Some varied footnotes to the preceding

- Donna Smith of National Nurses United put things in perspective. She noted that "123 people died today" and not one of those deaths had anything to do with WikiLeaks. They died "because they lacked enough money to buy healthcare services."

- A columnist at The Economist writes:

With or without WikiLeaks, the technology exists to allow whistleblowers to leak data and documents while maintaining anonymity. With or without WikiLeaks, the personel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public. ...

The basic question is not whether we think Julian Assange is a terrorist or a hero. The basic question certainly is not whether we think exposing the chatter of the diplomatic corps helps or hinders their efforts, and whether this is a good or bad thing. To continue to focus on these questions is to miss the forest for the texture of the bark on a single elm. If we take the inevitability of future large leaks for granted, then I think the debate must eventually centre on the things that will determine the supply of leakers and leaks. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals the sense of justice which would embolden them to challenge the institutions that control our fate by bringing their secrets to light. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals ever greater fealty and submission to corporations and the state in order to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the powerful, lest their erosion threaten what David Brooks calls "the fragile community"—our current, comfortable dispensation.

I know which side I'm on.

- The BBC has a nice summary of the issues various raised by the released cables, at least the first group, by country.

- On Monday, the BBC published an item saying that WiklLeaks had published a cable including a list of facilities that "the US describes as vital to its national security."

The list includes pipelines, communication and transport hubs.

Several UK sites are listed, including cable locations, satellite sites and BAE Systems plants.

I included this because I just found it amusing that the article included a helpful link to the text of the offending cable.

- The Guardian (UK) has been live blogging related news; it's worth checking for updates, assuming they keep it going and it wasn't just for the day of Assange's expected arrest. And BTW, can you honesty look at the photo of Assange on the Interpol poster and not see it as Bill Mahrer in a white wig?

Once more into the breach

I had really hoped to leave aside WikiLeaks for a bit after one more short comment that I was too tired to make last night. Events demand otherwise.

In science, it's held that an explanation that unites various pieces of evidence under a single heading is a sound hypothesis worthy of serious consideration. It is in that spirit, that sense of a sound hypothesis, that I say that what we are seeing is an international campaign, sparked, coordinated, and at least in some parts directly controlled by the Barack Obama White House, to destroy WikiLeaks. Not in the cause of justice or "protecting sources" or any of the rest of that crap, but out of a pure, self-interested, hunger for power and dominance.

Of particular relevance here, the Obama administration has taken an even harsher line against whistle-blowers than the Shrub gang did. The growing, expanding, campaign against WikiLeaks fits right in with that agenda. And that agenda makes everything that's going on make sense.

Mastercard now has cut off WikiLeaks, claiming it is engaged in "illegal activity." Visa now has cut off WikiLeaks, muttering about "the nature of its business." This, of course, despite the fact that WikiLeaks has done nothing illegal. As one Ben Yarrow put in in the tweet heard 'round the world,

Freedom of Speech - Priceless. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

The Swiss post office's bank, PostFinance, has shut the account Julian Assange set up there, arguing that he couldn't prove he lived in Geneva. It says it will return the 31,000 euros deposited there - but doesn't say when, meaning for now the funds are effectively frozen. According to WikiLeaks, PayPal has not only blocked the group's account, it has frozen - that is, it has and is not allowing to be transmitted - some 60,000 euros intended for the group. Which means the group is out some 90,000 euros at exactly the time when its costs are rising and its ability to obtain donations is being choked off.

Assange himself has been arrested by UK police and is being held in Wandsworth prison without bail despite the fact that he turned himself in as soon as police received a valid warrant, the police knew where he was before, his attorneys offered to accept a number of conditions including an ankle bracelet, and face it, he is hardly a flight risk.

That linked article, by the way, repeats the same falsehoods about Assange's legal troubles with Sweden that have penetrated almost all coverage:

[H]e faces one count of rape, one of unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation.

