A fugue in four parts
About fifteen years after the movie Jaws came out amidst a flurry of hype, out of ennui I picked up a copy in an airport book store. It was much better than I expected and that persuaded me to finally see the movie and its sequels.
Similarly, by the time that I finally picked up a copy of the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, to tackle its profound and lofty summit, it had long before osmoted into the popular psyche and its reputation had preceded it.[1]
It was an influential book for me, catalyzing a paradigm shift in my thinking. I believe I was not alone. In comparing notes with others, however, I have found not a single person who derived the same conclusions I did.[2] A hallmark of a great book?
To illustrate this tension with a couple of anecdotes, in the late seventies, I attended a work-sponsored, three-day course entitled "Interpersonal Communications". I vividly recall an interchange in the audience in which Y made some comment along the lines of, "science is the answer", following which, X made what seemed to be an ad hominem retort. Y responded to that in turn, clearly offended. I chipped in to mediate, (practicing my Interpersonal Communication skills!?), saying that I did not think that X was attacking Y personally, nor science/technology in general. About ten minutes later, X made another comment about science that was unmistakably antagonistic: sadly it became quite clear, (even to me), that X had an arts background and detested everything about science and technology.
In the mid-seventies at the university I attended, it was well known amongst the science faculty students that some wag had defaced the wall over the toilet paper dispenser in a stall in the toilets on the ground floor of the Engineering Department with the inscription, "Art Degrees: Please Take One".
Yes, there was tension.
The paradigm shift that Zen wrought in my thinking was to admit the idea that Science and the Arts are not separate and orthogonal as we commonly might believe. There is no left-brain/right-brain divide. They are not or should not be antagonistic toward each other.Robert Pirsig's gentle persuasion for me was that Science is in fact an Art, and just as creative as any other.
Possibly we think of science as boring, plodding, tedious, detective work in a laboratory, on a black-board or out in the field. Certainly not primarily as a creative enterprise. The common perception, anyway.
The special distinction of Science as one of the Arts is only that it is constrained to reflect the observable universe; all others are free to range in imagination where they will.
Perhaps the reason for some confusion about the nature of science is the bifurcation of science as an activity: postulating a theory is an intensively creative process; on the other hand, testing the theory to disprove it[3] is (mostly) a grindingly pains-taking and tedious process.
This division of labor in science is, I think, profoundly important to understand. A theory is a work of creation. Testing it in practice is quite a separate undertaking. (Whether a theory comes before or after its confirmatory observation(s) is much like the chicken and egg, I suppose: it depends upon which chicken and which egg.)
In the sciences of the observable[4], I want to venture that a theory falls into one of two categories of status: it is either "disproven", or it is yet "unproven". Any theory that conflicts with legitimate observation is disproven. A theory that hasn't been disproven (by conflict with observation), may be further qualified in status by a) how much confirmation it has received from observation, b) how well it fits with the rest of the body of scientific "knowledge", and c) how elegant the theory is.
This last idea that theories may, in general, only be disproven, but never proven, is sobering because it introduces another commonly-believed, mutually-exclusive opponent into the realm of Science: that of Faith. It means that the majority[4] of scientific knowledge is provisional.
Rather than being a severe constraint on the creativity of the scientific process, the marvelous intricacy of Nature does, in fact, set the bar involuntarily high. You can't just practice the art at the level of your abilities and to the level of the credence of your fans. Nature is the final arbiter.
Therefore I opine, Science must be considered as one of the Arts. The fact that it has an exclusive marriage with Nature does not ostracize it from the Arts, nor does this in any degree diminish its stature as an Art.[5]
[2] The same occurred with respect to my assessment of the movie, Apocalypse Now. No-one got the same thing I did.
[3] Another common misconception: you cannot prove a theory[4]; only disprove it. The harder and longer you try to disprove it and fail, the higher your confidence in the theory becomes. Oh: you have to let everyone else try to disprove it, too!
[4] Except perhaps in pure mathematics -- some things there are "knowable". Some theories can be said to be "proven", although you will always have to depend upon the axioms. And you will always have to convince yourself the proof has no errors.
