to the thousands of salmon fishermen whose livelihoods have utterly disappeared as a result of widespread clearcutting of important salmon habitat in these same forests. Salmon too are an old-growth dependent species. When the mills took away most of the old-growth, they took away wild salmon as well. Today between 90% --95% of the original old-growth is gone, more than 106 major salmon runs are extinct, and another 214 (more than 90% of the remainder) are facing extinction in the near future unless things change. Over the past 30 years, the salmon fishing industry in the Northwest has lost an estimated 47,000 family wage jobs due to the collapse of coastal salmon stocks alone (i.e., outside the Columbia Basin).

While I feel empathy for out of work timber workers and wouldn’t wish a layoff on anyone, the companies they work for and the agencies that allowed it to happen had no right to extinguish the very existence of the salmon which supported the families of fishermen. Douglas fir trees can grow anywhere, but once a river’s irreplaceable wild salmon runs are extinct, they remain extinct forever.

Salvage Rider facts
1.

On August 22,2002, President Bush released a new plan he said would address the issue of wildfire. Instead, the plan appears to be a resurrection of the disastrous 1995 Salvage Rider. Pro-timber industry Senators are planning to attach similar language to the Interior Appropriations bill, up for debate on September 3.

Bush Plan and Salvage Rider: Striking Similarities

In July 1995, following widespread forest fires during the previous summer, Congress enacted the Emergency Salvage Timber Sale Program (Salvage Rider) as part of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations and Rescissions Act (P.L. 104-19).

The Salvage Rider was written principally by Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist who was then an aide to Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) and is now the Bush Administration’s top forest policy official.

*

Like Bush’s so-called “Healthy Forest Initiative,” the Salvage Rider temporarily exempted salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review.
*

The Salvage Rider directed the Forest Service to cut old-growth timber in the Pacific Northwest that the agency had proposed for sale but subsequently withdrawn due to environmental concerns, endangered species listings, and court rulings. Bush’s initiative also aims to increase logging of old-growth trees in the Pacific Northwest.

2.

The Salvage Rider expired at the end of 1996, and Congress made no effort to extend it. Vice President Al Gore subsequently stated that approving the Salvage Rider was the worst mistake the Clinton Administration made during its first term.

President Bush’s new forest plan bears strong resemblance to the Salvage Rider. Both seek to exempt timber sales from environmental laws, administrative appeals, and lawsuits. And both aim to allow timber sales of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest that have been protected due to wildlife concerns.

The "Salvage Rider" -- A Subversion of Democracy

-- The "Emergency Salvage" timber rider was stealthily attached
to and signed into law by President Clinton as part of the 1995
Rescissions Bill, legislation supposedly designed to reduce
federal expenditures. The "salvage rider" is probably the most
far-reaching, anti-environment legislation in the history of this
country. We, the people, are paying dearly for it: in terms of
actual dollars; loss of critical wildlife habitat, endangered
species, and the last bits of our intact ecosystems and ancient
forests; and in the precedent it sets for lawmaking and the
separation of powers in this country. Utilizing the rider process
means virtually no process at all. Senators Mark Hatfield (R-OR)
and Slade Gorton (R-WA) subverted democratic lawmaking by
promoting the "salvage rider." The Rider bypassed the proper
channels of debate and analysis in Congressional committees, and
its actual text was still being withheld from members of Congress
when they were asked for an initial vote. Other individuals
instrumental in the passage and broad interpretation of the rider
include Senators Craig (R-ID) and Murkowski (R-AK), and
Representatives Dicks (D-WA), Taylor (R-NC), Young (R-AK), and
Roberts (R-KS). These decision-makers, as well as all those who
voted for the Rider, along with those who acquiesced to its
becoming law (President Clinton included), must be held
accountable.

Suspension of Laws

-- The "salvage rider" has put logging outside the law. It
suspends the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the National Forest Management
Act (NFMA), three other major laws, and finally, as a catchall,
"all other applicable Federal environmental and natural resource
laws," such as the Clean Water Act. Three decades of
environmental legislation succumb to timber industry greed.

-- The public is blocked from the legal process through which
decisions affecting their public forests are made. All sales
under the "salvage rider" are exempt from the administrative
appeal process, and judicial review is essentially non-existent,
as it is severely limited to sales deemed "arbitrary and
capricious."

I'll be gone this weekend

I have a conflicting schedule and family picnic which will prevent me from blogging this weekend. I'd also like to thank you all for visiting. It's nice to know I am not talking to myself. LOL!

Some of the up coming things I hope to be covering: Are tax cuts (not raising them) appropriate in war time?, Is the US economy really in good shape with a national debt in the trillions?, Bush administrations environmental record, and Bush's newly passed energy bill.

