Shame

I was unprepared for the percentage of Americans who think torture is sometimes called for.  Experienced interrogators say that torture doesn't work, but that is not a question that interests me.

That our leaders ordered torture, and that so many of my countrymen are OK with it shames me deeply.  Torture should be considered un-American.  That so many Americans don't agree makes me ashamed to be an American.

Authority

I mentioned in a previous post that the Right likes authority.  Of course, it needs to be kept in mind that there are two types of authority.  The first type is that possessed by people who, through intensive study, know more about a certain subject than most people.  The other type is exerted by those who hold power over others--one's parents, the boss, despots, people with lots of money.

Unfortunately, these days, a lot of power in this country is held by the second kind of authority.  The folks in charge of science policy care nothing for science.  Indeed, they are against it.  The people who vote for these ignoramuses love the second type of authority and distrust the first.  The ignorant call the true authorities elitists.  The power elite encourage this attitude.

It's not a recipe for success.

The elephant in the room

I was watching a celebrity golf tournament supporting a charity called "Folds of Honor," which looks like a worthy attempt to help wounded returned veterans and also the families of the wounded and the dead.  As I watched the stories of families with lost sons, daughters, spouses, and parents, and the wounded men and women trying to piece their lives together, I felt anger rising in me.

Many of the wounded and dead were from the Iraq war.  The atmosphere of the show was, rightly, one of praise for the valiant sacrifices these men and women made to keep America safe.  But what we owe the Iraq War veterans, we can never repay, because their sacrifice was so needless.  They were sent to a war that should never have been fought, by that fool, George W. Bush.

The TV show about the golf tournament, for the laudable purpose of acknowledging the veterans in a positive way, left the gaping matter of the shameless way they were sent into combat under false pretenses unmentioned.

When and how will that matter be addressed?

Political correctness would seem to be dead...

To all the folks who have long railed against it, I hope you're happy in the newer, smellier world of political discourse.

I've been wondering for a while if the widespread opprobrium that has served to drive racial insults underground since the 1960s would result in explosive resentment in time, and it looks like maybe it has.  The dog whistle code words of the Republican Party have given way to overt racial slurs by elected officials.

When I was young, before political correctness, white people used insulting language about blacks, but even then, outside of the South, it was understood that it was just lowlifes who talked that way.  Now, the lowlifes are getting elected to public office at an alarming rate.

Have you voted for any of them?  Did you do it on purpose, or did you not know what you were getting?

Vote carefully.  These days, that means don't vote Republican.

Like the free market? Let it work.

Bill Moyers tells us that America is on the verge of a solar power boom.  He links to an October 29 article from bloomberg.com, noting that solar electricity will be cheaper than electricity provided by conventional power plants in more than half the states in the U.S. by 2016.

From the Bloomberg article:

After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states--in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week.  That's assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.

Even if the tax credit drops to 10 percent, solar will soon reach price parity with conventional electricity in well over half the nation: 36 states.  Gone are the days when solar panels were an exotic plaything of Earth-loving rich people.  Solar is becoming mainstream, and prices will continue to drop as the technology improves and financing becomes more affordable, according to the report.

One would think that the Republican Party, champions of the sacred free market, would welcome the chance for America to lead the world in development of a technology that would save us from dependence on demon foreign oil, while saving their beachfront property from erosion.  But, as usual, the Republicans say one thing and do another.  Bought and paid for by the oil and coal industries, they fight solar and wind power at every turn.

Solar electricity:  It's just one more thing in a changing world that the political right won't be able to stop.  Bloomberg:

Because of solar's small market share today, no matter how quickly capacity expands, it won't have much immediate impact on the price of other forms of energy.  But soon, for the first time, the reverse may also be true:  Gas and coal prices will lose their sway over the solar industry.

 

Religion: a net plus, or a net minus?

I just read another article that wrestles with the question of whether religion is, overall, a positive or negative force in the world.  This is a question that can be argued about until the end of time.  Does "God is Love" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers" win out?  One thinks of all the charity given out by churches, their feeding and sheltering of the homeless; one puts the Inquisition and the Crusades on the other side of the balance.

All religions have their saints and their murderers.  In point of fact, religion gets its character from human nature.  My feeling is that, if there suddenly were no religion, the saintly and the murderous acts would continue unabated because these behaviors are human behaviors.