First, no actual charges have been filed and what he is wanted for is questioning. Second, Sweden has a much broader definition of what constitutes "rape" than the US or most other Western counties do, under which even consensual sex can be rape if the man refused to wear a condom. As I have said before, this does not mean he is not guilty. It does mean the reporting is the polite term is inaccurate.

More importantly, it should be emphasized - it can't be emphasized enough - that this has nothing to do with WikiLeaks! Assange could be an outright sexual predator and it would still say absolutely nothing about the leaks or the value of the organization (or, if you prefer, the lack thereof). It's a sideshow, a distraction the powers-that-be are delighted to see be a center of focus, one which I still find, as I said the other day, fishy, but which ultimately is irrelevant to everyone except the people directly concerned.

Meanwhile, major news media, ever eager to suck up to power, have largely stopped applying the term "whistle-blower," one most people regard as favorable, to WikiLeaks. After White House blah-blaher Tommy Vietor said WikiLeaks "is not a whistle-blowing organization," AP, NBC News, and Reuters all snapped to and the New York Times has flopped back and forth, sometimes using the term "whistle-blower" but in at least one case changing a posted article to remove it.

The direct threats have also continued, of course:

Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters [on Monday] that he is personally involved in the ongoing criminal probe of WikiLeaks and that he authorized "a number of things to be done so that we can get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable."

Holder wouldn't say just what the basis for a prosecution would be beyond saying that the Espionage Act of 93 years ago was not the only thing they were looking at - which is to be expected since, again, WikiLeaks has broken no laws, especially not any US laws. But that is not a problem, according to Holder.

"To the extent there are gaps in our laws," Holder [said last week], "we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say . . . that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that's ongoing."

Put another way, if we can find something to use, the fact that you were not subject to US jurisdiction is irrelevant. (That, parenthetically, is not new: We've argued that the reach of US law extends across the world for at least 21 years.)

As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, even being innocent is no guarantee against punishment, especially when, as Senator Mitch "Fishface" McConnell suggested on Meat the Press, you can simply change the law - because, after all, if dumping "innocent until proven guilty" is not a problem, as it apparently isn't, then pitching the Constitution's ban on bills of attainder and ex post facto laws down the memory hole should be no problem, either. The message is, "We'll find something!" - a message it is reasonable to think is not aimed just at WikiLeaks but at anyone else who may think of crossing the government.

This is all being done despite the uncontested fact that

[d]ays before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released.

The State Department flatly refused, just as the US government had in the face of a similar request prior to the summer release of the documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That is, the US could have prevented many if not all of the threats to innocent people they now claim exist - and they outright refused to do so. With the experience of the summer behind then, they had to know that WikiLeaks would proceed. So was the Obama White House interested in protecting innocent people or in having something with which to slam WikiLeaks? It's hard to argue that it was not the latter.

By the way, it's also uncontested, despite what media accounts would have you believe if you don't dig a bit, that after being summarily dismissed by the US government, WikiLeaks went to four major European news outlets and they, along with the New York Times, published redacted versions of the released cables - and that WikiLeaks posted those cables only after those media has published stories about them and in many cases with the redactions they proposed.

But still, but still, it's not all bad news. Last week, the ACLU said prosecuting WikiLeaks would raise "serious constitutional concerns." On Monday, Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief of Wired.com, wrote on "Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America." The group Civil Liberties Australia has issued a statement declaring it

unreservedly supports Julian Assange's right to operate as a journalist/blogger, and to post leaked material online. By doing so, he commits no legitimate offence we're aware of in the USA or Australia.

The statement went on to put him in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg and Woodward/Bernstein.

Even better, Twitter and Facebook have indicated no intention to ban WikiLeaks, with Facebook saying the WikiLeaks Facebook page "does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies." That may well not be the end of it, especially in the case of Twitter which was evasive on the matter, but for now the access remains up.

So the battle, if you will, goes on. Which brings me to the last thing I want to say here, the thing I was too tired to say last night. It will be relatively short because Glenn Greenwald has covered it in more detail and at greater length than I could have in the first phrase and would have in the second. But still I want to say it.

