Red Sex, Blue Sex

I want to write about the Christian right, and how I think they are leading our nation into the next Dark Ages. Unfortunately, I just don't feel articulate enough at the moment to formulate such an argument. Like I've said before, I don't want to make you read crap, so I don't intend to post crap. So instead of posting crap that I wrote, I'm going to reprint an article from the New Yorker, which is decidedly not crap, and also quite interesting.

Red Sex, Blue Sex
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
by Margaret Talbot
November 3, 2008

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity—such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, “maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who—despite their own conservative leanings—admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”

Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, “In such an atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt.” Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that “red families” and “blue families” are “living different lives, with different moral imperatives.” (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher concentration of “moral-values voters” in red states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.

Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.

There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules—messily divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”

Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In “Forbidden Fruit,” Regnerus offers an “unscientific postscript,” in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they’ll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.

“Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable,” Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should “work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation.”

Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.” Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.” Teenagers and single adults are “told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages” them “to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way”—getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on, “This doesn’t mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well—so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they’re not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely.”

Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” for example, tells teen-agers that “the momentary relief” of “self-gratification” can lead to “shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you.” And it won’t slake sexual desire: “Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first place.”

Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to “believe in abstinence in a religious sense,” but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous “for students who simply are not abstaining.” As Knox’s approach makes clear, you don’t need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed—you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”

It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.

The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives—the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion—do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In “The Education of Shelby Knox,” for example, Shelby’s father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter’s campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells Shelby, “You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It’s because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance.” But as her father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn’t worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies that they can’t support. As Shelby’s father declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy “is a problem—a major, major problem that everybody’s just shoving under the rug.”

Get Your Vote On!

This nation was founded on the principle of democracy. A government of the people, for the people and by the people. In case you're wondering, “the people” are you and me. Obviously, we're not all sitting in Washington making the world go round, and the Bush administration has tarnished the word “democracy,” but as Tuesday November 4 (tomorrow) approaches, your opportunity to speak is upon you.

Your right to vote is the most important right you have in this country. Your vote is the way you participate in our republic. Your vote is your voice. You can write to your congressman all you want, but nothing speaks louder than when you vote his ass out of office for screwing up.

If you don't vote, then you might as well live in a totalitarian dictatorship, because by not participating, you waive your right to complain about whatever deal you get, raw or not. I suggest taking a little time to review the Voter Information Guide that was sent to you by your Secretary of State, and become at least superficially informed about the issues facing us in the upcoming election. Then, go and vote on Tuesday, November 4. Yes, that's tomorrow.

Here is a recap of the California Propositions on the ballot, and how I intend to vote. I, of course, suggest you do the same.

Proposition 1A: bond measure to begin construction on a high speed rail system connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. The bond is not enough to complete the project, and the remaining ninety percent of the funding has not been secured. Proponents claim it will fix congestion, but the problem isn't getting from San Francisco to Los Angeles, it's getting from Oakland to San Francisco. Vote NO.

Proposition 2: animal rights on industrial farms. My heart says yes, my wallet says no. I hate to see animals getting mistreated. Proponents pick and choose their evidence to support the measure, but unless you work in the industry, you do not know what the conditions are like. We've heard a few horror stories of animal cruelty in the past few years, but those may be isolated incidents. On the other hand, passing this measure will require industrial farms to re-tool their entire operations. The costs will be great, and they will be passed on to the consumer. If you like meat and eggs, you may want to consider voting NO.

Proposition 3: Children's hospital bond. The hospitals just got a $750 million bond in 2004 under Proposition 61. Where did all that money go? In fact, it's not all gone yet. Vote NO.

Proposition 4: a constitutional amendment requiring a 48-hour parental notification period before minors will be allowed abortions. This measure discriminates against minors who do not have a functional and supportive family, and the dangers to these young girls could be catastrophic. This is another case of people attempting to impose their morality on everyone else and is a first step in whittling away the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973. Vote NO.

Proposition 5: puts non-violent drug offenders into treatment programs as opposed to prisons, saves the State of California billions of dollars annually, makes marijuana possession a ticketable offense instead of a misdemeanor. This is a step in the right direction for reforming the criminal justice system. Vote YES.