I think that, among the excuses for war, religion is very high on the list, but religion is only one of a number of things that humans fight ferociously over.  Economics, forms of government, questions of morality can all whip us into bouts of frenzy.  Now and then, people even kill each other over sports.  Religion may be one of the foremost excuses for violence, but we have plenty of others.

I don't think we get anywhere posing the question this way; the argument itself brings out the bellicosity in both sides.

That said, I come down on the net minus side, simply because religion deals in falsehoods, and if you're born in a religious family, it can take a long time to get out from under the mounds of misinformation.  But that's a different matter.

Recruitment letter

Funny how old memories come back.  When I was in ninth grade, I was in a class called General Science.  Early in the year, our teacher, Mr. Doyle, passed out a little survey, which was probably designed to get an idea of how sophisticated his students' sense of history was.  We were given a list of names and asked to rank their relative importance.  Sprinkled among the more modern names were such ancient names as Moses and King David of the Old Testament.

Now, my family was as Christian as they come, but we were no fundamentalists.  Even my mother, the most devout of all, would never doubt the importance of science and material progress.  She knew, for example, that antibiotics and vaccination had made the world less dangerous for children.  But, as I think I have mentioned before, my idea of the ancient world was formed totally by the Bible.  I reasoned that, if Moses and David were still influential after millennia, they must have been mighty important people.

Others in my science class must have felt the same, because Mr. Doyle was visibly disturbed by our answers to the survey.

Now, in my youth, though I was a believer, I had many questions which I felt I had never received satisfactory answers to, either from my parents or, indeed, from the wise men and women of our church.  If all the world's people believe their religion is the true one, how do we know ours is?  If all the religions of the past have been eventually abandoned, why should ours last forever?  Why did miracles all happen in the past?  I knew none of the answers I'd heard to these questions were convincing, but I was, understandably, still under the spell of my upbringing.

I bring these matters up because I now realize that religious education is miseducation.  My parents thought they were doing their best for me, but instead they had settled layer upon layer of misinformation and mythology on me that has taken most of a lifetime to dig my way out of.

For a long time, Biblical scholars have been trying to understand the origins of the Bible, separating and identifying its various authors, and comparing it to other texts written at the same time.  Archaeologists have never ceased digging up the Middle East for evidence.  A book from 2001, by the archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, titled The Bible Unearthed, has digested recent archaeological evidence and put the Old Testament in a new light.

According to the authors, the stories of the Old Testament do not match the archaeological record.  Great events recounted in various locales in Israel, Egypt, and the surrounding area, seem to be out of sync with the current evidence; that is, great battles and conflagrations are reported to have happened in places where, according to archaeological digs, no one was living at the time.  The stories are full of anachronisms, and it makes sense to the authors that most of the Old Testament was assembled in the Seventh Century BCE, because the stories are located in places that were familiar and populated at that time.

The bottom line, according to The Bible Unearthed, is that the Old Testament was written to further the religious and political aims of King Josiah, a fundamentalist ruler of Israel.  Josiah's aim in presenting "history" in the way he did was to show that, whenever a king followed only Yahweh and disallowed the worship of other gods, Israel prospered, but kings who were more liberal and allowed competing religions to exist brought disaster.  Archaeology and other written sources say otherwise.  Even David and Solomon seem to have been relative nobodies.

So now, from all appearances, the text that we always assumed to have been written over a long period, was mostly done during the reign of Josiah, and is not even good history.

I've let this blog entry get away from me a little.  I originally titled it Recruitment letter because I wanted to reach out to young people--or people of any age, really--who sense that there is something wrong with what they are being taught.  If, instead of granting supreme authority to a single (highly suspect) book, you choose to check out what else has been written down through the ages, you will give yourself a future full of exciting, surprising discovery.

Less romantic views of nature

I recently read a couple of books back-to-back that happened to emphasize something about evolution that I had never thought of:  In order for natural selection to work, biology must be tremendously wasteful.

The first book was Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality, which points out that entropy dictates that, "Every explanation of adaptation must... harness a wasteful process to create order."

Forget design; evolution is a mess.  This is a fact about natural selection insufficiently realized and not widely enough publicized in biology.

