Apropos a conversation I'm having elsewhere:
I have no problem mocking religion, mine or anyone else's.  I think there's a LOT of humor-material in any religious creed and PERSONALLY, if someone is wound so tight that they can't laugh at themselves or their sacred cows (see what I did there?) that almost makes them MORE worthy as a target.

HOWEVER, if you're going to make fun of someone for something, and you deliberately choose to make fun of the person that you KNOW isn't going to react, that just makes you a wuss.

If you want to tell a 'challenging' religious joke in mixed company, fine.  But then 'pick on somoene your own size'; tell one that challenges the frothing fundamentalist standing right there who might take a swing at you, not the octogenarian lutheran lady that's just going to be uncomfortable but too polite to even say anything.

So yeah, make jokes about Christianity.  God gave us a sense of humor, after all.  Just don't be an intellectual coward about it.  (And REALLY don't then be a hypocrite and claim "that" certain indigenous faiths are 'protected' from mockery simply because they're brown people, that's just naked PC bs.)

I think Congress as an entire group should be impeached and removed from office.  Both parties, all members.  The GOP controls the House, they would lose that.  The Dems control the Senate, they lose that too.  This is not a partisan issue - it is a (lack of) competence issue.

The entire 'budget' dance since summer 2011 - the deal, the commission, sequestration - is all patently unconstitutional.

CONGRESS (you know, the people who control the purse strings) made a deal to
- set a small commission who would agree what would be cut.  OK, it's a farcically stupid idea with today's politicians but lets assume that it worked - Congress is VOLUNTARILY giving up its control as a body to a smaller body, selected not elected.
- if this commission couldn't decide, automatic broad cuts would take place.  Again, they are not fulfilling their jobs, they are simply mandating a mechanism that obviates their role entirely.

Sequestration is not "them doing their jobs, just badly" - it's not even that.  It is like your gardener (who has allowed your garden to become grossly overgrown with weeds) saying, "I really don't want to go through the hard, tedious, and painful work of sorting out the good plants from the bad, so I'm just going to cut EVERYTHING 6"."
From a gardener, it would be absolute incompetence.
From Congress, this should be criminal.


I grant that calling it unconstitutional may be overstepping.

The Constitution states that "...The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;..."  Conceded, it does not assert a method.

But if Congress took to paying our budget by pulling bingo balls and randomly allocating funds, I suspect we seek some recourse to impeach them for failing to conscientiously exercise the duty assigned to them.  What they are doing now is no better (and frankly, no more effective).

We need to punish incompetence in our politicians, not re-elect 90%.

The data seems to indicate that the gap between the 'have very muchs' and the 'have very littles' is growing. The "have just enoughs" have kind of been getting crushed.

Yet...this is invariably attributed today to the growth of rampant capitalism. Is that justified, or is that just a relationship pulled out of someone's backside because it "seems right"?

Were I to assess capitalism-ness as a metric, I'd say it's pretty clear that the USA in the late 19thC and early 20thC - the era of the rail barons, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Pullman strikes (1894), the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (1911), etc. - was a society far more "nakedly capitalistic", unfettered by government oversight or regulation. Further, the sheer growth of government since that time, the 1929 crash, the New Deal, WW's I and II, the War on Poverty, the Great Society Programs, etc. would suggest that capitalism has been if not receding, than at least mitigated strongly by regulation, government instutions and, honestly, public expectation.

My point is that the growing disparity in incomes between the top and bottom has paralleled the ebbing of capitalism, not been counteracted by it. Adam Smith might hypothesize that as the government is more and more involved in the market, it picks with disproportional force 'winners' and 'losers' that may be contrary to the long-term health and benefit of the system. Capitalism is conflict-based. Successful capitalism REQUIRES some people make bad choices and suffer for those choices for the collective good. It equally requires businesses to fail - with the concomitant pain for the workers of said businesses. A close reading of the Wealth of Nations makes it clear that for capitalism to function at its healthiest, it HAS to be universal. Any intrusion of anti-market activity - specifically, government - harms the efficacy of the system as a whole in broad and subtle ways. (FWIW union activity itself is inherently NOT anti-capitalistic, as some shallow commenters have suggested; labor organization, striking, etc are all very inherently capitalistic responses to perceived imbalances in the power between employer and employee; HOWEVER, government taking a side and preventing the natural resolution of the conflict is very *definitely* anticapitalistic)

I'm not making any prescription here. Just observing that the 'common wisdom' that 'as capitalism increases, so does wealth disparity' doesn't seem to be borne out by historical fact for at least the last 100+ years.