Proposition 6: allocates nearly $1 billion from the state's General Fund to pay for more police and more jails and prisons. It is throwing more money at the criminal justice system to continue operation, same as it ever was. It does not include any reform to the system or provide any proactive crime prevention. The solution proposed in Prop 6 is essentially to fight crime with more guns. Vote NO.

Proposition 7: mandates renewable energy. Alternative and renewable energy is going to be the product of research and development that will take place worldwide. A mandate requiring a certain percentage of renewable energy sources in California by a certain time is bound for failure. It will drastically increase energy costs and shut down small-scale renewable energy start ups (the ones who I think will eventually lead the charge in years to come). It's a nice idea, but it's not well prepared. I think it's back to the drawing board on this one. Vote NO.

Proposition 8: eliminates the right of homosexual couples to marry. Why don't we go ahead and not take rights away from people. In our advanced society, how is it that we can still allow bigotry to get even this close to our government. The law should treat every citizen of this country the same. Period. End of Story. Vote NO.

Proposition 9: the victims bill of rights. This measure gets in the way of an already-bogged-down criminal justice system by adding more requirements to it, that really don't advance the process at all, but it sure will make it cost more. Vote NO.

Proposition 10: this measure includes a nice idea of state-funded rebates for the purchase of alternative fuel vehicles. Proponents claim that it will remove “polluting diesels” from our roads. It turns out diesel vehicles are the ones that keep trade moving, and diesel engines are where the biggest advances on clean air vehicles have been. While eventually, we will need to move on to a different energy source than oil, any interim plan is going to involve oil until we find something else that is economically viable. See the article I wrote about that here. And vote NO.

Proposition 11: redistricting. Right now, the legislature sets district boundaries in California, and they do it to suit their own reelection needs. This measure takes it out of their hands and eliminates this conflict of interest. Vote YES.

Proposition 12: bond measure for a veteran's home loan program that has been in place for a long time. The costs incurred by this measure would be wholly borne by recipients of loans under the program. I can't see any reason why not. Vote YES.

Continue Voting No

Proposition 4 was called Proposition 73 in 2005, and it got voted down. It was called Proposition 85 in 2006, and met the same fate. Now, it appears on the ballot again with essentially the same language, and it continues to be a bad idea. I'm getting pretty tired of these people trying to tell me how my family should be. If a minor is seeking an abortion, and she hasn't told her parents, has it occurred to any of the supporters of this measure to ask why she isn't telling her parents? I'm sure all the supporters grew up in nurturing supportive families. But guess what? Not everybody has that luxury.

The argument in favor of Proposition 4 that appears in the Voter Information Guide says, “When abortions are kept secret, adult sexual predators go free.” My question is this: what the Hell are you talking about? Really, that's a pretty roundabout connection. Here's another connection: when people are faced with restrictions, they find ways to circumvent those restrictions. The speed limit on the freeway is 65 miles per hour. We drive 70. Marijuana is illegal. We smoke it anyway. The drinking age is 21. I got drunk for the first time when I was 16.

When a minor pregnant girl circumvents a restriction on getting an abortion without notifying her parents, the results could be catastrophic for her. This law isn't going to save any lives, and it's not going to put any sexual predators in prison. It's going to drive young girls to coat hangers and shop vacs instead of abortion clinics staffed with doctors and professionals. Further, it's going to allow the religious zealots that are trying to take over this country to begin to whittle away at abortion rights.

Here's a little food for thought. Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner makes an interesting connection. The Roe v. Wade decision, which essentially legalized abortion in the United States, was written by the US Supreme Court in 1973. Within 20 years, the crime rate dropped nationwide. Levitt and Dubner suggest in Freakonomics that a connection may exist. Abortion leads to fewer children born into situations where they are not wanted. Unwanted children have a higher tendency towards crime, on account of not growing up in loving homes. Fewer unwanted children, therefore, may lead to less crime. When coupled with evidence presented in the book, this argument is fairly compelling. The book is fascinating, and I highly recommend it.

