Mechanical engineer and kids-show host Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke to about 1,500 Columbus-area students this Monday. I attended his talk, and found that the peppy, brilliant man who preached the fun of science during my childhood had come bearing a hopeful message of the earth’s future.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has helped to make climate change an enormous hot-button issue, and as the “future owners of the planet”, we college students hear about it a lot. Five separate school organizations have hosted five separate on-campus showings of An Inconvenient Truth in the past three months. The intent to inform and warn has gotten a little out of control.

With the media coverage of climate change in addition to this campus onslaught, most students get it. The close-minded may stick to their guns, but those moveable students understand. Yes, climate change occurs, yes, it will have grave consequences, yes, something desperately needs to change. Now what? The constant reiteration of Gore’s warning leaves all too many jaded and bored with the message.

Bill Nye, in his classically playful-yet-educational way, reframed the issues at the heart of global warming. He dispensed no Gore-like nay saying, he made no threats of the doom to come. Instead, he said this:

“People talk about how we have to ‘Save Planet Earth!’ But the Earth will be fine. The cockroaches will keep living; life on the planet will go on. It’s the humans I worry about.”

So, no forthcoming apocalypse after all. Just a human problem, caused by us humans. Nye also dispensed even more useful information: rather than focusing on the problem of climate change, he outlined one way to help. Nye’s goal aims to reduce energy expenditure in the US 80% by 2050. We can achieve Nye’s “.80 by ‘50” goal in a surprisingly simple way. Nye explains:

“We can reduce energy expenditure by 30% in a weekend, just by replacing every light bulb in the US with a more energy-efficient version. If we replace every car that only gets 12 miles a gallon with a hybrid or a car that gets 46 miles per gallon, which should only take about 15 years, we’ll be up to 50%.”

In recent years, the former children’s show host has become an outspoken proponent of sound energy policy, and even owned one of the now-destroyed EV1 electric cars. Bill faced off with Jerry Falwell earlier this year, discussing matters such as energy efficiency and which came first, the chicken or the egg. I can’t track down a video of the debate, but you can see many of Nye’s recent media appearances on Youtube.
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A significant difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the innate ability to abstract ideas. That is, we can manipulate symbols as though they were things. We do this so well that most people are unaware that the symbols aren’t actually the things they represent.

If a map is wrong, we get angry at the roads for daring to deviate! I’m using the word “map” as both a representation of a literal road map, and as the semantic entity of a symbol used to abstract information about an object into a more manageable form.

What, you might well wonder, is “abstract”? There are many definitions, but I am using it as the verb meaning to construct a semantic entity (idea) that represents certain aspects of a concrete object. This latter phrase simply means “something”. The drawing of an apple in a book of A-B-C’s is an abstraction of an apple. It represents the idea of apple, and is used as a bridge to try to teach children to further abstract the sound sequence they learned (”apple”) to the written symbol loosely representing the first sound in that sequence (”a”).

Enough of a primer. Fundamentalist Christianity is trying hard to teach people that only one higher-level abstraction is needed: All things come from God. To these thinkers, Man invents arbitrary abstractions such as “atom” and “electron” and “gravity” and “evolution” and other theories based on evidence to explain things that are all obviously given by God.

The Bible” is a collection of abstractions (stories) collected at various times in history (different for each book), edited and translated through a series of languages, and viewed through the prejudices instilled into the reader or listener by a particular community. In other words, the unadulterated, pure Word of God. Poe-tay-toe, Poh-tah-toh.

But, I wander from my point. Man loses sight of the idea that an idea is a mental gymnastic that directly or indirectly represents something concrete. What is something concrete? Anything that can be repeatably measured, or reliably modeled and tested by measurement.

Example: There are 92 “natural” elements out of which everything on Earth is made. You can even buy or make sample boxes of them all, arranged as Mendeleev did. Of these elements, most have one (or a few) “natural” isotopes, and other more fleeting ones. Why do I quote natural? Because the word was commonly used before it was widely understood how old the world was. There are at least a dozen more elements that occur in nature, but their half-lives are shorter than the time they have been in the crust of our planet. Even some of the “unnatural” elements have been recently discovered in naturally occurring nuclear reactors.

