Hyperbole and a Half

Allie Brosh suddenly disappeared from the Blogosphere more than 18 months ago and some part of it became bewildered and worried about that.  And then we discovered she was in a severe state of depression.

For those who may not know her, Allie is a wonderfully talented and whimsical artist/storyteller.  She made an immediate impression when she first appeared.  I think everyone thought they were the one that first discovered her when in fact, of course, she had been “discovered” by many members of a particular blogecosystem.

I cannot claim to have any understanding of that community even though I am a part of it, as are a number of people I know.  It is diverse and probably not right-leaning politically but otherwise wide-ranging.

Allie’s posts were unusual since they combined her cartoon-like whimsical art with her ideas and opinions, usually in a story fashion.  We loved them because they were all about what it was like to grow up as a kid and live as a young adult.  Her “voice” was clear and funny and ironic and smart.

Then she went into serious depression.  Like many other people.  And we lost her voice for what seemed like forever.  And now maybe she may be back.  I think clinical depression is something sufferers need to realize will always be a part of their lives.

I hope Allie will thrive and delight us but even if she chooses to retire from this ecosystem I wish her a better world.

Jonathan Winters – RIP

I first encountered Jonathan Winters as a little kid watching the iconic “It’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, one of the strangest comedies Hollywood had ever done to date and which became a huge hit, especially for Winters.  I was so impressed by that movie that he instantly became  my model for comedy – thinking far outside the box, adopting different personae and tip-toeing along the edge of crazy vs. humorous.

I rarely saw him after that in film and he apparently didn’t do very much except for his own TV show.  But he did records and radio and his unique voices and manic but lovely sensibility was always so attractive.  Like that of Robin Williams whom I discovered today regarded Winters as an idol.  Which is totally not surprising.

I hope we continue to find comedians who have the wide manic range and intelligent sensibility of Jonathan Winters – a real model for what comedy can be at its best.  He will be missed.

Sequester Madness

Well, tomorrow seems like we will indeed get the Sequestration, the self-inflicted “austerity” wound.  A lot has been written about this and I won’t repeat it in detail.  But a few examples may suffice to show why we live in mad times dominated by frothing conservatives who are apparently bent on destroying this nation.

We have a sovereign currency – in fact it is the world’s reserve currency; everyone wants it and uses it – we aren’t ever going to be like Greece.  Interest rates are so low that we should be investing billions in education and infrastructure to create jobs and hence bring in taxes as well as investing in the future.

The sequester will actually increase the national debt because unemployment will increase dramatically causing a significant decrease in tax revenues and an increase in unemployment payments hence increasing the debt.  So, the sequestration exercise is entirely self-defeating and because its cuts hit everything it is highly destructive to good programs as well as those more dubious.

And the low interest rates we’ve had for 5 years also means that current and near future payments on the national debt are going down.  The economy is recovering and new employment and corporate profits mean that tax revenues are increasing. Moreover, the combination of serious Obama budget cuts and a slowly recovering economy in the last couple of years means the annual budget deficit is coming down very rapidly and so the national debt increase has slowed dramatically and will shortly go down unless the GOPs in Congress continue to be criminally stupid.

To understand the otherwise incomprehensible context of the sequestration, you have to understand that all of the positive economic trends are really bad news for the GOP.  But you thought they were being deficit hawks, right?  Not at all.  Every time we have had a Republican administration (Reagan, Bush I and II) and, during the Bush II era, also when we had a monolithic GOP Congress, the deficit has exploded.  By contrast, it went down during Clinton and Obama.  What’s going on?

The GOP isn’t interested in the deficit; they are only interested in reducing the size and functionality of the domestic side of the Federal Government so that it becomes irrelevant for anything other than making war, which they want to do more or less permanently.  Oh and lots of subsidies for wealthy corporations which ordinary people will pay for.  A form of government called Neo-Feudalism.  That’s what we need to overcome.

Of course, long before this awful outcome so desired by Conservatives would arrive, we would likely see a widespread insurrection and perhaps, sadly, another civil war.  Let’s hope rationality intervenes before then.

Terracide Warning

This table comes from last year’s United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report on the emissions gap, i.e. the difference between what countries have pledged to meet the 2020 goal of limiting emissions to keep global warming at 2 degrees above the mean global temperature in 1990.  The report notes that, while some progress has been made, generally the world’s big emitters are far behind meeting their targets – looking at you USA, China and India, in particular.