The people who oppose abortion and work to get it made illegal are the same people who champion abstinence-only sex education. They want no abortion, no birth control, and they expect kids to listen when they're told not to have sex. I'm sure that will be a highly effective means of preventing teen pregnancy, just like posting a sign that says the speed limit is 65 miles per hour. If you want to fix the problem of children with bad parents, eliminating options for “family planning” is not the way to do it. Maybe instead, everybody should be required to use birth control until they take and pass a parenting class and demonstrate that they are qualified to reproduce and take care of their children. But let's not make new laws that will encourage more breeding and building of dysfunctional family situations.

Remember the Fourteenth Amendment

Does anybody remember the term "separate but equal?" That seems to be the argument for Proposition 8, which adds a line to the California State Constitution that says "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Proponents of Prop 8 state that gay couples will continue to have the rights associated with marriage because of the domestic partnership laws, but they shouldn't be able to call it marriage. Black people had drinking fountains that were supposed to work the same as the ones for white people. Proponents of Prop 8 say that the California Supreme Court decision to allow same-sex marriage goes against the will of the people. The people didn't vote to end racial segregation in the United States. The Supreme Court ended it. If it were left to the will of the people, black people would still have to sit in the back of the bus in the South.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution states the following:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All persons. The constitution only separates citizens from non-citizens. It makes no other distinction. Equal protection of the laws. The only way to ensure equal protection is to subject every person to the same laws. The civil rights movement demonstrated that separate is not equal, no matter what you call it. What crimes have gay couples committed that would allow the State to abridge their rights without violating the US Constitution? And leave God and the Bible out of this. This is a matter of state, not church.

Read my other column about same-sex marriage by clicking here.

What's the Opposite of Endorse?

Whatever it is, that's what I want to do with regards to the McCain/Palin ticket. Like I said yesterday, I have no intention of endorsing either Obama or McCain. I think either way, we're in big trouble. I'm not sure Barack Obama has what it takes to hoist this country out of the big hole George W. Bush has dug for us. John McCain is seventy-two years old, and he might not make it four years. Then Sarah Palin would be President of the United States. Please join me in a shudder. Rather than bore you with a nonsensical rant steeped in horror, I'm going to reprint an article that increased the degree to which I am appalled. Enjoy.

Sarah Palin's War on Science: The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.

Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008 at http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/ .

High-Speed Rail? Don't need it.

It's been a while since I wrote. I went on vacation. I moved. I sat on my ass a little in there too. But, now I'm back and writing again. I thought I'd do something a little different, with the election just a week away. I'm not going to endorse any of the presidential candidates. Neither Obama nor McCain are good candidates for the office of President, and I just can't bring myself to publicly endorse either of them. What I'm going to do is break away from the fortnightly column, and instead post a few articles over the next week about some of the referendums on the California ballot. I will start with Proposition 1A.

Proposition 1A is a bond measure to raise funds to build a high-speed rail line in California. The first phase will connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. The measure calls for a bond worth about $10 billion. The project is estimated to cost around $50 billion, but it is more likely we are looking at $90 billion. This bond measure would, therefore, cover about eleven percent of the cost of the project. The remaining eighty-nine percent of project funds are supposed to come from federal and private sources. None of these funds have been secured at this time. The project is open to the same brand of cost overruns that have plagued the Bay Bridge replacement.

Supporters of Proposition 1A say that a high-speed rail line will create jobs and fix some of California's woes in terms of congested transportation corridors. The supporters who wrote the arguments for Proposition 1A in the voter information booklet say that with high-speed rail, we could get to LA from San Francisco in two and a half hours for $50. Southwest Airlines can do it in one hour for $60. The road from LA to San Francisco is only congested on the ends. Traffic only gets really bad on Interstate 5 on major holidays or when there's a horrific accident. Getting between LA and San Francisco is not the problem. The problem is getting between Oakland and San Francisco, or Long Beach and Hollywood.

I think a high-speed rail line is a great idea. I would love to make that trip. It would make California look that much cooler to the rest of the world. But this state has worse transportation problems that need to bee addressed before we start fixing something that isn't broken. $10 billion could be better spent fixing and widening freeways, enhancing regional transit so we aren't so reliant on our cars, and reducing congestion where it occurs.