An open letter to those who complain about the political climate:

Isn't this exactly what we wanted?

I mean, we're the electorate, and we consistently vote for representatives who are short-sighted, self-interested, and frankly, stupid.

I don't care WHICH side of the political fence you're on. Both parties have full rosters of idiots, and we seem to be listening more and more to the histrionic extremists and punishing the moderate centrists.

BOTH parties seem entirely focused on maintaining their own partisan grip on power and enriching their supporters, rather than actually doing their jobs.*

*and yes, it's not just Democrats and Republicans.  There is a rind of political 'conscientious objectors' who insist on voting for third-party candidates.  Yes, on occasion when the two major blocks are precisely balanced, this can make a difference in US politics.  But understand, the bulk of the dialogue is between the two basic parties in the US, and the the 'third option' only has influence as a tiebreaker.  They throw no weight, politically, except insofar as their message becomes broadly interesting to one demographic or another such that they're co-opted into the main platform of their nearest political faction.  So yes, you can sit comfortably with your conscience that you're 'doing the right thing' but understand that in practical terms you're impotent to make policy.

Instead of having a reasonable cross-spectrum discussion about meaningful subjects like the role of government in the 21st century, we seem to be satisfied with an educational system that churns out 'citizens' with only a faint grasp on basic concepts of math or reading (to say nothing of civics, history, or art), and who are thereby easily swayed by entertaining but vapid emotionalist demagogues from both extremes.

Assume you have a budget planner who can't do basic math, and continues to budget your spending for far, far more than you make every year. Then, when things get tough, he does things like whine that "you need to just make more money" and cut off your long term investments instead of making the needed choices about maybe not buying a new gun this year, or cutting off some of the freeloading relatives who could probably get a job anyway (mainly because the guy you buy guns from takes him on junkets, and the freeloading relatives keep recommending that he's the guy for the job, respectively).
Wouldn't you FIRE him immediately for gross incompetence, if not have him outright prosecuted?

Some of us had the 'excessively sympathetic friend' in high school. The friend that, whenever something went wrong, they always 'helped us' by figuring out someone else to blame for everything. Didn't get the library book in on time? It was the LIBRARY's fault for being closed on Sunday (not you, for waiting until the very last moment to return it...). Girlfriend dumped you? She was a controlling harpy (it certainly had nothing to do with you cheating on her, that was just a mistake...). Failed calculus? Of course it was because the teacher hated you (and nothing to do with the fact that you got stoned instead of doing your homework). It was always someone else's fault.

Those are the talking heads on both sides.
They are entertainers. They are employed because they are entertaining blamers. Not because they're reasonable, not because they're wise. And we keep listening to them - the Limbaughs and Colters, the Maddows and Mahers. These are the people that make us feel better because everything is "someone else's fault".

WE are the ones who keep returning 95%+ of politicians to their seats.
WE are the ones who are ultimately responsible for putting them there.
WE have nobody to blame but ourselves.

A considered response to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

 I know I'm going to be castigated as a "dissenter" (Yikes, just that name reeks of quasi-religious orthodoxy. How dare he disagree!) but sure, I'll bite:

'For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.' 
I'm not sure "decades" applies, as it's only been about a decade and a half since the alarmists started warning us that the sky was falling. When initially presented by a blowhard self-promoting politician, it's hard to take the 'science' seriously. If Rush Limbaugh produced a propaganda film insisting that 2+2=4, I'd likewise start to doubt whatever it was he was promoting. Let's also remember that there's a bit of a 'cry wolf' case here; the people claiming that armageddon was now approaching, had previously told us that:
- we were going to all starve to death
- we were going to run out of oil
- we were going to run out of fresh water
- we were covering our country in landfills
- DDT was going to kill us all
- nuclear power was going to kill us all
(etc. ad infinitum) ...and that sort of bombastic pessimism HAS been going on for decades (real decades, not inflated decades).