The thoroughly proven concept of isotopes is a great stumbling block for Young Earth Creationists and Global Warming Carbon Skeptics. These groups have to claim that the Laws of Nature (a simple set of abstractions the consistently explain everything) must have been arbitrarily, discontinuously, and undetectably different at some time in the past to contradict all the directly measured evidence of isotope concentrations. Fortunately, the simple abstraction that God Can Do Anything allows them to believe this in spite of any evidence.

In conclusion: Choose your levels of abstraction carefully, and be aware that you are doing it.

I listen extra closely whenever an organization dedicated to skeptical inquiry investigates a claim that is characterized as bogus by a loud minority.  A new detailed report on global warming was published in the May/June issue of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine.   Here’s the primary conclusion:

This paper will offer compelling evidence from a large body of researh that gloabal climate change caused by global warming is already underway and requires our immediate attention.

These following additional conclusions are raised at the site of the Center for Inquiry:

Convincing evidence that the Earth’s climate is undergoing significant, and in some cases alarming, changes has accumulated rapidly in recent years, especially during the past three decades.

The conclusion that there is significant warming of the Earth’s surface is not based primarily on theoretical models, although these models do succeed in replicating the existing database with growing success. Instead, global warming is a fact confirmed by an enormous body of observations from many different sources. Indeed, the focus of research has now shifted from attempts to establish the existence of global warming to efforts to determine its causes.

Although the exact extent of harm from global warming may be difficult to predict now, it can be said with confidence that the harmful effects of global warming on climate will significantly outweigh the possible benefits.

The probability is extremely high that human generated greenhouse gases, with carbon dioxide the major offender, are the primary cause of well documented global warming and climate change today.

Much can be done now to mitigate the effects of global warming and the associated climate change. Difficulties in addressing the problem are not caused primarily by unavailable technology, but by the lack of sufficient incentives to implement the new technologies more aggressively.

Here’s one more thought on global warming.   That human activities are at fault for warming the earth is being denied mainly by conservatives, many of whom state that the claims are most likely incorrect.   They avoid talking about the horrific consequences of being wrong (and having thus done nothing to prevent global warming).   Most of these conservatives are religious, though, and many of them commonly invoke Pascal’s wager as a reason for being religous.   In other words, these are the same people who believe in insurance, in being safe rather than sorry, when it comes to their own soul.  But when it comes to the planet itself, they suddenly become reckless. 

I sometimes shake my head at the futility of debating the dedicated faithful.  By that I do not mean those who are serious about their religion and think it through, but those who attached themselves, limpet-like, to a movement and then abandon all introspection and attack all dissent aimed at it.  Creationism vs Evolution is a good example.

Now, there are some Creationists who know perfectly well that their arguments won’t sustain a scientific examination, but it doesn’t matter.  They see their mission as one of “saving” those who can’t (or won’t) parse such distinctions from the murkiness of science, and in that cause they have adopted what amounts to a tactic–formulate their arguments in the language of science so as to reassure those who already dislike Evolution that there is no monopoly on reasoned analysis, and that god can be found in the epistemology of creation science just as in evolutionary science god is eliminated. 

Why bother with this?  Well, for aesthetic reasons.  We live in an age wherein the jargon of science, wherein the fruits of a scientific approach, wherein the Scientist has enormous cachet.  Even while rejecting the conclusions of much science, people sort of know that there’s something to it, even while they don’t understand it.  And that if you can couple your old wive’s tales, folkore, New Age poppycock, or religious viewpoint with a scientific explanation you can pretty well cover all bases and stop worrying about Anything Changing.

That last bit is important.

What the faithful follower really wants is a cake that never disappears, even after you eat on it for a whole lifetime.

Science is just a downer.

Example.  My father is an engineer.  My whole childhood, we had conversations that went something like this.

“I want to go to the moon.”

“Okay.  You need X amount of fuel per pound.”