Mr. X

That One Guy continues to be on vacation. This is the second of two guest columns. The guest writers were paid as much as I am to appear on here, which incidentally is the same as the amount you pay to read it. I have to say that, especially this time, so I'm not on the hook for royalties or any other trouble reprinting an article might cause. The following article, written by Carl Sagan, appears here as it was reproduced on Dr. Lester Grinspoon's Marijuana Uses website. Enjoy.

This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in these experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 10⁸ bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Corporate Socialism: I can't compete in the free market, can I have some money?

Better late than never. That One Guy is on vacation. This is the first of two guest columns. The guest writers were paid as much as I am to appear on here, which incidentally is the same as the amount you pay to read it.

This piece was written by Rob, a close personal friend of mine. It appeared in his blog “Be A Producer” on Friday August 29, 2008. For the record, I agree with him, which is why I have reprinted this article here. And now...

When did all the capitalists become socialists? GM is telling the Congress that it is “deserving” of $50 billion in government backed loans so that they can retool to build more fuel-efficient cars. They are pushing Congress to appropriate $3.75 billion to back the $25 billion in loans authorized last year. And now they want double that amount, citing the sudden jump in consumer demand for fuel efficiency.

Their problem is that the plants they currently own are too weighted towards large truck and SUV production, while demand is for smaller cars and crossover vehicles. Guess what guys, it’s called the free market. Adapt or die. There’s a reason why they can’t get a loan on their own: no investor wants to loan them all that money just to watch them go bankrupt.

The American auto industry is not deserving of government loan guarantees any more than any other industry that made such bad strategic blunders as GM and Ford have over the past decades. They put all their eggs in the gas-guzzler basket, despite having made exactly the same mistake in the 1970s.

If we, as a country, truly believe in capitalism, we let them go broke so other companies can thrive. However, if we believe in using tax money to prop up failing businesses, then we believe in corporate socialism. I’ll reiterate what I’ve said in previous posts; America is currently socialist when it comes to corporate losses and citizen profits, but it’s capitalist when it comes to corporate profits and citizen losses.

These handouts, bailouts, and tax breaks are distorting businesses and wealth in America. Companies used to have to take risks and build sustainable business models. Now they can pursue whatever stupid, short-term venture they wish since any loss they take will be buffered, if not completely covered, by taxpayers. This is why “too big to fail” is a reprehensible precedent to set. It would be ridiculous to do this for small or medium sized businesses. If your business cannot turn a profit, you lose. Start over, try again. It’s evolution, baby.

Let GM fail. It’s for the best. I know it hurts in the short term, but it is necessary for our country to move forward. I understand that this will put autoworkers out of work. It’s not just GM’s corporate executives that are pushing for this bailout, it’s also the United Automobile Workers union. Of course, Michigan’s lawmakers are all fully supportive of this bailout. And I’m guessing that Congress will eventually bend over and let them have all the money they ask for. It’s a hard coalition to beat with big-business-welfare Republicans and pro-union Democrats uniting to push this rape of the American taxpayer through congress.

I like GM. They have provided millions of jobs throughout the world for people. They are a big part of American culture. But they are also the guys who showed us what planned obsolescence really means. Years of building shitty cars across all their makes and lack of vision for more than a fiscal quarter ahead are inexcusable. If GM fails, it's because they don't understand how to run a business or build quality cars. No one in their right mind should give them a loan, and that includes the American taxpayers. The corporate executives who led the company to this point, and who are paid and compensated at order’s of magnitude more than their employees, need to admit their failings.

The falloff in truck sales has been devastating to the Detroit automakers because those vehicles historically have generated the most profit. GM’s vice chairman, Robert Lutz, on how to deal with the loss of profits from truck sales, said small cars would become considerably more expensive, filling some of the void created by the evaporation of big profits from trucks. I’m guessing that Honda or Toyota won’t be matching this increase in the price of their small cars. This means that GM’s small car will cost more, and since they are already seen as lower quality than the Asian automakers’, sales will drop to near zero. Sounds like a great idea. Here take this huge, taxpayer-backed loan.