[5] I've had this whole idea of Science-as-Art for decades now, but only now in writing it up for this post have I been forced to entertain the idea that, if creativity forces Science to be classified as an Art (and most will not agree with this simply due to convention), then it's possible that faith in Science similarly forces me to consider it as a kind of Religion. (This is just the kind of plastic-minded guy I am.) Why I am hooked on blogs, I suppose.
My first thoughts on this are that, while Science as the First of Equals amongst Arts may easily coexist with them, most naturally, as a Religion, Science -- a mono-atheistic religion, if you will -- must unequivocally dispute all the other religions...
Science is the hand-maiden of Nature. All of Nature is a testament to the validity of Science. This is faith. Nature is indeed a jealous non-God and punishes non-believers: picture an open elevator shaft on the 50th floor with a sign, "Stairway to Heaven"! Choose a false religion at your own risk...
"The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't", Kevin Trenberth, (from the CRUtape Letters™).
In the article,
What Do We Really Know About Climate Change?
Basil Copeland illustrates the statistics behind the global climate trend forecast:
As one responder noted, "So the noise is about 4x bigger than the signal." An increase of 0.114C per decade with a confidence level in the range of +/-0.440C per decade; the noise is about four times the magnitude of the signal.
Much the same could be said for the science of climatology, which seems occupied by secretive, rancorous, scheming cliques who resent peer review from scientists outside the ranks of this relatively new enclave. From statisticians for example.
Copeland goes on to say:
"If the truth be told, natural climate variation is so – well, variable – that no one can say with any kind of certainty what the future holds with respect to climate change. Be skeptical of any statistical claims to the contrary."
"The issue has been whether we really know enough to justify the kind of massive government programs said to be necessary to forestall climate catastrophe."
See also The Climategate Saga Plays Out.
More "denialist" opinion.
I have to say that I feel a good deal of sympathy for everyone involved, and particularly concerned lay folk who have adopted a position on this subject, which has now been completely muddied.
(I confess I inserted the double-quotes in the title above; I couldn't help myself. :) Prof. Jones is not a "suspect" at this time.)
See also: Climategate
Climate Change: This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation
by Prof. Christopher Booker
Global Research, November 28, 2009
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash regarding statistics for global warming.
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p. To order, call 0844 871 1516 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk Source Link: telegraph.co.uk
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
© Copyright Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 2009
This is why Alan Grayson is on the koan911 Congressional Honor Roll.
Grayson quietly but methodically dissects the Fed Chairman about 500T$ of credit swaps made by the Fed with foreign governments without oversight. A 20% increase in the US$ Nominal Exchange Rate occurring at the same time was "coincidence", if you believe the sworn opinion of Mr Bernanke.
It is claimed that 75% of Americans are now in favor of a requirement for the Federal Reserve Bank, (an enclave of private banking interests that sets monetary policy in the US), to be audited on a regular basis. (The Fed has never been audited since its midnight inception on Dec 23rd, 1913.) The Senate version of HR.1207 is S.604, known as the "Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009".
I had really meant to keep away from this debate, since I do not think climate is so important. However, I am writing a series of articles and I think it will become key that both sides of this debate are presented. Please bear with me...
Call For Independent Inquiry Into Climategate as Global Warming Fraud Implodes
Global Research, December 2, 2009
Prison Planet - 2009-11-23
Calls for an independent inquiry into what is being dubbed “Climategate” are growing as the foundation for man-made global warming implodes following the release of emails which prove researchers colluded to manipulate data in order to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
Former British chancellor Lord Lawson was the latest to demand an impartial investigation be launched into the scandal, which arrives just weeks before the UN climate conference in Copenhagen. “They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth,” he told the BBC Radio Four Today programme.
The emails were leaked at the end of last week after hackers penetrated the servers of the Climatic Research Unit, which is based at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England. The CRU is described as one of the leading climate research bodies in the world.
The hacked documents and communications reveal how top scientists conspired to falsify data in the face of declining global temperatures in order to prop up the premise that man-made factors are driving climate change. Others illustrate how they embarked on a venomous and coordinated campaign to ostracize climate skeptics and use their influence to keep dissenting reports from appearing in peer-reviewed journals, as well as using cronyism to avoid compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.
