Quote of the day: Policy

You deny the phenomenon. Then you deny that the effects of the phenomenon have anything to do with the phenomenon. Then people die. This is the way we make policy today.

- Charles Pierce, explaining why nineteen good men died last night.

How is the Bush Administration email system like a hitchhiker's towel?

From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel […] is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can […] wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous).

From yesterday's New York Times:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document […] ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status[…]

The Bush Administration's approach to federal regulation (even from tame agencies) that it doesn't want to comply with: If you can't see it, it can't see you.

By the way, it's working.

Memo to Gore: A truly dreadful idea

Telegraph (UK) headline: Senior Democrats mull Al Gore's nomination.

This is a truly dreadful idea. "Senior figures and aides to the former vice-president" clearly have more free time than good sense.

Apart from all the obvious reasons he shouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole (who really wants to see MoDo party like it's 1999 again?), there's this:

If Gore throws in for the nomination and the general election, his signature issue--global warming--will be ten times the political football it already is. And frankly, I think he can do more for his cause outside of government than inside--the next president will have both Iraq and our imploding economy, plus health care reform, to deal with 24/7 (or, in the event of a Republican victory, to ignore and deny 24/7, which would be at least as much work). Becoming POTUS would mean a net reduction in Gore's ability to work for global warming change.

Memo to the League of Tub-Thumpers for Gore: Let him keep focused where he can do the most good. Let him play his superdelegate role--with Bill Clinton all-in for Hillary's presidential campaign, Gore is emerging as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party anyway--and then get back to his environmental evangelism.

Annotated apology

We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are concerned more with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital, social problems of today, nor indeed to we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression has come across.

Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1972

A sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice

News item:

The White House significantly edited testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on health, deleting key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate.

The White House on Wednesday denied that it had “watered down” the congressional testimony that Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had given the day before to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But a draft of the testimony submitted for White House review shows that six pages of details about specific disease and other health problems that might flourish if the Earth warms were not delivered at the hearing.[…]

"It was eviscerated," said a CDC official, familiar with both versions [...]

Amazing: Event this late date, with crimes still to cover up and wars still to instigate, they've still got time to meddle with things like this. You have to admire their determination to watch over the details (unless, of course, it's billions of dollars lost by the Provisional Authority, or by one of the government contractors, etc.).

What a frustrating thing it must be: To work your whole life in your profession, finally making it to the point where you're the one who gives expert testimony in your field to Congress, only to see it censored to pieces by some 22-year-old Regent University biblical history grad, or an industry hack, simply because you had the bad historical luck to hit your career peak during the Bush administration.

I think that, assuming a Democratic president after the next election, they should have a prominent web site called This Week in Lost Science: "This week, the government released the following information that had been kept from you for seven years . . ." Likewise, the press secretary could begin each press conference by announcing that morning's Uncensored Fact Of The Day. And bits of Uncensored Science could be repeated in white lettering across the obligatory blue background when all government officials speak on camera. (Let's get subliminal persuasion working for us on this thing.) And so on.

(Hat tip to Doctor Beyond.)

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace price for efforts against global warming: Let the swiftboating of the Nobel selection committee begin!

Actually, it's already begun.

Also, for anyone who still thinks that Gore will be jumping into the presidential race to complete the Oscar/Nobel Prize/Presidency trifecta--and so far, only the hardest of hard-core Gore loyalists and the right-wing Hillary-hating blogosphere talk much about that, which ought to tell you something--wait until early next week, and then Google these terms:

Al Gore + Love Canal
Al Gore + Love Story
Al Gore + Invented Internet
Al Gore + Earth Tones

And watch how often the hits will appear not just at Free Republic or Pajamas Media or Drudge Report, or on O'Reilly or Limbaugh--where you'd naturally expect to find them--but in the broadcast news, and in the NYTimes and the Washington Post.

Once again, the only difference will be that, when Limbaugh says "don't forget Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet," the Post will say "Al Gore, whose 2000 presidential campaign was dogged by stories that he'd claimed to have invented the Internet…" If you say the smear, that's bad; but if you repeat the smear without correcting it, it's journalism, and that's good.

Prize or no prize, it would be astonishing beyond the power of words to describe if Gore entered the 2008 race, knowing he'd get five pieces of this kind of "coverage" for every one piece that actually focused on any issues he attempted to raise.

Think of it as "Environmental catastrophe with a happy face"

The movement conservatives are finally warming to the idea of global climate change. In fact, they've found an up-side:

Melting polar ice will mean that oil reserves under the Arctic--heretofore jealously guarded by polar bears--will be easier to get to.

According to FOX News--so, you know, it's reliable--melting polar ice will make "a full 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves." available for extraction harvesting. (Wait--if it's undiscovered, how do we know that it amounts to 25 percent of . . . oh, never mind.)

So the bright side is, if we all drive our cars more, we'll accelerate climate change, which will further raise the temperature in the arctic, which means there'll be more oil available, so we'll be able to drive our cars more, which will accelerate climate change. It's perfect.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you:

Another work of cognitive psychology and politics.

If you liked George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, you'll love George Bush's Don't Mention a Polar Bear!

Authoritarianism: The ultimate role-playing game

I invite your attention to Chapter 1 of The Authoritarians (pdf format), a recent book by Bob Altemeyer upon which John Dean drew substantially for his own Conservatives Without Conscience.

For this story, you should probably read the first couple of pages to get used to the author's unacademic style (especially the end notes) as well as to get what he's after conceptually, then skip over all the methodology and validity and reliability stuff to page 30 and the Global Change Game experiment. (Not that methodology, validity, and reliability aren't important; just read that part on your own time.)

That section, titled "Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference," tells this story:

The experimenters identified two subject groups, one group composed highly authoritarian personality types and the other strongly non-authoritarian. (Basically, the study defines the authoritarian personality type as characterized by a high degree of submissiveness to established or legitimate authority, a high degree of aggression in the name of that authority, and high levels of conventionalism. There--now you probably don't even have to read those first two pages!)

In the first part of the experiment, they put the group of several dozen non-authoritarian types together to play a complex board game in which the players take the role of world leaders to manage and maneuver their way through 40 years of global climate change.

Then the simulation was repeated with a like number of highly authoritarian personality types running the world and facing problems of simulated earth political/climatological history.

The outcome is pretty depressing, but also funny as hell, in a Mark Twain "Damned Human Race" kind of way. I'll leave you this one quote as a teaser:

By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs [high-authoritarians] managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world--although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.

Not bad for an experiment, eh? The remark about "another" nuclear destruction refers to an all-out nuclear exchange that happened early in one of the two simulations--I'll leave it to you to read or guess which group accomplished this.

Whether in the interest of humanitarianism or cleaner data-gathering, when the researchers realized that the participants had managed to render the earth's surface inhabitable long before the simulation's 40-year time span, they set the game clock to back two years before the missiles were launched, giving those players a sort of evolutionary do-over. Apparently that group managed--only just--not to annihilate themselves the second time through.