Be A Producer - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/

This Article - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/2008/08/corporate-socialism.html

Related Reading - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/2008/07/blog-post.html

Related Reading - http://rrhproduce.blogspot.com/2007/11/foggy-with-chance-of-economic-collapse.html

All the President-Elect's Men

What defines a presidential candidate? I'm sure there are many answers to that question. It could be his campaign promises and his party platform. It could be his voting record as a senator or a representative, his resume (sure, and a Libertarian might get elected President in November!), or his position on gay marriage. In this upcoming election, abortion is a hot topic, as is the war in Iraq. Apparently, other important metrics for a presidential candidate include how he speaks to his young children, what drugs he's done in the last thirty years, and who he's slept with other than his wife.

Because I like to state my opinion as if it is fact (which it is in my world), I'm going to tell you that all of the above is a bunch of equine feces. The President is a figurehead, not unlike the Queen of England. Yes, his signature is what makes a bill into a law, but do you really think he walks into the Oval Office in the morning and looks at a bunch of bills and signs them? No. A whole office building full of people has looked at that bill and told him whether or not to sign it. It's a lot like the office of a consulting engineer. A field tech did all the field work, and a junior staff level person wrote the report. A drafter prepared all the figures. A secretary formatted and bound the report. The managing engineer, the one with the authority, read it, signed it, stamped it, and took the credit. That's what the President does too.

So, back to the first question here: What defines a presidential candidate? His advisers. The Vice Presidential nominee, the cabinet, the press secretary, and even the first lady. They make the policy. The President says it out loud. He's the signatory of record. As Scott McClellan pointed out in his book, the President makes the news, not his advisers. In the Bush Administration, there are some other news makers like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, to name a few, but that's the general idea.

Here's a question for you, as food for thought. How the hell are we supposed make an informed choice for our next President when all we know are the things in the first paragraph of this article and who the VP is going to be? Wouldn't it be nice to know who's actually going to be making the decisions around here, and choose based on that information? I don't give a damn if the President smoked weed, or even if he still does. I did. I do. I don't care who he's sleeping with. How is that any of my business? That's between the President, the first lady and their marriage counselor. And frankly, a potential President's view on the war in Iraq doesn't really matter either. Like I've said before, we're in Iraq to stay until we're in charge of the oil, whether you, I or the next President likes it or not. So in order to decide who I think should be the next President, I want to see a roster. Who's on the team?

No Excuses, Just The Facts

Dear Readers,

I regret to inform you that That One Guy is tuckered out from a weekend of drinking beer and baking in the sun. What that means is this: I didn't write a column before I went away for the weekend, and I don't feel like writing one now at 11:00 on Sunday night. But, you can expect to see a post here by the time you go in to work on Thursday morning, or at least a more detailed cop out. Call me a slacker if you like.
-ThatOneGuy

Added on August 20, 2008

Okay, here's the more detailed cop out.

I decided to start writing this column because I wanted to find an outlet to formulate my opinions on various things that interest me, and to write about things other than the concentrations of benzene and lead in soil samples. I enjoy writing, and thought that this would be a fun outlet. And it is. I wanted to write a column, but I didn't want to make it a full time job, nor did I want to try to get a job with a newspaper to do it. My resume is not conducive to getting such a job anyway.

When I started writing this column, I set myself a goal of posting a new entry once per fortnight. Mostly, I think this is a good frequency where I can put up a good post every time. A weekly deadline would have been too much, and a monthly not enough.

After five posts, I've missed the first deadline. I would be lying to you if I told you this would be the last time. I don't plan to make a habit of missing the deadline of having a post up by every other Monday morning, but sometimes it might happen. What are you gonna do, fire me? I do this for fun. That's precisely why I write a blog instead of a newspaper column. It's not a job. That being said, I already told you why a post didn't happen on Sunday night like it's supposed to. Now, I'll tell you why one isn't happening right now like I said it might.

I have started writing the next entry for the blog. It's about drought, water resources, and some of the things we need to start thinking about as a society when our clean water supplies start to be depleted as a result of overpopulation and global climate change. I will be going back to school to get a PhD in hydrology, and that will be my vehicle to attempt to tackle some of these very problems. I intend that to be my life's work. As a result, my blog post treating that subject had better be good. It will be, when it's finished, but in its current state, it sucks. It needs more work. You don't want to read a piece of crap, and I don't want to post one. If I start posting crap here, why are you going to keep reading? I have no intention of ever posting anything on here that I don't think is good.