“But that means the ship will be too big.”

“Too big for what?”

“For everyone I want to take along.”

“You need several ships then.  You’ll need x amount of fuel for each one.  And when you get there, you have to have oxygen to breathe.”

“How come?”

“There’s no air on the moon.”

“Where will I get it?”

“You’ll have to bring it with you.”

“But that means the ships will be even BIGGER!”

Frustrating.  I just wanted to jump in the family car and launch it moonward and NOT WORRY ABOUT ALL THE DAMN DETAILS THAT SEEMED INTENT ON TELLING ME IT COULDN’T BE DONE!

Better to just fantasize about going to the moon.

Or, when a bit older, and the subject was pollution.

“I think we should go back to using horses instead of cars.”

“Why?”

“Less air pollution.”

“Okay, but everyone would have to have a barn to store the hay for them to eat.  A horse needs x amount a day.”

“The garage isn’t big enough.”

“No, it isn’t.  And then there’s another thing.”

“What?”

“What do you do with all the feces?”

“What feces?”

“The horse feces.”

When you’re young, these kind of “How do you pay for it?” arguments are intensely frustrating.  Some on your most cherished ambitions get shot down by bookkeeping, it seems.

To the followers of creationist arguments, I think something like this is in play.  What they adamantly do not want is to think about how all this stuff–the universe, you know?–works.  They want to repeal the three laws of thermodynamics and continue on as if nothing they or their parents or their children do to live “good lives” has any impact on anything.

For their part, though, Evolutionists and the like seem to misunderstand this psychology and get frustrated by the appeal of the religious approach.  The psychology is different, the aesthetics are different, and for the most part the two sides are speaking different languages.

What the faithful do not want is to feel (a) powerless and (b) responsible.  They avoid both by allying themselves with an omnipotent god who does good things for them when petitioned by prayer (evidence notwithstanding) and by believing that this same god has a plan and wouldn’t let all the dire consequence those scientists keep harping on about happen. 

Unless we deserve them to happen, which means we’re sinners and deserve it anyway, so trying to do something about it is human arrogance and in defiance of god.

But ultimately it’s the ducking of responsibility that’s so wired into the antiscience religious approach that’s attractive.  That cake will never vanish even as we eat our fill day in and day out.

The other part of this, of course, is the way people take things so personally.  I recall back in the Seventies when a prominent scientist announced that the sun will burn out in eight billion years and following day the stock market took a serious dip.  People are reactive and, at least in aggragate, seem incapable of a sense of proportion.

Not that we should stop trying to debunk Creationism.  But I think we need to realize that as we argue with these folks, we’re facing desires and needs we may not be acknowledging.  All they see is an argument that’s bent on telling us the cake isn’t there.  Or that we’re diabetics and can’t have any.  They’re not seeing the positive side.

Anybody have a spare fork?

I learned about tiny houses by reading the recent issue of Time Magazine, which featured 51 ideas for “making a difference” regarding global warming. Jay Shafer owns Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, which designs tiny inhabitable houses.  His smallest model is a mind-cramping 40 square foot floorplan. On the other hand, the 240 sq foot models intrigue me. He also has a more spacious 600 sq ft house (including a “great room”) that comfortably sleeps four.  Better make sure your roommates share your idea of what “noise” is . . .

Who is Jay Shafer? 

Since 1997 I have been living in a house smaller than some people’s bathrooms. I call the first of my little hand built houses Tumbleweed (left). My decision to inhabit just 100 square feet arose from some concerns I had about the impact a larger house would have on the environment, and because I do not want to maintain a lot of unused or unusable space. My houses have met all of my domestic needs without demanding much in return. The simple, slower lifestyle my homes have afforded is a luxury for which I am continually grateful.

Shafer’s claims that his homes are designed to withstand a 180 mph wind–a legitimate concern that he addresses in his site.  A big payoff, of course, is the reduced energy usage:

All of the houses are very well insulated and easy to heat and cool to any desired temperature. I typically spent less than $170 on propane to heat my house during the brutal Iowa winter (that is for the entire winter), and I spend next to nothing to cool it during summers.