So what? Some might say we have plenty of time to adapt to a warmer planet and by the time real problems start, we will have gotten off a carbon-based energy economy.  The horrifying figure above shows that this is not the case at all.  The black box in the left center constitutes the pledged CO2 emission limit ranges.  The top-most curve represents the business-as-usual scenario.  A 2 degree rise represents a serious problem for the world in terms of water supplies, agriculture and a significant increase in human mortality and mass extinctions of  flora and fauna.  Once we get into the 3 degree range and above that, human societies start to break down in a struggle for basic survival.  Anything 4 and above means the extinction of the human race.  This could start happening not far into the 22nd century but rather less than 40 years from now!

WTF??!  How did this happen?  Well, climate scientists have been observing what they feared would happen: the impact of positive feedback loops and the exponential nature of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  Like many other similar physical phenomena, CO2 concentrations do not increase at a leisurely linear rate: 1,2,3,4,5, etc. but rather at an exponential rate: 2,4,8,16, 32, 64, 128, 256.  This provides the familiar hockey stick curve since it rises only slowly at first and then takes an abrupt steep rise.  In addition CO2 emissions decay very slowly in the atmosphere, which means once up there they will be there for thousands of years.  So even if, as humans die by the millions and actual man-made emissions decline  sharply as a result actual total emissions won’t.  Why?  Because of the positive loops that are being created right now.  As temperatures rise, moist areas are drying out and forest and pasture fires are rapidly increasing in so doing pouring huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.  Global warming is melting  the Arctic and, as a result, melting the permafrost under which lies millions of acres of highly carbon-rich peat.  Once peat dries out it becomes highly inflammable and once on fire it just burns and burns for years.  So there’s a source of millions of tons of more carbon dioxide.

What does all this mean?  It means as soon as the next generation is mature they are almost certainly going to be in an extinction event and humans will disappear leaving only – and inevitably  – the cockroach.  Since humans are too stupid and too selfish to sharply reduce their carbon footprints we are seemingly doomed.  Or…we elect to dive into a major and costly experiment in geo-engineering.  Geo-engineering is the manipulation of the global environment to slow and even reverse global warming.  It involves, e.g. iron fertilization.  This is the intentional introduction of large amounts of tiny iron filings to the upper ocean to stimulate a phytoplankton bloom.  the massive bloom would sequester carbon through photosynthesis and also provide a feed source for what is increasingly a dying planetary ocean.  The other geo-engineering idea is manipulating solar insolation by reflecting sunlight away from Earth or trapping atmospheric CO2 with various types of aerosols.  See this article for a lot more details.  Almost all of these ideas are highly experimental, well except for planting trees, of course and so the there is no assurance that they will work or work well enough.

The way I see it, even if they are on the brink of extinction, humans will fail to do the right thing through a radical drop in emissions and so geo-engineering may be our only hope for at least buying time.

The Russian Meteor

Only half the size of a football field but, unlike a relatively recent predecessor, it exploded near a big city, Chelyabinsk injuring a lot of people because of the sonic boom blowing out windows and, apparently a bit of actual meteor rain.

Lots of Russian “dash-cams” recorded this event, which led to a lot of discussion about why Americans don’t have dash cams (because we are in the ruthless Capitalist country, duh and we are going backwards not forward on consumer safety but that’s another subject). It’s worth checking out on the You Tube – obviously the most recorded cosmic event ever.

Meanwhile there are a number of shirtless Putin riding the meteor posts, which are taken from his stupid horse-riding prancing.  Love the snark!

The relatively recent event I alluded to and which I haven’t seen mentioned in the media (oddly, though I may have missed it) is the Tungaska Event, which is the largest meteor impact in recorded history and which also occurred in Siberia and there are photos.  Also see this

(The dinosaur wipeout was caused by the “Chicxulub asteroid”, which was far, far bigger than this recent one.

The point is, as the erudite and always witty astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson explained on the teevee tonight, scientists have plenty of plans for deflecting civilization-destroying cosmic objects but there is no funding and no program to make preparations happen.

Ex-Benedict

The title is not original with me; it is from a Gawker article but I love its punniness.There’s a lot speculation about whether he was pushed or whether he really was “too pooped to pope”.  He’s a year older than John Paul II was when he died and trying to manage the world’s largest corporation (in the literal sense of that term) at that age is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

In fact, I think/hope this becomes a precedent.  The idea that a Pope should serve until he (unfortunately no near term hope of a she) dies makes little sense.