As expected, the establishment media has gone into whitewash overdrive, characterizing the emails as evidence of “rancor” amongst the climate community and focusing on some of the lesser emails while ignoring the true significance of what has been revealed.
Organizations with close ties to the CRU have engaged in psychological terrorism by fearmongering about the planet with doomsday scenarios, illustrating their argument with outlandish propaganda animation videos which show pets drowning and others that show computer-generated polar bears crashing to earth in a throwback to 9/11 victims jumping from the towers, when in reality polar bear population figures are thriving.
“One of the emails under scrutiny, written by Phil Jones, the centre’s director, in 1999, reads: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” reports the London Telegraph.
The author admitted to the Associated Press that the e mail was genuine.
In another example, researchers discuss data that is “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”. Apparently, the “real temperatures” are whatever global warming cheerleaders want them to be.
As Anthony Watts writes, attempts to claim e mails are “out of context,” as the defense has been from CRU, cannot apply in this instance.
You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.
Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.
Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.
Another email discusses changing temperature data to fix “blips” in studies so as to make them conform with expectations, which of course is the cardinal sin of scientific research.
“Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read, writes Andrew Bolt.
Another email appears to celebrate the death of climate change skeptic John L Daly, with the words, “In an odd way this is cheering news.”
In another communication, the author expresses his fantasy to “beat the crap out of” climate change skeptics.
In another exchange, researchers appear to discuss ways to discredit James Saiers of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, by means of an academic witch hunt, because of his sympathies with climate change skeptics.
“If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”
Other emails express doubt about whether the world is really heating up and infer that data needs to be reinterpreted.
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
Scientists discuss trying to disguise historical data that contradicts the man-made climate change thesis, such as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), which must be ‘contained’ according to one email.
Suppression of evidence is also discussed, with scientists resolving to delete embarrassing emails.
“And, perhaps most reprehensibly,” writes James Delingpole, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.”
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”
Scientists also “discussed ways of dodging Freedom of Information Act requests to release temperature data,” reports the Daily Mail.
The emails show that scientists relied on cronyism and cosying up to FOIA officials to prevent them from being forced to release data.
“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests,’ the email says. “It took a couple of half-hour sessions to convince them otherwise.”
“Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the chief librarian – who deals with appeals.”
It is important to stress that this compendium merely scratches the surface of the monumental levels of fraud that have been exposed as a result of the hacked emails.
People will look back on this moment as the beginning of the end for global warming alarmism and the agenda to implement draconian measures of regulation and control along with the levy of a global carbon tax.
Many more revelations will be forthcoming as a result of this leak, and the desperate effort on behalf of the establishment to whitewash the whole issue will only end up making the damage worse.
Paul Joseph Watson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Paul Joseph Watson
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, 2009
Back in July, I made sarcastic mention of sun spots, observation #1024, shown at this NASA site being welcomed by researchers after a long pause. The picture then was about the same as now, #1033; i.e. negligible in usual terms. The sun has been inactive with respect to solar activity for over three years now.
It is believed that this is part of its natural cycle but we may be at a point in the longer, outer cycle that comes about once every 400 years. The normal cycle is 10 or 12 years. Scientists wait with bated breath for the start of the 24th solar cycle because the data suggests that we may otherwise be at the start of a very long pause in solar activity.
Some scientists, as I pointed out in my July post, believe that emissions from solar flares (and the interruption of) have an effect on natural cosmic radiation upon the earth that in turn effects cloud cover. The lack of solar emissions would cause greater cloud cover year-round. The net effect would be significantly lower temperatures, world-wide.
As I cited in my post, historically, we have a record of a similar trough in solar flare activity that caused a period of global coolness known in scientific circles as The Maunder Minimum, (1645-1715), but you may have also heard of it as "The Little Ice Age".
Scientists are still awaiting the start of solar cycle 24. It's marvelous to think that the science of our Sun is still in its infancy and that goes double for the very complex meteorology of our Earth!
