Rhinocrisy

A little late, I see my friend Ben has posted his anecdote about some bad stuff he once did. Perfectly told, and absolutely hilarious. You should read it. Have I ever steered you wrong?

According to the New York Times, the oil industry is freaked out because climate change is destroying their oil platforms and refineries. The story obliquely mentions the greenhouse effect in the second-to-last paragraph.

On the other hand, the industry can benefit from climate change. At a lecture yesterday in Berkeley, Calif., long-time exploration insider Greg Croft said the industry’s best prospects for future oil are off the coasts of Greenland, Canada and Russia in the Arctic. These areas have never been exploited because of ice. With a hint of an ironic smile, he noted that ice is becoming less of an obstacle.

Croft also responded to a question about why the oil industry has built no new refineries in so long in North America. An audience member asked whether the industry was concerned that they wouldn’t recoup their investment because we might not be able to pump any more oil than we are now. “They don’t think that,” Croft said. “They know that.” The oil companies have known since about 1992, he said, that no matter how hard you squeeze the earth, you’re not going to get much more oil than we’re getting right now.

This gives the lie to the recent U.S. energy bill, which offers all sorts of incentives to get industry to build refineries. The situation is the reverse of 1979, he said. Then, the oil problem was political, but the government responded with technical fixes to improve efficiency. Now, the problem is technical — there is little new oil to be found — and the government is responding with political incentives.

Croft also said there is no one oil peak. There was a peak in 1979, he said, after which the world grew more efficient and went into recession, dropping consumption by 10 million barrels per day (about 4 supertankers). The next peak, he said, will be this decade, and possibly this year. Then some time in the future, the oil sands of Canada and Venezuela — by far the biggest hydrocarbon deposits in the world — will peak.

John Roberts has precious little experience on the bench. A scant eighteen months, bare qualification for the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And scant basis for anyone to decide what his beliefs are.

The press has focused on his likely stance on Roe v. Wade, but this seems to me to be a misdirection from a more pertinent question, and the one I think he was likely nominated for, that of illegal combatants.

Most of the “judicial activism” that’s been occurring over the past few years has been directed towards building up a very frightening sort of executive authority. Hundreds of individuals have been held without trial, in two notable instances American citizens.^* One of the few significant cases Roberts ruled on was Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, tried in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamdan, the personal driver of Osama bin Laden, sued to be tried by a court-martial rather than by the tribunals created by the executive branch. In the end, the court ruled that Congress had authorized the creation of such tribunals and thus that they had sufficient jurisdiction to try Hamdan.^†

Roberts’ presence in this business raises several issues. Foremost is the fact that he did not recuse himself from the case upon learning he was in consideration for a Supreme Court position. Here’s Russ Feingold (delightfully feisty in these hearings) interviewing him on the subject:

FEINGOLD: Let me talk to an aspect of the case that I think you can speak to. Many people were surprised to learn in your questionnaire submitted to the committee that you were interviewed by the attorney general in connection with a possible vacancy on the Supreme Court on April 1st of this year. Just six years (sic) before, you sat in the panel that heard oral arguments in the Hamdan case. While the case was still pending, before a decision was issued, you had additional interviews in May with the vice president, the White House counsel, Mr. Karl Rove and other top officials. I’m going to give you an opportunity to explain why you think it was not necessary for you to recuse yourself from this case, but first I’d like to know: Did the possibility of recusal, because you were under serious consideration for Supreme Court, occur to you or was it raised with you at any point prior to the oral argument in the case?

Take note of this circumstance, because it might shortly come up again. Not two days past another significant ruling came out on the detention of Jose Padilla (Eric Muller on that case), again in Bush’s favor. Again one of the judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Michael Luttig, is in consideration for a Supreme Court position.

Conflicts of interest and ethics aside, there’s the alarming fact that the Supreme Court is going to be stacked with people who apparently have little regard for civil liberties and are willing to make rulings (hanging on the barest of legal threads) sacrificing those liberties to executive authority. The Court itself hasn’t been entirely friendly to that purpose to date, ruling to check executive power in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (another American citizen) and Rasul v. Bush. If that changes, a very basic right of Americans is in danger of being eroded away.

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^* I’ll point out that in the single instance of a white American having been detained in the War on Terror, he was quite speedily tried and convicted in normal fashion. I doubt this was an accident.

^† This is a questionable ruling, since Congress did not explicitly authorize the president to create the tribunals, and previous precedent has been to be extremely conservative with regards to questions of civil liberties. Interpreting Congressional silence in favor of executive authority rather than in favor of civil liberties is dubious; the same logic is applied in the Padilla case by Luttig (see comments by Eric Muller, linked above).

