Rhinocrisy

Reiterating the hypocrisy of right-wing Christians in this country is a fruitless exercise, and I’m not exactly sure why I am about to embark on it. I suspect my rational mind must compulsively disentangle their dissonance.

Observe one Paul Broun, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, who wants us to proclaim a “Year of the Bible”, so we can get back to the Biblical principles our laws and fundamental values are based on. He’s most worried about a totalitarian government:

We are headed toward a total government control of everybody’s lives — a loss of freedom, a loss of our money, a loss of our private property — and it’s extremely critical now for us to go back to those foundational principles that this country was founded upon.

I find this infuriating, because it suggests to me that Mr. Broun has never actually read the Bible. The first Christian community, made by the Apostles, whose example we’re all supposed to follow, outlines principles diametrically opposed to what Broun describes above. In Acts Chapters 4 & 5, it clearly describes how the first Christians were meant to live - that is, they were expected to sell all their property and surrender their wealth to the Apostles, who would then dispose of it in the interest of the community. In fact, there’s even an incident where someone cheats a little bit, with drastic consequences:

But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.

And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out. Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.

This seems pretty clear to me: as I’ve suggested before, the early Christians lived according to something resembling Marxist democratic centralism, with a Politburo controlling the community’s wealth and decision-making. This conflicts with Broun’s claim that the Bible upholds the sanctity of private property; whence, then, does he make that argument? The Bible is not text to him, to be read and understood - it’s just a totem to be waved around. I thought that this was the problem that was supposed to have been corrected by the Protestant Reformation, when people first started reading the thing, and saying to themselves, “Wait a minute - none of this shit you’re saying is actually in here.”

J. Schwarz over at A Tiny Revolution points us to a 1999 New York Times article on the repeal of a portion of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, specifically the portion that prevents banks from offering both savings and investment services. For those more cognizant than I this is probably old hat; you others playing catch-up, like me, might want to read this article by former World Bank economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, where he attributes the current mess to five pieces, including the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act, legalizing maneuvers and consolidation between banks and investment houses that had already occurred (illegally), such as the merger of Travelers Group and Citibank to make Citigroup:

The most important consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was indirect—it lay in the way repeal changed an entire culture. Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people’s money very conservatively. It is with this understanding that the government agrees to pick up the tab should they fail. Investment banks, on the other hand, have traditionally managed rich people’s money—people who can take bigger risks in order to get bigger returns. When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risktaking.

Of course, once you’ve let the bull out of the paddock, it’s not going to come back in willingly…

UPDATE: See also this excellent Matt Taibbi article documenting this mess with AIG as a case-study.

The stakes are high for our citizens and for our economy, and with gasoline running at more than four bucks a gallon, many do not have the luxury of waiting on the far-off plans of futurists and politicians.

This, from a speech McCain is to give on the subject of opening up offshore drilling. Some of you may recall that when last we left it, the question had been broached and approved in the House, which voted 232-187 in favor of allowing offshore drilling beyond 50 miles from any coast (with an option to ban in the 50-100 mile range by individual states). Subsequently it languished in the Senate, and has now been reintroduced as the “Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act of 2008″ (with exceptions for Florida and California, the most beach-dependent and therefore most recalcitrant).

Bush has done McCain one better and also proposes opening up a bit of ANWR for exploration and development. Politically this is a good time to propose these things, because the price of gas is absurdly high (round these parts nearing $5/gallon) by American standards. It’s a moment for feel-good solutions, even if they won’t manage to actually stave off the high prices for the next few years. Oil companies still rely on exploration, and exploratory drilling, all of which takes quite a while even before you get to the point of setting up a well. So charitably speaking, even if we manage to pass this bill and open up the outer continental shelf for exploration by 2009, it won’t make a lick of difference to oil prices for, minimally, the next few years, and realistically the next few decades. As campaign rhetoric goes, this is merely, well, campaign rhetoric.