(This post is dedicated to my very good friend, mentor, scientist and polymath, RC, who has closely and in detail followed the climate debate for more than 15 years and is, I think, ready to lose his mind if the lying doesn't stop. :) )
I have to break my own vow of silence about Australian politics due to the wider context of this article...
In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of
Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger
describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia:
how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way
Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which
speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and
limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war --
against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone
else's country".
Read the article.
I take this quiz again to keep in step with the neighbors, but also to see if anything has shifted.
This may seem like a very tall claim, but in this blog, I have studiously avoided trying to characterize myself politically. Truthfully, my politics are too fallible and too much in quandary to be easily described, and more importantly, I have no urge to have anyone else share them.
I will say that I do not consider myself "left-wing", nor do I identify with liberals.
I have a very great sympathy for the aims of socialism, but cannot classify myself as a socialist since I distrust government. If I were ever forced to wear a uniform in an armed conflict, though, I imagine it would most likely be that of a (revolutionary) socialist. (E.g. if sometime in the future the USA invades Australia. :) )
Since the focus of my political interest is the crony-capitalist USA (and thence the world), I rely heavily but not solely for news, analysis and critique of the USA on a socialist, anti-globalization journal (www.globalresearch.ca) and I often reprint articles from it to show that even a socialist society would be doing better than the corrupt, monopolistic capitalist American one. Surely one would not depend on Forbes or the Wall Street Journal -- or Rupert Murdoch's Fox network -- for political commentary about the USA? But this does not make me a socialist; it's just a very good source of incisive journalistic critique.
Indeed, I was raised in an arch-conservative family, and I happily considered myself "arch-conservative" for the first 40+ years of my life. (My mother, bless her, is a Hun and claims to have known Attila very personally during a past life. And it was from her also that I derived my penchant for wild exaggeration. :)) Among other places, I had the good fortune to spend considerable time living in Boston and San Francisco and it was more than once that, due to the trusting nature of my very liberal friends, I managed to infiltrate a number of dinner parties, which were ultimately terminated only after SWAT teams had managed to free the hosts and hostages of harangue... Good times. :) Eighteen years of life in the USA finally disabused me of my conservative dogma as I saw it (the USA) gradually rot before my eyes. (Of course, that rot can be traced much further back in US history, but that is a subject for the sock puppet code-named MMQ. :) )
My natural, putative home has always been the planet Utopia, on which every person respects the freedom of all others as much as his or her own. But regrettably I live the life of an ex-pat on a planet on which, but for a brief moment of time, people have always selected their welfare, to be provided by society at large, as their chief political axiom; not Liberty. Indeed, true liberty is considered a crackpot idea here on Earth and daren't be mentioned in any more than a whisper. So I may not consider myself a libertarian.
(So that is my personal quandary and of no consequence to anyone: am I to be a socialist or a libertarian? Or an anarchist (society without government)? (I promised myself when I started this blog that I would never get this personal!! :) ))
In this blog, I have taken it upon myself to berate the one-dimensional political spectrum of Left and Right that defines (US) politics and has the Common Person, one at the throat of the other, to the detriment of All. Skilfully divided. Skilfully conquered. Truly and sincerely, my heart bleeds...
Yet, I myself am a single-issue creature -- what is in the balance is the welfare of the 99.999999% humankind versus the welfare of the 0.000001% hyper-wealthy. The "class struggle", so-called. The latter, by Law of Nature, must finally prevail. But Nature has unwittingly thrown up intelligence, consciousness and Humanity -- and Humanity must now overthrow Nature, a most formidable foe, or it will not survive in any recognizable form.
My friends at Fishbowl.com (Facebook) know my political views to go by the sound-bite: "Liberté et Humanité"
My political stripe, then, is "enemy of those who would willfully cause massive human suffering on a global scale", (the 0.000001%), and "ally of humanity", (the 99.999999%).
So where does all this show up on the (1- and 2-dimensional) graphs above?
#1 how did a freshman Senator rocket to the top?
#2 why is President Obama not making much real progress?