Examples are all around us.  A female leopard frog will lay up to 6,000 eggs at a time--each carrying half of all the order required for an almost perfect duplicate offspring.  Yet out of that 6,000, the frog will produce an average of only two surviving offspring.  Some fish are even more inefficient, laying millions of eggs at one time just to make two more fish.

...

It's hard to think of a better way to waste energy than to produce lots of energetically expensive copies of something and then destroy all of them except for the minimum number of copies that you need to do it all over again.

The second book would seem to be  very different in kind from The Atheist's Guide.  Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek overflows with spirituality and biblical references, but its tenth chapter, "Fecundity," goes even farther in its descriptions of nature's wastefulness.

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls.  I suppose it is the teeming evidence  that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives....

On top of the wastefulness, Dillard describes the various horrors of the natural world, including parasitism,  and the many instances of species eating their own kind.

Sometimes, when a female [lacewing] lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, she is hungry.  She pauses in her laying, turns around, and eats her eggs one by one, then lays some more, and eats them, too.

Flatworms eat their own discarded tails, which, left alone, would grow new heads and be viable.  And it's not just the "simple" animals that do these things.

Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs.  A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn.  She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.

We humans tend, still, to consider ourselves as separate from nature, whether we are praising our own intellect or even godliness or, conversely, condemning our irrational ways or the violence in which we consider ourselves unique, at least in degree.  Perhaps a closer knowledge of the ways of nature will make it plain that humans are less far removed from the rest of it than we think.  The close observation of nature, without romanticizing, goes a long way towards explaining human behavior.  Look at what we come from.

 

 

 

A tiny annoyance

Making my way from the parking lot to the grocery store, I saw a woman who seemed to be talking to herself, but in truth, she was talking to everyone within earshot.

"Did you hear me?"

"Jesus loves you!"

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"

"Ma'am, did you know Jesus loves you?"

(Ma'am smiles indulgently and says, "Thank you.")

I had begun walking faster while the woman was occupied with others, but she called after me, "Sir, Jesus loves you!"

Well, I suppose this woman might be a bit loony, or a new convert, or someone who just underwent some moving experience.

Harmless.

But when I'm in the vicinity of people of people bestowing unsought blessings, I feel like the victim of a mildly aggressive act.

"Have a blessed day!"

And another thing...

I'm sure the human race will be arguing over abortion until the end of time, but can somebody tell me why the fucking hell are we having to defend birth control?

Bad weather

I've been blogging since 2008, and a lot of my blogs have concerned the descent of the right wing into deeper and deeper stupidity.  It just keeps getting deeper.  Political movements like this seem to come on without rhyme or reason, build like hurricanes, and run their course, destroying everything in their path.  One knows that this, too, shall pass, but how bad can it get before it's over?

My glum mood (and I'm really not glum all the time, honest) is occasioned, of course, by the decisions of the current Supreme Court session, especially the Hobby Lobby case.  Now that corporations are people, I suppose we'll be hearing more and more cases with names like Important People vs. Little People.  Or are people no longer people?

The Founding Fathers were so smart.  They understood that the only guarantee of religious freedom is the separation of church and state.  Today's fundamentalist Christians are so paranoid about losing their religious freedom to enemies such as Muslims and atheists, that they are trying to bring about the very conditions that would end religious freedom in this country;  Christian rule.

Shopping

It's been possible for several years now to buy whatever you want online and not have to go out to brick and mortar stores for most things.  For a long time, being used to having to travel a certain distance to find rare items, it almost seemed like cheating that buying them online was so easy.  When it came to books and music, I enjoyed the hunt, and the pleasant surprise I got from happening across long-desired items in stores.

I'm getting over all that.  In the case of books, it's not that the thrill of the hunt is gone, it's that the surviving large chains seem to have given up.  They can't stock everything the way that the Internet can, and they seem to be moving more than ever toward stocking just the newest and most commonplace titles.  The sure things.

I went to Barnes and Noble today for a copy of J.M.Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.  Coetzee is one of the more popular literary fiction writers, and Barbarians is one of his better-known titles.  In the recent past, I've been able to go to B&N and find several of Coetzee's books in a friendly little row of Penguins.  Today, I found only three of his novels, none of them Waiting for the Barbarians.  And it took me a little time to find the three Coetzees because, more and more, I'm finding that the chains can't keep enough people employed to keep the books in alphabetical order.  B&N is getting worse, and Books-A-Million doesn't even try.