Initially they claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data which shows a similar warming trend. 
I'm not sure that's true. Well, probably SOMEONE somewhere said that. My concern was that weather station data was sparse, extremely questionably interpolated in a way that seemed to encourage bias (upward), anecdotal evidence that many of the long-standing weather stations in the US had been subject to encroaching urbanization without (as far as I could see in the data) any correction for that, etc. Further, while the "hockey stick" (that started this) shocked me as fully as it did Mr Gore, I was suspicious of the statistical methods that had been broadly explained in its initial presentation. Further, I'd (anecdotally) remembered stories about oranges growing in England that didn't seem to be reflected in the data. As more discussion followed, people who were far more savvy than me presented a more-convincing case that the statistics used were deeply flawed. This of course made me wonder why someone would do this - by accident or on purpose. To be frank, I immediately categorized Messrs. Mann (et al) as eco-alarmists, the broad group of discredited wierdoes I'd been ignoring since the 1970s. Frankly, that's the hole that "global warming" alarmists have had to try to climb out of since then. I'll be very clear: In my mind, this definitely weighed against subsequent AGW claims.

Further, and regardless of his conclusions (many of which I believe to have been either overstated or otherwise flawed; I *do* feel strongly that his whole point about opportunity costs of chasing CO2 vs other beneficial ecological investments is the baby that's gone out with the bathwater) the vitriol and fury directed against Bjorn Lomborg for daring to doubt the data was even more confirmation for me that this was no longer a scientific issue - this took on the tenor of a secular Inquisition.

Next, solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s, when solar output started to diverge from global temperatures. 
Really? http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html [tmgnow.com] seems to present fairly soberly.

Comparison of the extended solar activity record with the temperature series confirms the high correlation between solar activity and northern hemisphere land surface air temperature and shows that the relationship has existed through the whole 500-year interval for which reliable data exist.
A corresponding influence of solar activity has been demonstrated in other climatic parameters. Thus, both the date of arrival of spring in the Yangtze River Valley as deduced from phenological data and the extent of the sea-ice in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic sea have been shown to be correlated with the length of the sunspot cycle during the last 450 years.
Conclusion
70-90 years oscillations in global mean temperature are correlated with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries, signatures of human activity are not yet distinguishable in the observations.

Certainly, from other sources it seems to me that the correlation seems to have diverged in the past 30 years. It's hard to imagine that a system correlates accurately for about 500 years, then suddenly doesn't. I don't know what to make of that.

Now, climate contrarians are convinced that changes in cloud cover will largely mitigate the warming caused by increased CO2. The New York Times examines how even this last bastion for dissenters is crumbling. Over the past few years, Several papers have shown that rather than being a mitigating factor, changes in cloud cover due to warming may actually enhance further warming."
To suggest this is some sort of 'climate contrarian' homogeneous dogma is again, misrepresenting it. As far as I've seen, the impact of clouds in modeled systems has been extremely rationalized and frankly doubtful. For AGW advocates to suggest that this has been anything but a weak part of their models seems a bit disingenuous. To me, this has been one of their most dissuasive tactics: false certainly and the misrepresentation of speculation as widely established and infallible fact harms their case when NATURALLY in the course of scientific inquiry hypotheses are sharpened and theories are tightened as more data is applied.

I'm genuinely pleased if their models now do a better job of including more accurate cloud modeling. If by "more accurate" this only means "fits our prognostications of doom" that's going to be less convincing.