Don't get me wrong. I like Mr Obama. I'd be happy to shake his hand. He richly deserves his Nobel Prize for Fresh Air. His predecessor can have my sneaker, hurled with extreme prejudice. :)
Earlier this year, not long after Obama moved into the White House, I read a number of articles offering the opinion that there would be little change coming from the new administration because the political appointments of Obama's "cabinet" could easily have been selected by his predecessor; indeed some conservative pundits applauded the bevy of Wall St and Pentagon pedigrees.
While looking for a sample of those articles, I came across this:
Back when Obama was a freshman candidate for Senator he was selected to be keynote speaker for the Democratic national convention in 2004. A nobody from Chicago was plucked from midair and cast into the most important slot in the convention. How he would [sic] up there remains to be revealed.
Just a little over one year after being elected as a junior senator, in 2006 Obama was the featured guest before a private gathering of the Goldman Sachs executives in Chicago, an honor unheard of for someone that politically insignificant, speaking before the most powerful financial firm on Wall Street and one of the most powerful in the world. This was quietly reported in Bloomberg News.
It was the launch of his presidential campaign and Goldman executives soon gave over $800,000 to jump start the Obama presidential bid along with collecting millions of dollars from their fellow Wall Street firms and clients. Oh yes, Robert Rubin became the Obama economic expert, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Billionaire Warren Buffet became his most trusted economic advisor, a man who was to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs in the height of the economic meltdown.
...
The story only gets better. On May 3, 2007, Barack Obama attended an event at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan that was not on his public schedule and is only now surfacing[1]. The exclusive private dinner was for Goldman Sachs traders and featured a discussion on issues by Obama moderated for the Wall Street firm by NBC's Tom Brokaw. Once again the circumstances are strange as a year later Brokaw would be moderating the second presidential debate between Obama and McCain and the economy and Wall Street were the main points of discussion. Of course the debate commission and McCain were unaware that Obama and Brokaw had already held a practice session the year earlier.
Goldman Sachs was the largest, private contributor to the Obama presidential campaign[2]. The whole article is here. I did my best to try to find cross-referential corroboration of the above but was not easily able to find the Bloomberg article to corroborate the 2006 meeting in Chicago.
Nevertheless. How is it that Obama pushed past all his Democratic nominee competitors, including the very seasoned, (if haplessly uncharismatic), Hillary Clinton?
Here's one of the articles about "Obama's Wall street cabinet".
And why did Obama load his advisers with executives from Wall Street and, in many cases, the very men who crippled the economy with deregulation in the first place? Who Are The Architects of Economic Collapse?
Let's take Larry Summers for example, chief economic adviser to Obama: he lobbied for the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, was an architect of the Foreign Services Modernization Act (allowing derivatives), chief economist at the World Bank where he "contributed to shaping the macro-economic reforms imposed on numerous indebted developing countries...[that resulted in]...devastating social and economic impact, resulting in mass poverty", known to environmentalists as the proponent of "dumping of toxic waste in Third World countries, because people in poor countries have shorter lives and the costs of labor are abysmally low, which essentially means that the market value of people in the Third World is much lower" and protege of David Rockefeller. (Think he caused a stir as president of Harvard University, too, that controversy earning him the boot in 2006. Oh yeah, he said women couldn't cut it in the sciences and engineering due to lack of high IQ.)
So how did this guy, Summers, get an office in the White House?
The neo-conservatives have been salivating about a "Continuity of Government" plan since the Ford administration. And after the last election, the White House still seems to be populated by neo-conservatives, with the exception of the very personable, very articulate, very ambitious, very charismatic Barack Obama. You couldn't hand-pick a better front man for hard times and unpalatable policies.
[1] Obama interviewed by Brokaw at private Goldman Sachs dinner
[2] Goldman Sachs contributions to Obama
[3] Early optimism that Obama Embrace of Wall Street Insiders points to Politic Reforms. Has not eventuated.
[4] If you need cheering up, read Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply A Game For Fools, by Michael Lewis
[5] Why I Voted No (against HR.3962 -- the Affordable Health Care for America Act), by Dennis Kucinich, D-OH
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