Colin Powell, for this gem:

“It wasn’t a racial thing … poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor.”

RAFAH, Gaza Strip

Palestinian teenagers Mahmoud Barbakh and Mohammed Jaroun grew up just a few minutes from the Mediterranean, but had never been to the beach.

On Monday, they waded into the waves with their jeans rolled up, then abandoned all caution and threw themselves into the surf. “It was the sweetest thing in the whole world,” said 15-year-old Mahmoud.

Apparently, some fundamentalists have managed to sneak it into school curriculums in Texas that NASA research supports the Biblical account of the sun standing still in the sky (Joshua 10:11-14) at the behest of Hebrew ass-whupper Joshua. NASA actually has a page about this.^*

Anyway, Majikthise was on this shit fully a month ago. I just caught up via Hedwig, who had a panel of the comic “Slowpoke” posted mentioning this travesty. Jen, creator of Slowpoke spells it out in detail.

Since I’m clearly in the dust on this one, I’ll employ this opportunity to point out that not just Christian fundamentalists spout such hooey. My mom does, too!

My parents publish a newsletter that goes out to the New England Hindu community, and I’ve drawn a small one-panel comic for this for many years, usually religiously-themed, often inspired by Hindu mythology. One particular comic was based on a story about Hanuman, the son of the wind (”monkey god” to you uneducated rubes). In his youth, the young Hanuman looked up one day and saw the orb of the sun in the sky. Imagining it to be a ball that he might use as a plaything, he leapt up and took it in his mouth, plunging the world into darkness. The various demi-gods, alarmed, intervened and encouraged the boy to cough up the sun. Then they cursed him to forget his powers for good measure, perhaps telling him he was a very naughty monkey.

Anywho, being the humorless empiricist that I am, I lampooned this story by depicting Hanuman looking up at the sun and telling a bystander, “Well, I was going to swallow it, but then I realized that my mouth wasn’t wide enough by 870,000 miles.” Ha ha!

Later I discovered that the official censors (my parents) had edited my comic and replaced my punch-line with the limpid “What a nice ball! Why don’t I find you a different one?” (voiced by the bystander). I was about as outraged as I could be about something so ridiculous and unimportant, but since my name didn’t ever actually appear on the comic I couldn’t demand to be divorced from it. So instead I argued it out with my parents, who told me that my comic had been “wrong”, because Hanuman had, in fact, swallowed the sun. All my best efforts to point out how absurd this was, including the likely catastrophic effects on the Earth ecosystem of even a momentary blip in solar input, the concomitant change in mass required by Hanuman and its disruption of gravitation in the solar system, etc., were met with patient insistence that I was wrong. My parents are smart folks, but their adherence to dogma (in this case, the notion that the Ramayana is absolutely historically accurate) sometimes leads them to espouse ideas that are not so smart at all.

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^* Rotational energy of the Earth, incidentally, is 2 x 10²⁹ J. What happened to all that energy in the intervening hours while the Earth wasn’t rotating is a mystery. Also a mystery is why Joshua says, “Sun, stand still,” instead of “Earth, stop rotating.” It’s almost like he believed the Sun traveled around the Earth! Fortunately, it’s called Biblical inerrancy, not Joshuaic inerrancy.

Sorry it took so long. Old results. Although I’d like to point out that some of your fears are misplaced: the moon’s orbit is actually decaying AWAY from Earth, not towards it. So unless some meddling Kryptonians show up, we should be okay.

I talked to a friend in Baton Rouge yesterday, who had some fairly disgusting stories to share. Not of official incompetence (although there was that, too), but of active malfeasance: cops looting goods in the vacated city, lounging around at their ease with their stolen largesse, stealing (”commandeering”) from evacuating residents, keeping people from taking what they need to survive. There’s other ugly stories: opportunists running around buying up property to rent out to refugees, housing prices rising, landlords forbidding tenants to take in guests.

And then there’s some gorgeous ones. This one, via Bitch PhD is buoyant. It’s a long saga, and it’s written the way an anarcho-communist like myself would love: the Man is the villain, the working people are the noble heroes.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

If you’ve found this obscure corner of blogland, you’re probably used to spending too long staring at computer screens. So go read these. They will grow hair on your chest and make your children grow fat and happy.

Tom Englehardt wrote a few days ago all too well about what has happened in New Orleans. Depressing and beautiful. Go read.

James Wolcott makes a good case that we are at the end of our financial rope in the USA, and about to see even worse times.

In better news, I just watched a golden lab and a pointer stare in fascination at the stuffed lamb in the window of a store on Valencia Street in San Francisco. They kept sniffing the window, trying to learn more. These were dogs who had never seen a lamb before, but they knew, somehow, that it was something they should know more about. I love that.