I understand that by having any questions about anthropogenic global warming I'm already a thick-browed neanderthal. But I've *tried* to be conscientious about this. When An Inconvenient Truth came out, honestly, it smelled like something from Leni Reifenstahl. But it was hard to imagine that it was all made up, so there must be SOME facts behind it, and they alone might be troubling. I'd immediately downloaded a half-dozen sets of tree-ring temperature proxy data from some US government website, dumped it into excel (which was ugly, this was long before it had been parsed for public consumption) and I saw NOTHING to suggest recent warming. But I'm very well aware I'm not a climate scientist, so I kept digging for long-term climate data, always trying to find and evaluate the least-'interpreted' data possible.

What I see is a repetition of sudden and startling temperature/CO2 spikes on about the 120-140kiloyear cycle over at least the last million-800k years, the last being about that same span ago. So to my amateur eyes it seems like a long-term cycle that we're about due for another spike. Is this the cause of the current changes, or something human-driven? I genuinely don't know.

Certainly, it's inarguable that humans are affecting their local microclimates from heat output, pavement, groundwater diversion, draining of wetlands, output of particulates and aerosols, etc. It's almost inconceivable that a species with such an impact could hit the 7 trillion mark and NOT have an impact on the planet. The contribution of effects from all these microclimates ALMOST CERTAINLY has some impact on our macroclimate. Is this all the result of CO2? Obviously not. (In fact, I tend to be more suspicious of anyone that points to sole-causes on a system as complex as climate.)

On the other hand, history is replete with Humanity assuming their exceptionalism - assuming that they were somehow 'special' or more important (than other species, or even other ethnicities sadly). I'm not sure we've grown out of that conceit. Further, with or without human activity, climate WAS NEVER GOING TO BE STATIC. The claim is, certainly, that human impacts are happening faster than the planet's ever seen before - that's simply ludicrous. Volcanism, asteroid impacts, whatever - great, colossal changes have happened to this planet's environment in MUCH shorter timespans...generally coinciding with a 'wipe' of 60%+ of extant species. (We probably owe our current dominance to the last of these.)

Ultimately, the system settles down to a new normal. In any case I would wager that life on earth will continue with us or not.

In the final analysis:
- climate change seems a staggeringly massive system that we are only starting to understand
- there is every reason to try to be more efficient at energy production, distribution, and eliminating waste regardless of global warming
- the histrionics of the AGW folks scare me badly. Personally, the toyed-with ideas of geoengineering all seem catastrophically (and I mean that word precisely) reactionary, poorly thought-out, and smack of Simpsonian Bolivian Tree Lizard-solutions. The economics of cap & trade, while perhaps well-meant to some genuinely concerned folks, are little more than a systems of ecological indulgences (and probably about as effective).

What I see is (another) wave of mostly-white first-world liberals who feel deeply guilty at their lifestyles and want to "do something" constructive, and will spend any amount of (other peoples') money to "fix things", even if they have to fly (First Class) to sixteen global climate conferences to convince us how serious they are.

And that's where I end, and I've tried to be as honest and candid as possible. I'd love to actually debate this with someone who would help me understand what I don't.

FWIW and in all openness, I don't believe much of any new data I see any longer on either side. It's become so deeply politicized, the presentations are so tendentious, that I can't really grant any source the sort of inherent credibility they might have had 15-30 years ago. Everything now is either misleadingly portrayed or is a constant effort at goalpost-shifting. An example? Sea ice. For a decade we've heard about sea-ice decreasing in the arctic, proved with ample and very easy-to-understand pictures. Then, suddenly, sea ice actually was increasing. Well, wait, said the alarmists - that's just THIN surface ice, what we really mean to talk about is volume. Nobody talked about volume before; "thin" surface ice - which would nicely melt quickly and show great swaths of open sea at the slightest warming - was perfectly adequate when it HELPED make their point. Whether the original point is valid or not (I actually believe it is), this seems very much like the sort of discussion one would have with someone who is arguing from belief, not reason.

Partisanship in US Politics

I completely disagree that partisanship has increased recently in US politics.

For those engaged in them, the fights over politics have been bitter, deep-seated, and ongoing since the founding of the Republic (ask Alexander Hamilton!).

The difference is that until the mid- to late-80s, politics remained an insider sport.  Even as late as the first Reagan administration, 'government' was the exclusive province of long-term politicians, covered by reporters of a very limited number of news services, who were equally-long-serving.