There are powerful people in the House and in the Senate who have condemned WikiLeaks as "terrorist," who have successfully intimidated companies into breaking their ties with the group, who have proposed changing laws and ignoring the Constitution in order to get WikiLeaks in general and Julian Assange in particular. But despite all that, their power lies in their influence and their connections to the levers of power. They are not the people with their hands on those levers. Those people are found in the White House and the federal agencies it oversees. So it is those people I will consider.

These people, these people who have covered up torture; who outright refuse to pursue even the self-admitted torture and war crimes committed by the Bush administration in direct violation of international treaty obligations, indeed who have actively sought to block attempts by others to do so; these people who run their own secret prisons; whose military has repeatedly killed innocent civilians, tried to cover it up, and then dismissed those victims as "accidents"; a military which as recently as last July turned over prisoners to Iraqi security knowing they would be tortured; these people, who drag out and extend immoral wars on behalf of corrupt governments; who have claimed the power to spy on us, the power to poke, prod, and pry into every facet of our lives in secret and to track us in real time; who have claimed the power even, potentially, to kill us; all of it, all of it, without oversight and without being questioned -

These people do not have the moral standing to attack WikiLeaks.

They do not have the moral standing to accuse it of putting innocents at risk. They do not have the moral standing to lecture it about "impropriety." They do not have the moral standing to go on about "illegality." They do not have the moral standing to point their blood-stained fingers, not at WikiLeaks and not at those who would and do support it.

Is WikiLeaks perfect? Beyond criticism from any source? Without error? Of course not, no, and don't be stupid. Still, Thomas Jefferson was quoted as saying "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable at times that I wish it to be always alive." It is in exactly that spirit that I can unhesitatingly say:

Long live WikiLeaks.

It's not information, it's disinformation!

Regular reader and occasional commenter JM commented on my previous post thusly:

There's suspicion of government conspiracy too:

But then why would the government be after the guy if they participated in the leaking? Granted, she's got a sobering analysis of the publicity here:

I don't really care of Amazon doesn't host him, it's their choice.

(I did turn the written-out URL's in the original to hyperlinks for convenience; it is otherwise unchanged and quoted in full.)

I wrote a response but it kept getting longer and longer until I had to break it into two comments and - well, the hell with it, I decided to make it a post since I think some of the points are relevant enough for general consumption. So here it is:

To be precise for non-link followers, the suspicion expressed in the first linked post was of a conspiracy by people in the government ("the remnants of Cheney's operation at State and in the military"), not by the government.

Okay. To be direct, the argument made there by Anglachel (the poster) that this is "a rather large rat-fucking operation" by the right wing to "embarrass and compromise people, force resignations, undermine conduct of policy" doesn't impress me in the least.

For one thing, it's typical conspiracy-mongering: "This much information being released does not happen without some serious coordination and power." Why not? The Pentagon Papers, which had more impact than this release ever will, was the act of one person. So why not? The only answer seems to be "Well - it just doesn't, that's all."

Something that pretty much everyone (the qualifier there included merely for the purpose of scientific-level doubt) agrees on is that the info was available on an essentially unsecured computer network accessible to a rather large number of people. In light of that, I find the whole "must have been a big coordinated operation" line, offered without anything to back it up other than the assertion itself, wholly unconvincing.

And, like many conspiracy theories, it changes definitions as the need arises: Early on the leak is described as "information on so many fronts being made public all at once" - but later it's "carefully selected stuff."

So it's a carefully selected but huge mass that shows "fairly conventional politics of states," i.e., contains nothing special or particularly damaging, even though it was intended to, again, "embarrass and compromise people, force resignations, undermine conduct of policy."

Nope. I don't buy it. I do notice, following some links to links, that the idea that this is some sort of conspiracy by someone(s) for some purpose has its supporters - one even arguing that the fact that there were a few significant bits buried in a mass of trivia was itself evidence of a conspiracy. But then again, some people are still arguing about Samuel Mudd.