Perhaps it seems like a paradox, but I think that, while the competition from online sources is putting the brick and mortar chains out of business, the lack of competition from the defunct Borders has made Barnes and Noble slack.

I have reached the tipping point, where the enjoyment of buying things online has surpassed the attraction of buying them in stores.

(Independent and used bookstores are another matter, however.  Still fun.)

"400 Prominent scientists," Part IV

I struggle to stay up to date and relevant, although the IPCC has come out with a newer report.

I got a chuckle out of another bold claim of the 2007 Inhofe report:

Background:  Only 52 Scientists Participated in UN IPCC Summary

Well, there you go.  Our 400 beats their 52, so there's nothing more to say.

Let's move on to our next dissenting climate scientist, Dr. John Maunder, past president of the Commission for Climatology (World Meteorological Organization, United Nations).

Dr. Maunder makes two points in his response to the Senate committee.

It is not always true that the climate we have now (wherever we live) is the best one... some people (and animals and crops) may prefer it to be wetter, drier, colder, or warmer.  Climatic variations and climatic changes from WHATEVER cause (i.e. human induced or natural) clearly create risks, but also provide real opportunities.  [Punctuation and capitalization from the Senate report]

Well, I'll give my opinion on this part quickly, since it doesn't argue one way or the other on the causes of climate change.  Clearly Dr. Maunder is correct in predicting that some regions of the globe will benefit from climate change.  But the real issue, in my mind, is the possibility of disruption and upheaval as masses of people find it necessary to move because their regions become impossible to live in.

Second point:

Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate.  Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998.  [From a letter signed by Maunder and others.]

I've come across this "no net global warning since 1998" argument before, and it has proved to be an artifact of selecting a shorter segment of data from a larger chart, and claiming that it proves the opposite of what the chart says.

But Dr. Maunder has made stronger statements since 2007, and he is of the opinion that natural cycles (apart from human influence) are in charge.  One of the things that bothers me about his way of speaking of this matter is the way he seems to separate human influences from "nature," as though humans (and their domestic animals) are not really part of nature.

In any case, climate scientists are well aware of the effects of sunspots and variations in the Earth's orbit and tilt relative to the sun, and include them in their calculations.  As I have mentioned, we are currently in a part of the natural cycle in which we should be cooling.  And yet, we are not cooling, we are warming.  If your "natural" explanations predict cooling, you're missing something.

A website I recommend is Open Source Systems, Science, Solutions.  The climate change deniers have some tricks up their sleeves, and OSS explains what is wrong with their arguments.

 

"400 Prominent Scientists," Part III

One of the objections to changing policies cited often in the Inhofe report is the fact that, during the Nixon administration, scientists caught Nixon's ear with predictions of global cooling and a coming ice age.  It follows, in some people's opinion, that governments should not go overboard in forcing behavior change in response to scientific predictions.

It turns out that one of the scientists who made the ice age prediction in 1972 is also cited in the Inhofe report as a climate change denier.  That scientist is paleoclimatologist Dr. George Kukla.  Dr. Kukla's response to the Senate committee's request for dissenting views is that humans do influence climate change, but not enough to worry about.  From the report:

What I think is this:  Man is responsible for a PART of global warming.  MOST of it is still natural.

Dr. Kukla is still predicting an ice age, based on past ice age cycles, and believes that climate change is mainly driven by a combination of periodic changes in the Earth's tilt and periodic changes in its orbit around the sun.

Other scientists, of course, are aware of the known natural drivers of climate change, and include them in their tests.  One example is in a 2011 paper by climate scientists Reto Knutti and Marcus Huber, cited in Nature, which concludes that man's release of greenhouse gases into the air is responsible for 74% of the observed since 1950.  The authors of the paper developed methods of separating the effects of greenhouse gases from various known natural influences on climate, including the cycles mentioned by Dr. Kukla, as well as cyclic differences in solar radiation.  According to Nature, Knutti's and Huber's results agree with those from experiments done using other methods.

According to the paper's authors, the rise in average air temperature caused by human activity would actually have been higher, but have been mitigated by natural processes.