The department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service estimates that there are about 86 billion barrels of technically recoverable reserves waiting for us in the US outer continental shelf. To put this in perspective, current US total reserves amount to less than 21 billion barrels. This represents quite a bit of oil, and at current prices of $136/bbl, it’s also a lot of money ($11.7 trillion). Ostensibly, of course, the goal of this effort is to reduce that bloated figure, but it’s not necessarily the case that it will do so. All other US reserves are in terminal decline. Oil production follows a more-or-less bell-shaped distribution, as once a region is open for discovery it is methodically explored and exploited. US productivity history looks like this:

In about thirty years we’ll be bone-dry if we don’t develop our offshore resources. Most of the rest of the world is in the same situation. So by the time we do get those offshore fields into production, it’s probable they won’t be able to make up for the intervening aggregate loss in production.

This isn’t necessarily catastrophic, if we ignore our various environmental concerns. Developing our energy infrastructure need not be a zero-sum game, and we can certainly imagine that this offshore exploration might continue apace with the development of other technologies that obsolesce it before it even becomes problematic. Political will, however, is definitely no better than a zero-sum game, and probably has diminishing returns over time. Adopting more oil production as our forward-thinking energy model doesn’t set the stage for the kind of century I had in mind.

ADDENDUM: For some typical commentary, see this one by Charles Krauthammer (presumably so named because he is the scion of a family of cabbage-beaters), where he excoriates McCain for not going far enough with his oil-exploration madness, but ignores the fact that the exploration he is touting won’t actually earn us any energy independence, especially as compared to, say, developing alternative energy sources. I will never understand why, when you are discussing questions that depend on fundamentals of geology, you ignore the fundamentals of geology.

In this article in the LA Times, one Heather MacDonald contends that there is no “rape crisis” on college campuses and the idea that a significant number of young women in college are raped every year is a ridiculous myth advanced by crazy feminists. Her evidence for this claim is that college rape crisis centers don’t receive many calls. Using similar logic, I have deduced that no one actually uses this new-fangled “Internet” contraption because our blog readership still hovers in the low single digits.^*

MacDonald spends a good deal of time critiquing the methodology of one Mary Koss, who did some pioneering work in the late 1980s on the subject of date rape on college campuses. MacDonald finds Koss’s methodology suspect and concludes it is designed to inflate the numbers and manufacture a “rape crisis” so that feminists can get on with the program of reducing men to castrated tote-bag holders and baby-nappy changers. Rah rah rah!

It may surprise you to learn, however, that Koss’s paper was not the only one on the subject! Using my favorite methodology, “a few minutes of careless searching”, I found one of these papers, which you can read here (but only with a JSTOR subscription). The authors are quite careful about their methodology (which is relatively unambiguous in its manner of questioning), and they find 20% of women reporting unwanted attempted intercourse and 10% reporting unwanted intercourse (rape - 71% said “no” explicitly) out of a sample of 518 college women. Female alcohol use was present in the majority of cases (65% in the third category), but even if this puts rape in a “gray area” (as MacDonald suggests), this only eliminates 65% of incidents, still leaving a substantial number of rape incidents going on every year. Criticisms could be made of this methodology, of course, but we shouldn’t expect the numbers to change by an order of magnitude. Shockingly, MacDonald presents no studies that manage to knock down the basic claim.

Most interesting to me, however, was who the women described unwanted incidents to:

Saaaayy… do you think that might explain why no one is ringing up rape crisis centers? Because talking to a stranger is like, the hardest possible way to deal with a rape? Surely no…

The real problem, as Heather MacDonald tells us, is that women are tarting it up instead of keeping their chastity belts on:

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act … and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”

And that, my friends, is evidence you can take to the fucking bank.

^* Hi Bob!

William Kristol is one of the pre-eminent neo-conservative mouthpieces. He was one of the most consistent defenders of Bush administration policy in the leadup to the war, supported unequivocally the idea that Saddam’s WMDs proposed a threat, claimed that we’d be greeted as liberators, and to this day asserts that the outcome in Iraq will be roses and custard pie, resulting in a strong, stable democracy and an American ally emerging in the Middle East.

