open democracy

A little late, and perhaps superfluous, to comment on the Obama-mercial, but for me the very last sentence is the one that really matters:

I will always tell you what I think and where I stand. I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you when we disagree. And, most importantly, I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.

"Vote like your life depended on it"

A good tag line in what looks like it may be a useful new book, Cool the Earth by Prof. John Harte and Mary Ellen Harte -- available for download here.

It's not just about voting, though...

China

An official in China has said that Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases are roughly the same as US emissions -- report

Here is what I said two years ago.

Peak speak

UK will face peak oil crisis within five years, says a report flagged in The Guardian.

World will struggle to meet oil demand, says The Financial Times (The IEA expects oil consumption in 2030 to reach 106.4m barrels a day, down from last year’s forecast of 116.3m b/d).

But peak oil, more accurately termed elsewhere oil, remains a red herring (see this and this).

A new and terrible weapon

After Hiroshima, the Japanese scientists concluded, correctly, that the United States must have labored long and hard to create enough U-235, the difficult-to-extract fissionable isotope of uranium used in atomic bombs, and that they probably did not have any left—the Hiroshima bomb was a one-time shot, at least for now. After Nagasaki, however, these scientists recognized the plutonium used in that bomb and understood that it must have come from a working reactor—and, therefore, there would be more where that bomb came from. The authors [of The Nuclear Express, Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman] surmise the scientists’ advice to the Japanese war cabinet after Nagasaki: “Better take this one seriously; better accede to American demands; there are probably more plutonium bombs.”

If this is accurate, it creates a different context for reflection on whether the United States should have delivered a warning shot. Of course, in one important sense, the moral equation remains unchanged—the U.S. decision-makers could only proceed from the knowledge they possessed; they could not factor in how well-educated Japanese nuclear-weapons scientists would react. Still, it does suggest that if the U.S. had conducted a demonstration bombing with its uranium-based weapon, it might not have made a decisive impression on the Japanese at all.

-- Steve Coll.

Socialism

We’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.

-- Sarah Palin, quoted by Hendrick Hertzberg

Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain's favourite president, was also branded a socialist, notes Andrew Sullivan

Arcadia

To the ancient Greeks, Arcadia was a rural idyll. Instead of a lush, bucolic landscape, I found one devastated by the hunt for fossil fuels. Sixty per cent of Greece’s electricity is derived from lignite (brown coal). This involves bulldozing whole landscapes to feed the nearby power station. In Megalopolis I found Greece’s second largest lignite mine. The village of Anthohori in Arcadia was wiped off the map - the church of Santa Maria was all that remained.

-- Stuart Franklin

Titanic

the idea that a quick recession would purge the world of past excesses is ludicrous. The danger is, instead, of a slump, as a mountain of private debt – in the US, equal to three times GDP – topples over into mass bankruptcy. The downward spiral would begin with further decay of financial systems and proceed via pervasive mistrust, the vanishing of credit, closure of vast numbers of businesses, soaring unemployment, tumbling commodity prices, cascading declines in asset prices and soaring repossessions. Globalisation would spread the catastrophe everywhere.

Many of the victims would be innocent of past excesses, while many of the most guilty would retain their ill-gotten gains. This would be a recipe not for a revival of 19th-century laisser faire, but for xenophobia, nationalism and revolution. As it is, such outcomes are conceivable.

-- Martin Wolf

Pause

...There is...no escaping the need for politics, for a robust international agreement that, among other things, commits America to sharing the burden for helping China and India develop without burning their piles of coal; building wind farms in Mongolia is even more crucial than in Minnesota.

...[Tom] Friedman can't easily deal with such [analysis] precisely because of the tenets of the conventional wisdom, American style, which is that fundamental change in direction is essentially impossible. The world is a growth machine and "nobody can turn it off."...