Environmental reviews reflective of our environment

I had to put these reviews down because the first one made me laugh so hard, and the second frankly is a hallmark to a kind of second sight you just will not hear normally. It unfortunately does tell a real truth: The Wise Use crowd, that being those who only know the developed, metropolitan way of life, know what is best for the environment. These are the people who know nothing about the great outdoors and camping under the bright night lights. These are some of the people who would laugh at the mention of a healing and spiritual relationship with nature. These are the unplugged who would simply dismiss John Denver's environmentally-aware music as nothing more than granola-munching cheesiness. These are the politicians who base the environment not on the environment, but on economics. These are examples of all the people who are defending their right to live an excessive consumer-driven life without consequence.

For the sake of human progress, do I have the answer for the environment? No, I haven't a clue. The environment will continue to decline for our development. (Noting Front Page's "environmental experts" devotion to a more developed economic globe does not lead to a improved natural environment because humanity will in fact use up more land.) All the excesses though will one day catch up and be realized that these over-romanticized green nuts, who are killing the environmental message in many ways today, were right about this one thing after all. Humans did misread God's plan by thinking the land was strictly for the taking instead of as being part human developer, part caretaker.

Earth Report 2000

What a great read. Nothing like a good political book. We rightwingers enjoy books like this because it provides science that we know to be false that we can use to back up our profit-driven agenda through the usual propoganda outlets such as talk radio. For example, in the excellent chapter on Air Quality, the authors talk about whether or not we humans are actually causing the air quality to go down or not. Although we all know that pollution is real, when folks like me own stock in large factories, the financial bottom line is all that matters. If the Big Government puts heavier restrictions on such companies, that means their costs will go up, and folks like me will lose money in our stock portfolios. Not a good thing. The chapter on Pesticides provides another example of misinformation that we can use on our talk radio shows to make sure the masses will vote Republican. I don't really care if pesticides are hurting people or not; what matters is when I, like Tom Delay, have a vested financial interest in a pesticide company, the last thing I want are the liberal scaremongers causing the government to force us to shut down our companies, causing us more financial losses. It's all about money. And that's why a book like this is such a good thing. Sure, the science is bad and absurd, but it helps us push forward our agenda.

Ronald Bailey’s dumbed down “Earth Report” is nothing more than vulgar anthropocentrism marketed as feel-good ecology neatly packaged for the McMasses. Actually, even the title of the book is a misnomer. While Bailey’s book is a “report” of sorts, at no point does the author seem to express a sincere or grounded interest in the “earth”.

Perhaps the book's greatest flaw, aside from the curiously misinterpreted statistics and erroneous conclusions, is its perverse avoidance of addressing the spiritual and philosophical issues logically raised when considering mankind’s roll in the natural world. While the book does a good job of inundating readers with all sorts of statistics and corporate-sponsored meditations, Bailey refuses, in a rather disturbingly determined sort of way, to pose the “larger questions”. The result is a book that too often feels intentionally rushed and suspiciously simple.

In Bailey’s worldview nature is a tangible commodity with a value that can fluctuate (...). “Ecology” is seen only as a tool to better manage natural assets to meet corporate and economic needs. This “nature as product” ideology has been practiced by capitalist entities since the industrial revolution, but Bailey’s attempt to bring it to the masses, and the simplistic manner of his presentation presents a new and dangerous trend. Bailey even insists that we should judge a species as “good” or “bad” depending on its relative worth to mankind. For example, Bailey believes that North American white-tail deer are, “dangerous mammals” and “killers” because they have the audacity to stray onto roads and highways where they often cause serious accidents when struck by fast-moving cars and trucks. Not only do these deer/vehicle collisions cause human fatalities, they ALSO result in over 1 billion dollars worth of insurance claims annually. To Bailey this represents a prime example of poor asset management (the deer of course being the poorly managed asset). Bailey never once considers that the massive deer overpopulation (which has logically increased the risk of deer/vehicle collisions) may have something to do with reduced deer habitat and the almost complete annihilation of the white-tail deer’s natural predators (courtesy of mankind).

Bailey’s disarmingly pronounced hubris in “Earth Report” is matched only by his inane insistence that there aren’t even any real ecological issues at all (at least in the “green” sense)! Counter arguments are seen as radical and suspicious.

The technocrat-friendly ideas presented by Ronald Bailey in “Earth Report” are not only arrogant and misguided, they are downright dangerous. Bailey’s subtle and consistent suggestion that all is really well in the world, may just cost us that, the world.