Even if a 240 sq ft house is not interesting to you, the fact that people are selling and living in such houses explodes some preconceptions of what is “necessary.”  I’ve written on this topic of wasteful consumerism here and here and here.

This Huffpo article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shows the extent to which ExxonMobil is not our wise old friend belatedly coming to our rescue on the issue of global warming:

Last week the release of the IPCC Report by the world’s 2500 top climatologists closed the scientific debate on global warming once and for all with a grave warning about its apocalyptical consequences to human civilization.

After years of denial the oil giant finally acknowledged the role of fossil fuel emissions in global warming, pledged to stop funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the country’s most visible global warming denier, and boasted of its own efforts to deal with the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

But behind the scenes, Exxon was engaged in the same old mischief. The American Enterprise Institute, a corporate front group financed by ExxonMobil and staffed by Bush administration dead enders, sent letters to top scientists and economists in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere, offering them $10,000 each plus expenses for articles explaining shortcomings in the report.

To read the horrifying conclusions of the IPCC, here is the summary written for policy makers:  Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis”  You would think that President Bush would take this report seriously, but he’s not.  Here’s the garbage being generated by the White House as of February 8, 2007 (more…)

And why should we care about this material rarely mentioned outside of science-fiction? Well, it involves recycling, our energy future, and a chance to de-proliferate nuclear weaponry and reduce the threat of “dirty” bombs. First, a brief bit of history:

Back in the 1930’s, it was discovered that isotopes of 3 elements could sustain nuclear fission chain reactions in a reactor. They are:

• A rare and hard-to-isolate isotope of Element 92, Uranium 235,
• Two hazardously manufactured isotopes of Element 94, Plutonium 239 and Plutonium 240
• The cheap and common isotope of Element 90, Thorium 232

Although all three could be used to make a nuclear reactor, in the 1940’s it was important to make a bomb. The amount of the common Thorium isotope needed just to get a reaction going was too heavy to airlift, so they focused on refining Uranium, and producing Plutonium. Both of these 2 tracks bore hideous fruit.

By 1950 we already had big facilities to make these 2 rare and expensive fissile substances, so why not just use them for power stations? (Answer: It’s just too darn easy to make wayward Plutonium into portable bombs.) Our present generation of slow-neutron reactors is reasonably efficient at getting energy out of the original isotopes, and almost as safe as the reactors now being built in Europe. But what about the 95% of the original fuel that we call radioactive waste?

The knee-jerk reation is to do with it what one does with garbage. Bury it. Originally, 10,000 years (about the time between the oldest discovered human city and the present) was considered a long enough storage time to be safe. But the no-nukes crowd managed to get Congress to up the certified unattended time-to-failure requirement for Yucca Mountain storage to a million years.

I’m not here to argue that this is a silly requirement. Just note that highly-radioactive isotopes are mutually exclusive from long-lived isotopes. I’m here to tout thorium, and the fast-neutron fission reactor that can “burn” thorium and also “burn” 90% of the radioactive “waste” that we are burying or planning to bury. Burn it to produce usable energy.

What? Look up fast neutron reactors. Here’s one wiki about them. But the point in this case, is not to produce more fuel, but to use a big reactor to produce energy from slow-neutron-reactor waste isotopes, medical waste isotopes, and from thorium. Sure, a fast-neutron reactor produces plutonium. I’m suggesting that we leave it in there to keep burning until we get useless isotopes of iron, lead, and the relatively safe and/or useful lanthanide isotopes in between those and thorium.

I’d advocate building this reactor right on Yucca mountain, where the 10% leftover waste from burning the original “waste” can still be buried. We already are shipping the waste (fuel!) there. Sure, the energy produced would have to be transported out, and long stretches of wire are expensive, both in terms of installation and parasitic losses. However, we are talking about a reactor that essentially burns dirt and garbage. Okay, thorium is not quite as cheap as dirt, but it is much cheaper than ₉₂U²³⁵.