So, if the post is complete and ready to be read by the end of this weekend, it will appear here by Monday morning, August 25. If it's not ready, it will appear the following week, at the regularly scheduled time. And, who knows? Maybe I'll end up writing about something else in the meantime. So stay tuned, check back here on Monday morning, and make comments on posts. I'd love to read your input.

-ThatOneGuy

Oil, Alternative Energy, and War in the Middle East

There is oil all over the the world. Venezuela, Alaska, Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, the San Joaquin Valley, Siberia, Nigeria, to name a few. In most of these places, oil companies bring in geologists to find the oil and tell them where to drill, and sometimes it's hit or miss. In the Middle East, oil producers don't really need the geologists to find the oil. They need the drillers to put a hole in the ground so they can get the oil. It's everywhere, more hit than miss. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran – they're all floating on a buried sea of light sweet crude.

Let's talk for a minute about where crude oil comes from. Oil, better known as petroleum, is what remains of biogenic material deposited in biologically productive marine basins and thermally decomposed. Ninety percent of the world's oil reserves were produced between the Silurian and the end of the Oligocene time periods (440 to 24 million years ago). Half of that was produced between the upper Jurassic and the middle of the Cretaceous (160 to 99 million years ago), which is also when the dinosaurs were running the show around here.

Petroleum slowly leaches out of the rock in which it is produced and migrates with deep groundwater into oil traps where it collects. These oil traps exist in locations where a non-permeable layer of strata overlies a permeable layer and tectonic deformation has created an anticline, often associated with a fault. Imagine a ham sandwich with swiss cheese, bent in the middle so it domes up. That's an anticline. Now cut it with a knife and you have just added a fault. Non-permeable layers might include shales or salt formations. This is the bread. Permeable layers might include fractured bedrock or clastic rocks such as sandstones, represented by the ham and cheese.

Because petroleum floats on water (in the environmental industry, we call this an LNAPL – Lighter-than-water Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid), it rises to the top of the permeable layer. As the groundwater flows over the crest of the anticline in the permeable layer, the floating oil accumulates at the crest of the anticline and gets lodged against the non-permeable layer while the denser water keeps moving. For those of you thinking in terms of fluid mechanics, the accumulation is offset in the down-gradient direction from the actual top of the anticline due to forces imparted by the fluid flow, but it is found near the top of the oil trap.

So, like I said earlier, oil is pretty abundant in the Middle East. Until the world started to care about oil, no one was really interested in the despotic governments that dominated that area of the world. But as soon as we figured out what a great and cheap source of energy oil is, and that it can be used to make almost anything, the demand for it skyrocketed. Suddenly, the Middle East was worth something to the rest of the world, aside from being the birthplace of western religions. Everybody wanted in. Problem is, it's pretty hard to enforce an oil lease in an area governed by what amounts to tribal rule. The easiest way to control a region is to install a totalitarian regime, and that's what happened. This worked for a while, but certain regimes became too powerful, Saddam Hussein's for example, and kicked the American oil companies out.

Fast-forward to today. Saddam Hussein's regime is out, but it's not PC to install a totalitarian government, so instead, we are trying to seed a democracy. But what if that democracy decides they would rather go back to their despotic roots? What if they don't want to sell their oil leases to ExxonMobil and BP? What if they would rather sell the world's fourth largest oil reserve themselves? The world oil market currently trades in US dollars. Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, OPEC considered switching to the Euro, encouraged by Iraq. If Iraq decides to handle their own oil, that could become a reality, and the balance of power in the oil trade will shift decidedly away from the United States, thus devastating our economy. Our military is in Iraq to stay. If the Iraqi people embrace democracy, we're still not going anywhere. We still will not have won the war.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, as it is now known here in the United States, does not exist, at least not as the organized terrorist group that we have declared as our enemy in Iraq. Couldn't viably sell a war to the American people without a tangible enemy. The Bush Administration called them Al Qaeda in Iraq because Al Qaeda is associated with Osama Bin Laden, who claims to have been responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Maybe he was. The name Al Qaeda in Iraq is propaganda to engender support for the “War On Terror.” We are fighting disorganized extremist groups that aren't interested in democracy, foreign policy, or anything else that we might care about. To them, this democratic government we are trying to impose is just another totalitarian dictatorship under another name with softer edges. And it's not going to do them any good.