As for his reign, he was not, of course, any kind of innovator.  His entire history was the opposite of innovation.  A caretaker, at most and a reactionary by most measures.  Also, there is a growing amount of evidence that he knew about and did nothing to stop the paedophilia scandals in the US and elsewhere. He also inflamed the Christian – Islam divide earlier in his reign.  So, from my viewpoint it is good that he is gone.

So, who replaces him?  The Curia that elects the new Pope are all pretty much conservatives so it is hard to imagine a candidate emerging who is going to engage Catholicism’s structural problems:

1. The Church is fundamentally a misogynist institution.  It categorically refuses to contemplate a clergical role for women and its reproductive doctrines are deeply anti-women and actually encourage STD and other social diseases that affect both men and women.

2. The Church is inconsistent about its social mission. Historically, the Church has had a pretty good track record of providing for the poor and organizations like Catholic Relief Service (and others) is a good development partner for the poor.  But JP II pretty much killed liberation theology because he thought it too socialist  given his history under Communist Poland.  Of course, Liberation Theology was far different from totalitarian Communism.  In fact, it embraced empowering the individual through collective action.  But the institutional Church has always been about cozying up to the political economic elite in any given country, including the USA and against the people, especially in Latin America but also places like the Philippines (with the heroic exceptions of people like the wonderfully named Cardinal Sin of the Philippines who stood against the dictator Marcos and Oscar Romero of El Salvador who the government assassinated in 1980).

I say this as someone who was born and raised in an American traditional Catholic family.  And went 3-12 in Catholic schools.

On social policy issues, as opposed to social services, the Catholic Church is only marginally more progressive than the Protestant fundamentalists who are frankly demented in their embrace of creationism, capital punishment, misogyny and a rejection of the legitimacy of science and factual reality.  Who would want to be a member of an organization that embraced a demented view of realty, especially considering the terminal future that climate change represents?  But the Catholic Church, as far as I know, has no policy on climate change.

(We’re already at 1 degree C increase in global climate average temps and positive feedback loops are rapidly increasing temps and the associated devastating impacts.  At 3 degrees C, civilization will be effectively at an end – a situation facing our children/grandchildren, depending upon how old you are but certainly before the 21st Century. We can prevent this global disaster but the USA, China and India are not interested – that’s another blog post.)

So it would behoove the Church to choose someone as Pope who is truly engaged in the world and its future since he will be the patriarch of more than 1 billion souls.  Of course that won’t happen any more than the Republican Party will become a party of rational thinkers.

Papa too pooped to pope

Or so we are being lent to believe. I don’t know.  This could easily be oldness, of course – he’s very old – and the enormous demands of dealing with a 1 billion person multinational corporation and associated franchises.  But also it could include the advancing evidence that the Pope probably knew about Cardinal Mahoney’s extravagant cover-ups of widespread paedophilia in the Los Angelos bishopric as well as others in other countries.  Same as JP II.  Who knows but I suspect that Ratzinger/Benedict knew all about that scandal world wide.

I was raised Catholic by the most wonderful parents one could have and was entirely almost K-12 in Catholic schools (but in an era when Catholicism had a liberal strain – long gone).  Still, I was utterly alienated by the Church’s persecution of women and its persecution of liberation theology not to mention the logical contradictions that a God’s actions that are mostly explained “God works in mysterious ways”.  I was gone from belief by age 14 on that basis alone, though the cultural artifacts and ceremonies kept me along for a little while longer.

Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has only become ever more reactionary over time.  JP II’s anti-communist stridency meant a strong embrace of capitalist conservative ideology even if not formally.  He also reinforced a rigid conservative hierarchy by which I mean bishop level and above nowadays that would be indistinguishable from the Republican Party except on capital punishment, which the Church, to its credit now opposes (unlike the Reformation).

It would be nice to think that we would get a Pope that recognized the need for family planning, that recognized the need to roll back clerical celibacy, which was a Medieval problem but one that has not been a potential problem for 1000 years, and that recognized female clergy.  There is a 0.001% chance of that happening, unfortunately and so the Catholic Church will gradually become a largely developing country religion that supports reactionary, paternalistic cultures and will also become irrelevant over time.

Not a win for the future.