As for the second linked post, I find it more revealing than intended since in it the judgment on WikiLeaks, the release of the cables, and all the rest of it appears to come down to a personal distaste for Julian Assange, which is a really crappy basis for judgment.

Just how crappy can be seen in the argument, made by Anglachel in comments, that his failure was not in releasing the "carefully selected stuff" but in not doing his own "careful selection" to "embarrass" people and "undermine conduct of policy" in some particular area such as Honduras. It appears that all the talk about his "paranoic ego trip" (which is at least somewhat internally contradictory) and repeated references to dealing in "stolen goods" would evaporate if only Assange had used the cables in the way Anglachel would want him to.

I agree Assange comes off as an arrogant twerp. But I know that's totally irrelevant: In their personal lives, Isaac Newton, Gandhi, and a host of others we could name were real pricks. Does that mean we ignore what they did outside that realm? As Joan Baez said, referring to Bob Dylan, "Idols are best when they're made of stone/A savior's a nuisance to live with at home."

As for Amazon, the issue isn't whether it hosted WikiLeaks or not. It's that it agreed to host WikiLeaks and then took it down after Joe Lieberman gave it the evil eye - which represented both corporate cowardice and, far more importantly, government intimidation. Do we really want to go the route of having the only websites that can get hosted be those that never tick off government? Or a single senator?

And finally, just BTW/FYI, it is legally incorrect to describe, as Anglachel repeatedly does, the documents that WikiLeaks has as "stolen property." This came up in the Pentagon Papers case, where the government wanted to charge Daniel Ellsberg with "theft," among other things. The defense pointed out, however, that Ellsberg had copied the documents and - the same as in this case - the originals never left government hands; the government was never denied either use or possession of the documents. The charge was dropped (after the government made a ridiculous attempt to maintain it by saying Ellsberg had "stolen the arrangement of the words on the page," that is, copying = theft) and as far as I'm aware, the argument has never been made since. This is why all the talk of laws revolves around "release" of the cables, not the "theft" of them.

Footnote: Instead of idle speculation and armchair psychoanalysis of what Assange is "about" or "after," we could look to his own words. (Link via Digby.)

And it's still trying to be

Even in the face of all the attacks on WikiLeaks, there has been pushback.

First, although the main site, resolved by EveryDNS, is gone, has been taken down, there are numerous mirror sites. In fact, there are now hundreds of them, specifically as a result of the attempt to kill WikiLeaks. And the site itself is still up via servers in other countries, where some companies are not as spineless as some US ones.

For example, in response to the demand from the French minister for industry, energy and digital economy that WikiLeaks not be hosted in France, the company that does host it, OVH, refused, saying:

It is not up to politicians or OVH to demand or decide the closure of a site, but to the justice system.

In Sweden, WikiLeaks is hosted by a company called Bahnhof. In response to an inquiry from The Daily Beast, CEO Jon Karlung wrote:

"The service is provided in Sweden—where Swedish law applies... We are not subject to American law, Chinese laws or Iranian laws either, for that matter. WikiLeaks is just a normal business client. We do not treat them any different than any other client."

Has the United States government reached out to ask you to deny hosting for WikiLeaks? "No."

Would you revoke hosting capabilities if so? "Of course not."

What's more, WikiLeaks' new Swiss registrar, Switch, said there was "no reason" why it should be forced offline.

There also was pushback from organizations of reporters and journalists. For one example, the International Federation of Journalists

condemned the political backlash being mounted against the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks and accused the United States of attacking free speech after it put pressure on the website's host server to shut down the site yesterday.

And Reporters Without Borders said it

can only condemn this determination to hound Assange and reiterates its conviction that WikiLeaks has a right under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to publish these documents and is even playing a useful role by making them available to journalists and the greater public.