Finally,

To test whether recent warming might just be down to a random swing in Earth's unstable climate--another theory favoured by sceptics--Knutti and Huber conducted a series of control runs of different climate models without including the effects of the energy-budget parameters.  But even if climate variability were three times greater than that estimated by state-of-the-art models, it is extremely unlikely to have produced a warming trend as that observed in the real world, they found.

In other words, in spite of Earth's being in a cooling part of the natural cycle, temperatures are still rising.

And, Senator Inhofe, including a scientist criticized by other skeptics for being wrong about global cooling in the 1970s in your list of doubters is sloppy work, in my opinion.

"400 prominent scientists," Part II

The Inhofe report we've been talking about does not claim to refute climate change, but 1) to try to show that there is a significant number of "prominent scientists" who are skeptics, and 2) to refute certain claims by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The scientist at the top of their list (whether by prominence at random I don't know) is Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (I cite the Inhofe report for that description).

Paldor's objections to the IPCC report are as follows:

First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by the IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial Revolution have occurred in Earth's climatic history.  There's nothing special about the recent rise!

and

Second, our ability to make realizable (or even sensible) future forecasts are greatly exaggerated by the IPCC.

and

Third, the rise in atmospheric CO2 is much smaller (by about 50%) than that expected by the anthropogenic activity, which implies that the missing CO2 is (most probably) absorbed by the ocean.  The oceanic response to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere might be much slower than that of the atmosphere (and is presently very poorly understood).  It is quite possible that after an "adjustment time," the ocean (which contains far more CO2 than the atmosphere) will simply increase its biological activity and absorb the CO2 from the atmosphere. 

and, finally,

Fourth, the inventory of fossil fuels is fairly limited, and in one generation we will run out of oil.

In regard to the fourth claim, I have wondered about the dwindling supply of fossil fuels myself.  One way or another, the near future may not be pleasant!  Paldor is apparently no spokesman for the coal or oil industries, being more a proponent of nuclear energy.  (I'm against nukes myself, because of the waste disposal problem.)

I don't know whether Paldor's third claim is anything more than speculation, although his own scientific papers (technical and way over my head, unfortunately) are predominantly to do with the ocean.  It's interesting that Paldor's statement that "the oceanic response to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere might be much slower than that of the atmosphere," when the IPCC reports that most of the warming since 1971 has been in the ocean.  Perhaps I don't understand what Dr. Paldor means by "oceanic response."

Dr. Paldor claims that climate modelers' "abysmal 3-day forecasts" don't bode well for longer predictions, but I really think that a very short-term prediction for an exact weather forecast for an exact area is tricker than making long-term predictions in average global temperature rise or fall.

As for the first claim, that there is nothing unusual about temperature changes since the Industrial Revolution, it makes no mention of the causes of those earlier events.  I would say that, just because earlier temperature increases were not man-made, doesn't mean that the current ones can't be.

I must report one study for which Dr. Paldor is famous outside academic circles.  Along with Doron Nof, PhD, Paldor wrote a paper explaining a possible way that a high wind could have parted the Red Sea for Moses and the Israelites' escape from Egypt.  I believe that the paper was intended as a mental exercise more than as a claim that the Bible's story of the Exodus is true.  But it gives me pause.  If I'm making fun of the man and not his stature as a scientist, so be it.

 

 

"400 prominent scientists can't be wrong!" Part I.

I'm just getting caught up with the news from 2007.

No, actually, a friend of mine on Facebook was mocking climate change deniers for not believing despite a purported 97% of climate scientists' agreeing that man's activities on earth are having a significant effect on the climate.  Climate change is any easy thing to be unsure about, and a friend of my friend's disagreed vociferously.  I did some sparring with this friend of a friend, and he was quite adamant that my beliefs on the subject were clouded by my politics, and that it was impossible to reach me with facts.

Well, I have made the same charges against conservatives here, so it's only fair for me to look into friend-of-friend's facts.  I will definitely agree with this fellow that it's a vexing human trait to keep believing what you believe, contrary to facts.  I have friends on the left who are much too ready to be against things that they really don't know much about, so I know this affliction affects people in all parts of the political spectrum.

So, is climate change real, or is it a case of mass hysteria that has overcome even scientists who should know better?  Well, I'm sure I won't come up with the definitive answer here, but I'm going to look into this guy's claims.