[He] can't see these new probabilities because they conflict with the one great imperative of the conventional wisdom, which is optimism. Just as you can't run for commander-in-chief on any platform other than "Our best days are still ahead of us," so you can't run for pundit-in-chief either. But those instincts can get you in trouble. Friedman, after all, supported the war in Iraq with a similarly glib but upbeat forecast. The day of the invasion he weighed the two schools of thought: the Europeans were predicting "more terrorism, a dangerous precedent for preventive war, civilian casualties," while Bush was arguing "that it will be a game-changer—that it will spark reform throughout the Arab world and intimidate other tyrants who support terrorists."

He chose wrong there, and of course deplores it now; my guess is he'll rue his dismissal of international diplomacy, and of the possibility that the world should consider more fundamental shifts than technological change alone. Global warming, above all, should give one pause—after all, we are making our mark now in geological, not human, time. But pause doesn't seem to be one of his modes.

-- Bill McKibben.

Get your kicks

McCain is right in detecting signs of growing class resentment; some of the angry are turning up at McCain-Palin rallies, where the mood has been not so much socialist as national-socialist.

-- Steve Coll

The problem isn’t lack of education—it’s that of a self-isolating political subculture gone rancid.

-- George Packer

Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured.

-- Christopher Hitchens

National Socialists here, End timers here

Walden

On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day...[Researchers have] determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long.

“It’s targeting certain branches in the tree of life...They happen to be our most charismatic species — orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.”

-- from Thoreau Is Rediscovered as a Climatologist

That old time democracy

It will be hard to surpass the campaign of 1876, when Republican Rutherford Hayes accused his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, of having picked up syphilis from a prostitute; in turn, Democrats accused Hayes of shooting his mother after a night of boozing. (In the end, Hayes stole the election by rigging votes in three southern states.)

-- from Ken Silverstein on the crowd-sourcing of Obama smears

The first African-American nominated for the office of vice president was Frederick Douglass in 1872 with Victoria Woodhull as the candidate for president on the Equal Rights Party ticket.

image: The Election (1) by William Hogarth, 1754.

We have a problem

The Spanish general has handed in his resignation to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General to Congo, Alan Doss:

His main reasons were that the mission lacked of a clear vision and was doomed to fail.

Heavenly twins

"Inexpert and delusory outlook", "a sense of self-adoration", "profound ignorance", subscribing to "superstitious religiosity", magic and the occult.

No, not Sarah Palin (although it's close), but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the words of some of his domestic critics in Iran, as reported by Akbar Ganji in his analysis for Foreign Affairs (Nov/Dec 08).

Cheney and Khamanei as the benevolent godfathers.

[P.S. 28 Oct: Elaine Sciolino scolds Robert Baer for peddling ignorance and misunderstanding]

'The freedom to be creative'

...a phrase used by one of the American practitioners in an excerpt trailed for The Torturer's Tale.

Congo, Greece under the colonels, and the present day U.S. provide the grist.

Congo, Greece (when it was a brutal military dictatorship), the United States.

Saddam Hussein, supported for two or three decades by the U.S. (and others), partly rose to the attention in the Ba'ath thanks to his creativity and virtuosity in the development and application of an alternative set of procedures. He used to offer some of his clients a menu to choose from, like a chef.

Denialists' deck of cards

Not before time, I came across this excellent guide.

Over

George Packer on the end of an era: one, two and three.

'Low-energy cosmopolitanism'?

ask Andrew Dobson and David Hayes.

I prefer 'low-carbon cosmopolitanism'. We are going to need all the energy we can find.

Or 'low-impact cosmopolitanism'?

Read

Joe Klein on Obama.

Out of their minds

To properly support dualism...non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by [Jeffrey M. Schwartz] in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. [But] in fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

-- from Creationists declare war over the brain. In addition to the faulty reasoning by Schwartz and the Christianists, an irony here is that the technique employed in the attempt to prove their point -- mindfulness -- comes from the Buddhist tradition, which in its core teachings is atheist.

P.S. In the first of a series of essays in Nature about 'being human', Pacal Boyer concludes:

Some form of [magical] thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.