This book is full of propaganda and misinformation. The general concensus of the larger scientific community is all but ignored by the various authors on virtually every subject. The one example I will site is in the essay Fishing for Solutions:The State of the World's Fisheries. Although the book has a copyright of 2000, and the author sites some data as recently as 1998, he chooses to paint a rosy picture of the fishing harvest by limiting his data to data available up to 1996. He fails to mention that it was at this point that the fishing harvest hit its peak and that it has been in decline ever since. Being a biology teacher, I have spent considerable amounts of time researching the literature on various environmental problems including population growth, global warming, loss of diversity and the state of our fisheries. In every case, the authors of this book are at odds with what I have found to be the general concensus of the larger scientific community. I find it troublesome that the publishers of this book apparently did no research of their own to determine the validity of the views expressed within the pages of this book. Such misinformation is dangerous and unconstructive and presents a real risk to our environment and the economic health of our country in decades to come.


I have been researching the motives of the good news industry for some time. As a population ecologist, my area of research concerns our understanding of the relationship between species richness and ecosystem function, as mediated through diffuse and strong multi-trophic interactions and feedbacks. What's scary is that, at present, we really have very little idea how large scale processes, such as nutrient and energy transfer in food webs, stabilization of the atmosphere and other life-sustaining ecosystem services at broad scales are generated at much smaller scales, where selection works at the level of individuals organisms. We do know that global ecological systems generate processes which serve as our life-support systems, and that their simplification impairs the ability of the biosphere to generate these life-sustaining processes for humanity. That's the state of the field right now. Many of my eminent colleagues across the world are working hard to understand how our continued assault on the natural world might affect the services upon which we depend for our own survival. In the background, are those, with virtually no scientific credibility, and who represent very vested interests (their paymasters in the corporate world) who dish out the news that everything in Eden is fine, without a shred of scientific credibility to support this. The alarming fact is that our current knowledge of ecological systems and their functions is too limited to support the argument that Bailey and his ilk (Easterbrook, Budiansky etc.) have been constantly dishing out to the masses: that the Earth is in a fine shape and can withstand everything that our species is throwing at it. While systems are somewhat resilient to change (bearing in mind that they are dynamic and become new systems in the face of environmental stress), there is no reason to believe that these same systems will be so robust in providing those services which permit our survival. This is a hard fact.

I am particularly dismayed by the non-scientific propoganda which spews forth from a long line of libertarian think tanks - The CATO Institute, the Hudson Institute, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Reason Foundation, are just a few - which contain very little credible science but considerable misinformation. Consider the so-called blurb at the beginning of the piece, which says that the list of writers are scientific "experts". Ronald Bailey's scientific credibility is about as thin as it can get: he has covered science as a writer for Forbes magazine and as a producer for PBS. That's it. And the ecological "authority" obtained a diploma in field ecology from the University of Zimbabwe. Unbelievable: considering the wealth of expertise available, they can only recruit someone with these credentials? I think that this is indicitive of the backlash and of their motives. I checked to see how many peer-reviewed papers this ecologist has published in relevant journals, and I couldn't find any. His chapter is a mish-mash of misinformation, misinterpretation of facts, and a basic misunderstanding of many important areas in conservation biology. I do not have the time here to expand upon this in detail: however, his take on the rate of current biodepletion and the consequences for nature and humanity was appalling. Invoking the use of classic species-area models to defend the backlash view that current extinction rates represent a fraction of the extant global biota was disturbing enough, but many key parameters were omitted in his thesis. For instance, diversity is multi-dimensional: extinctions at the species level are one problem, the other, hidden in this deceitful tome, is that of losses in genetic variation within populations. There is profound evidence which suggests that many, many species, particularly in tropical biomes, are declining rapidly and are therefore losing the genetic variation which enables them to respond evolutionarily to changing environmental conditions. Its part of a two-edged sword which may lead to a cascade of extinctions: reduction in habitat reduces the number of populations, which further reduces the ability of species to adapt to habitat reduction. Species lose their economic and conservation value long before they approach extinction. Furthermore, a reduction in the population diversity of a species coincides with the potential disruption of interactions with other species. Multiple interactions function by anchoring the stability of communities, and serve as cornerstones in our understanding of food webs.

There is an unspoken belief pervading these right-wing organizations that all government is harmful and that corporations are a boundless good, which underpins the motives of Bailey and his ilk in writing this patent nonsense. I would gladly debate any of these individuals on these issues, to expose the degree of their scientific illiteracy, which stands out in the pages of books like this. It seems to me that these publications are meant to dupe the nonexpert into believing the corporate line. However, these publications do serve a dual purpose: they have inspired me and my colleagues in environmental science to enter the public forum and to expose Bailey and his backers for what they really are.