But the question itself is a knotty one.  Is the argument that man is not having a significant effect on climate that a change in policies can do something about?  Or maybe the controversy is simply over the 97% claim?  Or that the media have overhyped climate change in their never-ending need for a scary story?  Or that Al Gore's take on the subject is bullshit?  I bring up the vagueness of the question because I'm not sure what we're talking about.

In any case, if you Google "400 prominent scientists," you will find the basis of friend-of-friend's argument, a U.S. Senate Report titled Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 - Scientists Debunk "Consensus".  This is a U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Minority Staff Report under the aegis of Senator James Inhofe.

Now here's where friend-of-friend got very upset with me:  Did I really disbelieve a U.S. Senate report?  I have to admit that I am predisposed to doubt any report put together by James Inhofe.  But I'm going to try to look this report over and see if there's anything in it.  I will no doubt be trying to debunk it, because I'm only human, after all.

The report consists of statements from more than 400 people who are basically testifying about how they became climate change skeptics.  I have not yet read most of those statements, but I'm going to try to see what these folks are claiming, and if they're all claiming the same thing.  (Now, I am already suspicious that some of these statements are taken out of context, but I won't make that claim until I know it's true.)

Before I start, I want to make note about this report that surprised me, and which gives me pause.  Here is what  the report says about the scientists giving the testimony:

The distinguished scientists featured in this new report are experts in diverse fields, including:  climatology; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology.

I have to say that I would be more impressed if the report had found 400 climatologists who are skeptics.  Throwing the climatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, and paleoclimatologists together, I come up with 152 scientists who are actually toilers in the field in question.  (I cannot at present say just how "prominent" any of them are.)  I will also grant that physicists and astronomers might have something to teach climatologists about solar cycles, but I doubt that many of the experts in other fields have done the experiments or read the literature enough to back up their views on climatology.

And I'm not sure at all about the inclusion of 22 economists, 47 engineers, 2 social scientists, and one philosopher.  Can they be of any help here?

But this is to be a learning experience.  Next, I'll be examining the statements of some of the climatologists and their associates.

Authority

It occurred to me only recently (I can be quite dim) the reason that conservatives worship the free market.  Conservatives love authority--authority of all types.  The ultimate authority is God, of course.  The thing that the free market has in common with God is its unpredictability.  Yes, there is a near-science of economics, but try as it may to make predictions, it's far from perfect (particularly imperfect when ideology gets in the way of honest research, but that's a topic for another time).

Conservatives resist the idea that humans can have any significant effect on the world.  Part of the denial of climate change (apart from the greed that helps drive it) comes from conservatives' denial that climate change could be either caused or mitigated by human efforts.  God wouldn't let that happen.  The twin authorities of the free market right wing church know better than science.

Of course, part of belief in the free market comes from the sense of justice of the rich, who believe that it must be God's will that the both rich and poor are where they belong.

As they've done since the beginning, do now, and ever shall do, the benighted lovers of imposed authority fight against the erosion of that authority.  I used to separate the right from the left by describing the right as "the punitives."  They love doling out punishment, but now I think they love receiving it, too.

Today's mystery

Why aren't Tea Partiers wary of Ted Cruz, given his surname?  Does he get a pass because he came in over the northern border?

Nah, I imagine it's their penchant for expediency.  They believe what they believe unless it's inconvenient.

Rush Limbaugh, tactician.

Rush Limbaugh is in the business of twisting the truth into unrecognizable shapes, and at making things  up.  Every day he leaves the rest of us a little mess to untangle, a little story to debunk.  Then the next day, he's on to something new.

He actually made me laugh the other day, though, when he claimed that the "polar vortex" that brought a nasty cold snap to the U.S. was something newly invented by the left to explain how global warming could be so cold.  He claimed he'd never heard of the polar vortex, and so it must be newly fabricated for the event.  I laughed because I had never heard the term "polar vortex" either.  Probably most of his listeners never had.  Most of his listeners don't do much reading or exploring on their own.  They don't wander far from Daddy.

Truth is, "polar vortex" is an old concept, a name that describes an event that doesn't happen often.  It's in the record.  It is possible to go back and check facts for yourself.  But tomorrow will bring some new tactic from Rush.

When science and the public record are not on your side, when everything you say is wrong, all that's left is tactics.