There was also some support from within the media itself - usually involving, no big surprise, non-US outlets. For example, Der Spiegel (Germany), while acknowledging it had consulted with the US before publishing the cables and accepted some objections, still said that

[i]t is now possible to view many political developments around the world through the lens of those who participated in those events. As such, our understanding of those events is deeply enriched. That alone is often enough to place transparency ahead of national regulations regarding confidentiality.

And The Economist (UK), a generally politically conservative magazine, published a piece titled "In defense of WikiLeaks" which declared:

If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. ... Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.

(Those last two links via the very useful Pruning Shears.)

As for politicians and other public figures, while some were screaming "enemy noncombatant" and "terrorist" and "traitor" and "kill him," at least one - Ron Paul - expressed some sanity:

“In a free society we're supposed to know the truth,” Paul said. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

(I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Personal privacy and civil liberties are areas where the left and the right can overlap and combine in unusual ways.)

There is one other absolutely essential point to be made here: The government's claims that the release of the cables is a devastating attack on the US which will get innocent people killed is at best significantly exaggerated. In fact, at a defense briefing last week Defense Secretary Robert Gates positively played down the importance of the release, labeling claims that the impact on US foreign policy amounts to a "meltdown" or a "game-changer" as "fairly significantly overwrought." He even referred to a quote wondering "how can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations," that being "dangerous and pernicious." The speaker was John Adams.

Two days before that, the McClatchy news service had reported that "officials may be overstating" the effect of the release and could not name anyone who had been harmed or threatened as a result of WikiLeaks' actions.

This is the same thing that happened with the summertime release of the documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: They were going to "get people killed," was the cry. "Assange has blood on his hands" screeched more than one. But months later, there was "no evidence" that anyone named in the documents had been harmed in retaliation.

So WikiLeaks has survived, at least so far, and that despite the best efforts of several governments, lead by the US. That effort has not even succeeded more than partly in shifting the focus from what's in the cables to the government's preferred focus, the fact of their release. WikiLeaks has been bruised, and it could use some help. But despite, again, the efforts of the US government and others, it is not isolated, it is not cut off, and it is not without support.

That is a good thing.

Footnote: A number of the links above (and in the previous post) were originally found at WL Central, which describes itself as "an unofficial WikiLeaks information resource." It looks like a good place to keep up on relevant events.

They say that information wants to be free

The campaign to turn Julian Assange into the new Osama bin Laden continues apace, with politicians and pundits calling him a "terrorist" who should be jailed as a "traitor" (although how an Australian can be a "traitor" to the US goes unexplained) and media describing him in terms befitting a hunted criminal gradually being brought to heel: For example, AP referred to "WikiLeaks' elusive founder, his options dwindling," and the Guardian (UK) asserted "the net was closing on Julian Assange."

One of the latest turns came in a letter from a legal advisor at the State Department addressed to both Assange and one of his attorneys, Jennifer Robinson, denouncing release of the documents in the by-now standard apocalyptic terms and demanding, essentially, that Assange shut up, go away, and otherwise be a good little boy.

What makes the letter important is the fact that it was addressed to his attorney as well as to him. Doing so, as Robinson noted,

appeared to bracket together client and lawyer as if to suggest that WikiLeaks and its lawyers were one and the same.

Basic international attorney-client protocol says that "Lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients' causes as a result of discharging their functions." By violating that protocol and effectively connecting her to WikiLeaks, the State Department appears to be attmpting to intimidate Robinson by suggesting she could be liable for prosecution in whatever way Assange himself might be - and thereby, potentially, also intimidating anyone else who might consider being a lawyer either for WikiLeaks or Assange himself.

Of course, it could be that the State Department legal advisor just didn't know what the hell he was doing, but it's rather hard to credit that when the intimidation (and the surveillance of Assange's attorneys) fits in so well with everything else the US and other nations - with or without US prodding - have been doing to isolate WikiLeaks, to cut it from the rest of the world and deny it support.

For example, on Friday the OMB

directed all federal agencies to bar unauthorized employees from accessing the Wikileaks web site and its leaked diplomatic cables.