Suddenly in the 80s there was 'talk radio' - a commercial response to the public's long-perceived leftish bias in corporate media systems - actively prying into the minutiae of the daily affairs of Washington.  A careful minuet of positions, negotiations, and alliances-of-convenience was disrupted by the blundering commentary of ill-informed entertainers posing as journalists, cheerfully inciting voter outrage by simplistic commentary on complicated and subtle issues.  Professional media organizations, with their instinctive defensiveness, only reinforced the 'outsider', and 'underdog' position of the talk-radio circuit

Certainly any democracy has a certain amount of grandstanding; nevertheless national government was historically an ongoing process of backroom deals, tit for tat, and compensatory back-scratching....no longer.   Never mind that compromise is the life blood of governance.

Later, the internet's ability to allow anyone to take the position of these talk-radio hosts - to "tell a story" unfiltered to tens of millions of people within moments, now coupled with a public whose general  educational level is lower than ever means that for the political class - for whom maintaining their public image and position is always uppermost - is almost forced to become more strident, more aggressive, and more reactionary to inoculate themselves against whatever might leak out.

Some degree of transparency is essential to good governance.  The brilliance of the US Constitution is that it ASSUMES politicians are scoundrels and will be self-interested.  But naked democracy is NOT constructive; not everyone can bear watching sausage be made.  And yes, I'm asserting that the general public is too uninformed and too distracted by daily life to make well-reasoned judgments on nuances of public policy.

The 24/7 news media makes every piece of trivia an issue.
The internet practically makes every issue a public plebiscite.
And we're surprised that demagogues control our public discourse?  Really?

America's new place in the world.

This is in response to a few posts I've seen about the US "falling behind" - in particular, someone said that the US is doomed "welcome to 3rd world America".

Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".

Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.

First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism.  I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity.  We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.

Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.

In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA.  The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.

Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.

In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million.  US fatalities were approximately 500,000.  Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.

The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination.  US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland.  (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.)  But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere.  Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.

For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.

In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy.  Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant.  Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism.  Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for all his (American-style) urbanity, was often easily manipulated by the others.  No state's foreign policy is without mistakes, certainly.  But as US arrogance grew in the 1950s and 1960s, our clumsy, shortsighted and usually reactionary choices often ran roughshod over our own interests.

The fact that the US emerged later from the Cold War as the sole superpower speaks more to the intrinsic contradictions (and weakness) of the Soviet system and the inherent systemic benefits of capitalism, than to any particular cleverness of US policies.  Like 50 years earlier, the US didn't "win" the Cold War so much as "remain standing" when its opponent finally collapsed - mostly, I'd argue, as a result of America's geographic situation with abundant resources and a nearly-unassailable location, and (one of the few attributes I'd characterize as a generally unique feature of American culture) and an entrepreneurial and independently-minded populace .

The point is that now - roughly 2 decades after the Cold War ended with a whimper, and 2 full generations since WW2 - the Old World has finally essentially recovered.  European states no longer act as simple proxies for Superpower policies, they have formed their own agglomeration that allows them finally to pursue truly independent foreign policy.  (Further, it's not trivial that much of what's left of the US industrial base is pre-WW2, when European infrastructure is a good 20-30+ years younger.)

So in this broader context it shouldn't surprise anyone that the US, which has always been a deeply religious, insular country EXCEPT when superpowerhood was thrust upon it (and which it wore fairly uncomfortably), is losing its dominance in technology, economy, etc.  Not much here has changed, everyone else is returning to normal.

As a Minnesotan, one of the least-attractive characteristics of my fellow-staters is often a seemingly-pathological need to be "noticed".  We're considered flyover country by the bulk of the population on both coasts, and this seems to activate a sense of insecurity and a need for attention.  I see a disappointing parallel in histrionic comments from Americans arguing "we're not falling behind!".  Sure we are, if you want to put it that way.  I'd rather recognize that finally the rest of the world has recovered.  I'd rather be enjoying the fruits of being in the middle of a pack of successes, than being the sole superpower upon which the rest of the world depends.