We could set up long lines of power towers, or build a superconducting power conduit cooled by hydrogen produced at the reactor, or just package the energy by producing methane or hydrogen or some other convenient energy storage medium that can be piped or trucked out.

One caveat is that a thorium reactor has to be big. The core needs to be twice as big as for a normal Uranium fast-neutron reactor in order to keep the reaction going. Fine. What is the real-estate on top of a nuclear disposal site going for? Out in the middle of nowhere, the only objection to “big” is that it costs more to build. Once it is going, it should run for about the same operating costs as the reactor near your town. One factor that helps is that the waste used as a co-fuel reduces the size requirement compared to a thorium-only reactor.

One other issue: If we don’t get a reactor like that built before we run out of fossil fuels, we may not have the wherewithal to build it later. Fusion might bear fruit; it’s been predicted “within ten years” since the 1960’s. The best bet for commercial fusion still requires a reactor bigger than what I’m suggesting here.

This is not an original idea, but I’d like to get it out before another audience. Just fuel for thought.

Bush’s oil company chums are trying to buy off climate scientists:

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: “The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration’s intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they’ve got left is a suitcase full of cash.”

How often have you heard this phrase: “powerful members of Congress.”  It gets under my skin.  It sometimes makes me seethe. I saw it on the front page of yesterday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch dealing with the President’s State of the Union address:

The prospects: Democrats in Congress have proposed raising the requirement to 60 billion gallons of 2030.  Some experts say big reductions in gas usage won’t happen unless Bush orders much higher fuel economy standards, which powerful members of Congress would resist.

[By the way, I'm not trying to single out the Post-Dispatch. This is just an illustrtion.  Almost every media publisher across America also uses this phrase] 

So there it is.  Some members of Congress are more “powerful” than others.  What does that mean?  Does it mean that they go to the gym more often so that they have big muscles?  Or does it mean something more sinister?  And if it’s a sinister thing, why is it so nonchalantly placed on the front page of the newspaper as though it’s not a scandalous thing?

There’s nothing in the Constitution that would give any clue to the mania of “powerful member of Congress.” To the extent that belonging to a particular political party makes one “powerful,” the Constitution is totally silent about political parties.  The “power” of Congress should not be determined by reference to who belongs to what club.  When it comes down to voting on issues, each member of Congress has the same number of votes as every other member of Congress.  And it can’t really be party politics to which the Post-Dispatch is referring in this case, because the allegedly “powerful members of Congress” who would “resist” meaningful energy policy changes are Republicans, who have recently been voted into the minority status.

Here’s why use of this term by journalists makes me angry: “Powerful members of Congress” are the recipients of lots of corporate money.  Huge corporations have locked onto the reality that certain members of Congress, more than others, respond favorably and predictably to the receipt of money.  If you pay them, they will be your puppets.  And see here. If you pay them a lot of money, they will throw around some of that money so that some of their peers will also become your puppets.

I don’t remember learning about “powerful members of Congress” in my grade school or high school civics classes.  I do remember lessons where we recited the Pledge of Allegiance and we became teary-eyed when we spoke about a Constitution that none of us really understood much.  But we did learn this much: our country is supposed to be about fairness.  We would have been surprised to learn, even as grade schoolers, that some people are more equal than others. 

Whenever a corporate media outlet nonchalantly refers to “powerful member of Congress” an important story is being buried, a story that is usually much bigger than the thing ostensibly being discussed. (more…)

According to Rolling Stone (January 25, 2007), TXU, an electric power company based in Dallas has recently announced plans to build 11 new coal plants in Texas over the next four years.  These additional coal plants would put more pollution into the air each year than 11 million SUVs. These will be the “old technology” types of coal plants, rather than the “newer and cleaner method known as coal gasification.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced fast-tracking permits for these new coal-fired plants two weeks after the recent election.  Rolling Stone also reports that TXU had pre-rewarded Perry’s reelection campaign with more than $130,000.

TXU is reportedly undeterred by the protests of 30 Texas cities and towns represented 7 million people. 