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism. It has nothing to do with democracy. It has nothing to do with freedom. It has everything to do with saving our petroleum-based economy from itself. And we bet the whole farm on it. The United States will win the war in Iraq when a solution to our energy needs is secured. Victory is not a democratic Middle East. Victory is energy independence. That's why we're there now, and that's how we will end this war. To win, we need to abandon this benevolent sham of trying to seed democracy in the Middle East and install a totalitarian regime. We know that works, at least for a while. But since putting dictators in power is no longer the in thing to do, the other option is to find our energy elsewhere.

Oil will dry up. Some say fifty years, some say one hundred, but either way, it will dry up. Mother Nature is not brewing up a new batch in any sort of time frame useful to our civilization. We need to find different sources of energy. We need to work on it now, and find it before we run out of oil. The ideas are there, nuclear, solar, wind, to name a few, but they all have their problems that still need to be addressed. We need to keep working on it, but we need to keep pumping oil out of those Jurassic deposits and keep that engine running until we find something better to run it on. We need to lift the ban on offshore oil exploration and recovery. We need to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Sure, doing so isn't going to make gas cheaper for you or me tomorrow or even next year. But if we can start being self-sufficient in the energy department, we could conceivably get out of Iraq. A couple polar bears and caribou can take a walk half a mile down the road and continue to prosper even if there's drilling going on. To think that letting oil fall by the wayside would encourage development of alternative energy sources is shortsighted and naive. To do so would be irresponsible. When Jerry Brown was governor of California in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he and his CalTrans director Adriana Gianturco tried something similar by cutting funding for highway maintenance to encourage people to carpool and use public transit. California's roads have yet to recover thirty years later. If we run out of recoverable oil while we are still completely dependent on it, where do think our civilization will end up? Same place as the Roman Empire, that's where.

References:

H.D. Klemme and G.F. Ulmishek, Effective Petroleum Source Rocks of the World: Stratigraphic Distribution and Controlling Depositional Factors (Condensed from their article published in the AAPG Bulletin, v. 75, 1991, p. 1809-1851; reprinted in part and adapted for online presentation.) - http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/Animator/klemme2.htm

How World Oil Markets Work - http://fuelfocus.nrcan.gc.ca/fact_sheets/oilmarket_e.cfm

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics – OPEC - http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/OPEC.html

Holland, H.D. And U. Petersen, Living Dangerously: The Earth, Its Resources, and the Environment. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Dolgoff, A., Physical Geology. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Geological Society of America, 1999 Geologic Time Scale. http://www.geosociety.org/science/timescale/timescl.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC

I'll Tell You What Happened...

I read What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary. When the book was released, current and former members of the Bush administration called it the whinings of a disgruntled former employee. Having read the book, I don't think that is the case at all.

As we all heard in the news when the book came out, Scott McClellan calls the war in Iraq unnecessary, the Bush administration not completely honest, and the press irresponsible. He says his faith in God drove him to write the book. If you don't remember the sound bytes and newspaper quotes, I refer you to the first chapter of the book to refresh your memory. No surprise that that is what made the news. When news of the book broke, I don't imagine anyone read the whole thing first. Having finished the book, that fact is plainly obvious to me.

What Scott McClellan provides the reader in What Happened is a summary of the history of George W. Bush and his administration starting with its formation while Bush was governor of Texas, through the campaign and the first five years of the Bush Dynasty Part II up until Scott McClellan resigned as Press Secretary on April 26, 2006. Nothing in the book is anything we haven't already heard. It is an alternate perspective on the news out of Washington from 2001 to 2006. While billed as a “tell-all” narrative of the happenings in the White House, not much of the behind-the-scenes dirt makes it into the book because I don't believe Scott McClellan was privy to that much that he didn't already tell the White House Press Corps.

Throughout the book, Scott McClellan refers to the “permanent campaign,” whereby the president and his aides operate the government in the same way they operated the run for the presidency. Instead of governing and upholding the campaign promises of bipartisanship and “cleaning up Washington,” the Bush administration has spent the last eight years deeply entrenched in a campaign to manipulate public opinion and to market and sell radical policy (I paraphrase). Scott McClellan blames Richard Nixon's administration for creating the permanent campaign, and he blames the Clinton administration for perpetuating it, legitimizing it and allowing it to become what it was by 2001. Finally, he blames George W. Bush and his administration for not doing anything to fix it. Scott McClellan appears to understand that he was part of the problem. He wants his book to be part of the solution.