Needless to say, William Kristol is frequently wrong. And not just wrong, like, “I forgot to add the fabric softener,” or “I chose the wrong drapes to go with this wallpaper,” but catastrophically wrong, like, “Nearly every important factual claim I’ve made in the past five years is incorrect, and the policies I advocated resulted in a million deaths.”

The correct thing to do when someone’s entire worldview has been discredited and the president whose policies they’ve supported is a laughingstock with an abysmal approval rating is, of course, to give them a column in the nation’s most prominent newspaper, the New York Times.

But, before you stab your eyes out, you should read this excellent article by Jon Schwarz dissecting Kristol’s idiocy.

Three of the most-viewed videos on YouTub today are of Hillary Clinton allegedly crying, or “tearing up”. I, for one, don’t buy it. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Clinton is giving a relatively boiler-plate speech about how much she “cares about our country”, and how she “passionately believes” in what she is doing. That, I DO buy: her passion is lust, and we all know what she’s lusting for. But what is she “tearing up” over? Who can tell?

This morning I woke up to some lady on NPR marveling at Hillary’s display of genuine emotion. She interviewed the lady who asked the question, and several others who testified that Hillary’s tears^* had convinced them to vote Clinton! at the very last minute. After vomiting on my pillow, I thought to myself “How the hell am I going to clean this up?” “My God, are we really so starved for political theater that we’re willing to swallow whatever horseshit act some politician can throw at us?” The lady who asked the question, incidentally, did NOT vote Clinton - she voted Obama, because the previous night, Obama’s stirring speech had “moved her to tears”.

I’m truly astonished that people can maintain this level of vacuousness. And not, apparently, a small handful of people - the majority of American adults. Shouldn’t there be an epidemic of head-implosion going on?

^* Which, frankly, are not in evidence in the video to mine eyes. Can you see ‘em?

A missive from the hedgehog woke me from my torpor, and I realize that I should give this blog its due diligence.

I wish I had a good story to explain the long silence. I was visiting a community of Arab exiles in Paraguay, whom I became acquainted with through a friend who trades in refurbished stereos with Arab expatriates all over the world. I found an old boot containing half a kilo of cocaine and an ancient illuminated copy of “The Lives of the Saints”, and had a devil of a time getting rid of both. I contracted a multiply-resistant strain of Staphylococcus and spent the month groaning in a hospital bed, my skin covered in sores that made it look like dried dates, while my doctors attempted to defeat the bug with various combinations of antibiotics. I unfortunately laughed at a man who stepped in a puddle of murky ice-water, who it turned out was a not-so-forgiving Jewish gangster, and spent the month hiding out with my old roommate in Ithaca until the whole thing blew over. I attended a conference in China and lost my passport, and so had to sneak back into the country with the assistance of a parade of smuggler groups, one of which made me work as a driver along the southern border of Panama for two weeks before allowing me to travel north again. I was trapped in a glass bottle by a djinn, and was only discovered a few days ago when my roommate mistook my prison for a bottle of Trader Joe’s olive oil. I went scuba diving and got my foot trapped in the maw of a giant clam, and had to take my air through a long tube until the clam (apparently popular as a local tourist attraction and therefore more valuable than my foot) released me. Meanwhile the skin on my hands partially rotted and they nearly had to be amputated. A fit of mania seized me and I took it upon myself to dig a well in the backyard; the frozen ground made it impossible to identify the water table, and I dug thirty feet down before I realized this. My yoga instructor spent a weekend in samadhi and conceived some brilliant insights about the nature of being, and enlisted my help to translate his fevered and fragmentary memory of his brief wisdom into a vernacular text. We argued almost constantly and in the end wrote almost nothing down. I experimented with a low-sodium diet that resulted in me dropping into a coma. In my comatose state I dreamt I was a salmon, desperately struggling upriver against the current, with the vague desire to spawn glimmering in my mind like a flickering beacon to guide me. Along with some friends I built a stone tower thirty feet high in a local park, working under cover of darkness and sleeping during the day. It collapsed after the first snowstorm and now resembles a ruined battlement. While drunk at a party I received a brief instruction in Tibetan throat singing. But poor coaching led to me developing two completely separate voices, which warred constantly whenever I attempted to speak and often expressed contradictory viewpoints. Recovery required learning to swallow my own tongue without choking. I received an envelope in the mail addressed to a former resident of my house, which I opened; the contents included a letter from the real Santa Claus and one of Baba Jaga’s iron teeth. My subsequent attempts to interest a society of cryptozoologists (some of the most frustrating, and, ironically, close-minded individuals I have ever encountered) in either of these items proved fruitless. A botanist I know isolated a phytoestrogen from a Colombian vine that he claimed suppressed homosexual urges and promoted heterosexual ones. A society of gay ninjas determined to destroy his research solicited my help as a mole. A new brand of long underwear I recently began wearing resulted in an unusual level of static accumulation, which caused me to destroy any keyboard as soon as I touched it; I proved unable to isolate the source of this problem for several weeks. My roommates discovered flatworms in a bunch of tripe they had purchased with the intent of making rennet for use in a homemade Havarti cheese, and got the rest of us tied up in their bullshit legal dramatics with the provider of the infected meat. Fuckers. I stumbled across some bones while jogging, which turned out to be those of a dromedary camel, a mystery which eventually led me to discover a defunct bestiality society which used to run around these parts in the 1920s.