They are already talking about expanding beyond Texas with another fleet of new coal plants in other states.  By pushing ahead so heedlessly, they are essentially betting the company on the belief that most Texans-and most Americans-would prefer to risk epic storms, droughts, crop failures and polluted air rather than to save the planet.

The following remarks were delivered by Bernie Sanders to the National Conference for Media Reform. Sanders is the junior United States Senator from Vermont.  He is an independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.  Amy Goodman describes Sanders’ speech as an “alternative State of the Union.”

The full text to Sanders’ speech can be found here.  Video of his presentation can be found here.  Here are excerpts of Sanders’ speech to the NCMR in Memphis:

[W]e will not succeed unless you are there, unless there is a strong grassroots media, which demands fundamental changes in media today and the end of corporate control over our media. We’ve got to work together on that.

Now, you are going to hear from a lot of folks who know more about the details of the media than I do, but what I do know a lot about is how media impacts the political process, what media means for those of us who day after day struggle with the major issues facing our country and a goal of trying to improve the quality of life for all of our people.

And I want to spend just a minute in telling you what I suspect most of you already know. If you are concerned, as been said, about healthcare, if you are concerned about foreign policy and Iraq, if you are concerned about the economy, if you are concerned about global warming, you are kidding yourselves if you are not concerned about corporate control over the media, because every one of these issues is directly controlled and directly relevant to the media.

In terms of the war in Iraq, the American media failed, and failed grotesquely, in exposing the dishonest and misleading assertions of the Bush administration in the lead-up to that war, and they are as responsible as is President Bush for the disaster that now befalls us . . .

. . . If you were to ask me what the most significant untold story of our time is, in terms of domestic politics, I would tell you very simply that that story happens to be the collapse of the American middle class.   . . . [D]espite an explosion of technology, huge increase in worker productivity, tens of millions of our fellow Americans have seen a decline in their real wages and are working longer hours for lower wages. In fact, what you probably don’t know is that the working people in our country work longer hours than do the working people in any other industrialized nation on earth.

How did that happen? How did it happen today that a two-income family has less disposal income than a one-income family did thirty years ago? . . .  Now, one might think that this is an interesting story. One might think that globalization and disastrous trade policies, which have lowered the standard of living of millions of American workers, might be a story that should be covered. . . .

Now, what is all of this about? What happens? If the reality of working people’s lives are not reflected in the TV, in the newspapers, what happens? . . . (more…)

I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.

Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.

We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill for the same money.

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Michael Moore recently published this pledge in the Los Angeles Times.  I applaud each of these twelve points:

1) We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

2) We will let you marry whomever you want (even though some among us consider your Republican behavior to be “different” or “immoral”). Who you marry is none of our business. Love, and be in love — it’s a wonderful gift.

3) We will not spend your grandchildren’s money on our personal whims or to enrich our friends. It’s your checkbook too, and we will balance it for you.

4) When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq, we will bring your sons and daughters home too. We promise never to send your kids off to war based on some amateur Power Point presentation cooked up by men who have never been to war.

5) When we make America the last Western democracy to have universal health coverage, and all Americans are able to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you too will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay. And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures for diseases that afflict you and your loved ones, we’ll make sure those advances are available to you and your family too.

6) When we clean up our air and water, you too will be able to breathe the cleaner air and drink the purer water. When we put an end to global warming, you will no longer have to think about buying oceanfront property in Yuma.

7) Should a mass murderer ever kill 3,000 people on our soil, we will devote every single resource to tracking him down and bringing him to justice. Immediately. We will protect you.

We will never stick our nose in your bedroom or your womb. What you do there as consenting adults is your business. We will continue to count your age from the moment you were born, not the moment you were conceived.

9) We will not take away your hunting guns. If you need an automatic weapon or a handgun to kill a bird or a deer, then you really aren’t much of a hunter and you should, perhaps, take up another sport. In the meantime, we will arm the deer to make it a fairer fight.

10) When we raise the minimum wage, we will raise it for your employees too. They will use that money to buy more things, which means you will get the money back! And when women are finally paid what men make, we will pay conservative women that wage too.