Scott McClellan concludes his narrative by making a series of suggestions for alleviating the political influence over public policy. The primary idea that he proposes is to create a position in the senior White House staff to oversee executive honesty (I paraphrase). McClellan's idealistic approach sounds great to me, but frankly I find that oxymoron as hilarious as you do. I think ending the book was the main purpose of his conclusions. Let's draw our own conclusions with this new plethora of information on the Bush administration and the last eight years of United States History.

First, the American people got sold a bill of goods when we got convinced that we needed to go to war in Iraq. I could have told you that in 2003. Some tried to, but the Bush administration did everything it could to make sure no one listened. The whole Valerie Plame situation was orchestrated by the Bush administration to shut Joseph Wilson up when he tried to tell us that.

Second, Scott McClellan was right. The media is irresponsible. Most of the nincompoops in this country would rather see “Real World: The White House” rather than actually understand what is going on in our government, which would love to run your life for you if you'll let it. Since that's what sells ads for penis drugs and something they call beer, that's what we get, which does a severe disservice to the American people, and indeed the world. Now, people are protesting and screaming “Oh my God! You can't let those gay homosexuals get married!” when they should be crying out “Holy shit! We're holding a country under siege for its oil and its strategic location next door to Iran, a country that would like a more efficient and less polluting source of power. And a bomb, probably."

Third, George W. Bush is in over his head, and has been the entire time he has occupied the White House. It's not that he's stupid. He's not. It's just that he's incompetent. Bush was a good governor in Texas. The Texans loved him. The United States of America is not Texas. Everything is not big in the United States of America. Especially the fine print, which, as it turns out, is monstrous.

Global Climate Change: Part One of a Probably Endless Series

On account of several excuses I could now give, but mostly just because I didn't get around to writing a column this time around, I'm going to kick off the climate change topic, a topic which I will definitely revisit, and probably more than once, by reprinting an article that was forwarded to me which provides a point of view on the subject.

Before we get to that, though, I want to mention three points about climate change and “Global Warming” that I believe need to be addressed prior to engaging in discourse and debate on the subject.

First, “Global Warming” is a media buzzword. What “Global Warming” refers to is global average temperature change. This happens on occasion, and has done so since the Earth formed, or God created it, however you want to look at it.

Second, a nice day, or even a whole week of them in February is not evidence of global average temperature change, nor is it caused by it. This happens on occasion, and has done so since the Earth formed, or God created it, however you want to look at it.

Third, and finally, “Global Warming” is a political issue, while global average temperature change is a scientific one. There is a communication breakdown between the political community and the scientific community. The media follows the political community, so all the general public hears about is “Oh No! Global Warming!” with no real good idea of what that is. I'll bet the average American who claims to have an opinion on “Global Warming” couldn't give you one scientific fact about the topic, and has no idea what global average temperature change even means.

Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, makes a few interesting points. Before I can really comment in detail, I'd have to watch the film again. But with one watching about a year ago, I can tell you this: Al Gore is a politician. He has a degree in government and some graduate study in divinity and law. That being said, his science, sound as it may be, but mostly his conclusions must be viewed with a skeptical eye and taken with a grain of salt. Scientific integrity and political manipulation tend to be mutually exclusive. Ask any current or former director of the US Public Health Service about what happens when politicians get their hands on science.

Al Gore presents one point of view. Without further ado, here's another point of view. John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, delivered these comments before the San Diego Chamber of Commerce on June 13, 2008. Text quoted below, thanks to Marilyn Jackson for sending this along to me.

Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas

by John Coleman

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

The future of our civilization lies in the balance.

That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.

Here is my rebuttal.

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.

Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.

Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?

The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.

Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.

The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son Ralph, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.

All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.

Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and voila, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.

May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.

Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.

So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.

So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.

To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From Y2K to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.

So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.

I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.D's. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position from Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.

In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.

I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.

The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughout the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.

So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.

So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.

I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it.

If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.

My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.