But the truth is it’s winter, and I’m depressed, and tied up with work, and my own guts are strangling me. Which seems an ill excuse not to write. I’ll try to pick it up.

I’m just registering a note of shame over this story about Richard Gere, which you may have missed. Apparently the guy kissed Shilpa Shetty (a Bollywood starlet) a couple of times on the cheeks during an AIDS rally in Mumbai. Subsequently a band of Hindu nationalist thugs known as the Shiv Sena (which has a long and illustrious history of idiocy) staged protests around the country, burning and beating Gere in effigy and burning pictures of Shilpa Shetty, in protest of this outrageous act of indecency:

“Even if the protest has been staged by the Shiv Sainiks, I would not blame them as the way Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere indulged in a shameless public display, it was not at all in keeping with our culture and tradition,” Sena MP Sanjay Raut said.

Now, I know I’m an ultra-liberal American; I was raised here and my permissive attitudes are informed by American libertarian ethics. But I’m pretty sure people kiss all the time in India. Given the current rate of growth of the population, I’m also pretty sure they get up to other things as well. And they certainly display affection in public settings quite often. Here’s a picture of Rani Mukherjee kissing Shah Rukh Khan:

And let’s not count the number of lips-on-bare-chest scenes I’ve seen in Bollywood films, which might be considered a bit more risqué than a simple kiss on the cheek. So let’s be clear that this is NOT the viewpoint of Indian society. Indians are certainly more conservative than Americans are, but this is the extreme reaction of a bunch of right-wing nutjobs, not a mainstream view.

There might be some value in debating whether this anger flows from the “interracial” nature of the kiss in question, but mostly I think the only value to be gained here is to wave an angry hand in the direction of the cloud of hornets infesting that particular corner of the Indian polity. Please, please, you Nazi shitheads, for the sake of all of us, disappear off the face of the planet.

Daylight savings time starts tonight in the United States, 5 weeks earlier than it has in prior years. The theory behind the change was that it would save energy. The theory, from what I can tell, was based on studies that dated to the Nixon Administration. Like so much in the Bush Administration, it was a “no-brainer” fix, a painless step that seemed like a win-win. I bet you $1 that it turns out to be lose-lose.

The win-win idea was that it would cost little to implement the change, consumers would save money, and the U.S. would become more energy-independent. All of these are likely to turn out false.
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Just a heads-up. I assume by now that all of you have heard of and perused Conservapedia, the product of a group of uneducated troglodytes home-schooled conservative students which attempts to counter the pervasive liberal bias evident in Wikipedia (cf. Colbert’s observation that this bias may be attributed directly to reality). It’s only good for a chortle at the moment, since they seem to have locked out account creation and anonymous page edits. But you might check out their page of Debate topics, or the star in their crown, the Theory of Evolution (link fixed).