11) We will respect your religious beliefs, even when you don’t practice those beliefs. In fact, we will actively seek to promote your most radical religious beliefs (”Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies,” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” and “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). We will let people in other countries know that God doesn’t just bless America, he blesses everyone. We will discourage religious intolerance and fanaticism — starting here at home.

12) We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and break the law. And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on our side first. If we fail to do this, we need you to call us on it. Simply because we are in power does not give us the right to turn our heads the other way when our party goes astray. Please perform this important duty as the loyal opposition.

Is terrorism really the biggest threat facing the United States?

TomPaine.com recently commented on a report of the libertarian Cato Institute arguing that terrorism

is really just not that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been “killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.” What’s more, many WMD threats are overblown and largely preventable.

To read the Cato Institute report, click here.  The report concludes that “any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed, however grimly.”  Tompaine.com commented on other Cato Institute findings:

Bush administration’s War on Terror hasn’t made us one lick safer. Because, while we’ve been duct-taping our windows, fighting an unjustified war and pouring money into porkbarrel anti-terrorism, we’ve essentially ignored both common-sense moves—like better port security and coordination among local police and the FBI—and very big, well-documented threats, from the climate crisis to the weakening of the global public health system and the rise of epidemic disease to the destruction of New Orleans.

The Cato report also points out “an obvious truth” that much of what makes modern societies insecure is that which “is unsustainable about them.”   For this reason, “sustainability is a national security priority. Perhaps the national security priority.”

Neither the Bush Administration nor the U.S. mainstream media is emphasizing environmental concerns over terrorism.  How could it be that environmental issues are actually more pressing than terrorism?

If scientists are correct, far more people have already lost their lives from the direct and indirect effects of climate change than terrorism. The health effects of sprawl, car accidents, chemical spills, environmentally influenced cancers: all of these things are probably bigger threats to the lives of average Americans than terrorism. Certainly preventable disease, unnecessary hunger, solvable poverty and environmental degradation  already cause far more death and suffering in the world than any terrorists ever could.

If you’re wondering why we “can’t” buy electric cars (especially since 80% of Americans drive 50 miles or less per day), check out this review of an electric sports car.  The title deserves a special award of some sort:  “Lick My Silent Sports Car; How much has Big Auto lied? Take a drive in this four-wheel electric orgasm, and find out.”

Here’s an excerpt from the review of the new Tesla Roadster:

This car, it has a top speed of 130 mph. It has a range of 250 miles. It also has GPS navigation and air-conditioning and air bags and it surely will come with a very badass sound system. It has heated seats and (I presume) iPod integration and Bluetooth. You know, just like a real car.

Oh, and by the way, this car? It’s completely silent. It is 100-percent emissions-free. Doesn’t even have a tailpipe. Because it has no internal combustion engine of any kind.

Here’s the website for this car.  According an article in Wired, Tesla’s $50,000 sedan is due out in 2008.  Maybe you’re thinking “But this might be all hype.  What would it really be like to drive an electric car?”  For one account, click here. 

And for a tale of intrigue about the lack of electric cars for sale, check out the trailer for the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car.”

Gosh.  If you’ve publicly shown yourself to be especially prone to dysfunctional cognition and flights of fantasy for many years, you can get yourself a big headline by merely stating the obvious.  Here’s the story from Reuters:

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said on Thursday the wave of scorching temperatures across the United States has converted him into a believer in global warming.

“We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels,” Robertson said on his “700 Club” broadcast. “It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.”

He’s certainly singing a different tune.  He’s the same guy who earlier had this to say: 

Tell me, what do the environmentalists believe? Do they worship the God of the Bible or something else?

I wonder what changed Robertson’s mind.  Could it be . . . evidence?

Evidence is very dangerous stuff.  Robertson will need to be very very careful with his new infatuation with real life information.  If he’s not careful, he might get seduced by other evidence, which might then cause him to modify his views on Iraq, evolution and the existence of a vengeful God.