In response, the State Department and the Commerce Department have warned employees to not look at the site and the Education Department has blocked access to it altogether. The DOD has blocked access to the site and some mirror sites as well. Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has blocked access to the WikiLeaks site not only on computers used by staff but on those used by visitors as well.

A spokesman for the library could not immediately comment, but expects to have a statement shortly.

That is, "We're doing this now; we'll come up with a good excuse later." That sort of bitter hilarity continued on Friday, as it developed that

U.S. soldiers in Iraq who try to read about the Wikileaks disclosures--or read coverage of them in mainstream news sites--on unclassified networks get a page warning them that they're about to break the law.

In this case - and there has got to be a name for this sort of argument, I just can't think of one - in response to complaints that Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and a bunch of other sites are blocked,

[a] spokesperson for U.S. forces in Iraq disputed that claim, saying that the web sites aren't actually blocked--it's just that attempts to access them on the unclassified network brings up a warning page saying that you're about to break the law.

Mugger to victim: "I'm not saying you have to give me your wallet, I'm just saying I'll shoot you if you don't."

The attempts at isolation were not limited to government:

The nation's biggest defense contractors, who employ thousands of people with security clearances, are taking steps to restrict their access to Wikileaks, including one company which is blocking employees from accessing any website, including news stories, with "wikileaks" in the URL.

And the office of career services at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs passed on to its students a warning from an unnamed alumnus now at the State Department that they should not link to the documents or discuss them in any public forum if they ever wanted to work for the federal government.

The feds were busy on the other end of the string, too. Just before WikiLeaks was to release the cables, the site was hit with a devastating DDoS (dedicated denial of service) attack. It is still down. (The standard line is that such attacks are normally the result of amateur hackers - in fact, the source this time is supposed to be a self-styled hacktivist known as th3j35t3r, i.e., "the Jester," but see below.) In the face of that, WikiLeaks arranged to have hosting at Amazon.com. But Amazon got a call from the office of Senator Joe Lieberman broadly hinting he, as Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, would be investigating Amazon's connections to WikiLeaks. Amazon quickly dropped WikiLeaks.

(The company, not surprisingly, denies Lieberman's inquiry had anything to do with the decision, nope not one little thing. No one believed it.)

In response to Lieberman's "request," Tableau Software fell in line, even though all they hosted was "data visualizations" which

contained no classified data at all, but merely described the distribution of the data according to various criteria.

Like this, and thank you Google cache. (Google is good for some things, after all.)

DNS provider EveryDNS also dropped WikiLeaks, although they claimed it was because the massive DDoS attack threatened and in the future would continue to threaten the stability of their on-line infrastructure - which, if true, indicates just how large-scale the attack was and at least in my mind raises questions about its source, about if it really was just some amateur "we don't wanna know anything" types or if it's some, let's say, "more professional" undertaking designed to cover its tracks by looking like an amateur one.

Nor were the efforts limited to the US. For example, Australia said it would cooperate with the US on WikiLeaks and that Assange is under investigation there, and

[t]he French minister for industry, energy and digital economy, Eric Besson, wrote to CGIET, the body governing internet use, to ask that hosting for WikiLeaks in France be terminated.

Going international, I expect, brings up the case in Sweden. First note that I use the word "case" because as too many people seem not to realize, no actual charges have been filed; he is wanted for questioning. I also want to emphasize that I have no idea if Assange is guilty or innocent: We all learned long ago - or should have, anyway - that even being an angel in one way does not prevent a person from being a devil in another.

Still, the whole thing is just strange. The original case was dropped for lack of evidence. After the intercession of a Swedish politician, a different prosecutor in a different part of the country picked it up with the result that an international arrest warrant was issued and Interpol sent out a so-called "red notice" - a sort of "most wanted" poster - calling for anyone who has seen him or knows where he is to report it. What's more, the prosecutor wants Assange to be held in solitary confinement and incommunicado, without access to visitors or even his lawyers. And even though he is, again, wanted for questioning, not for trial, the prosecutor has refused offers to meet via teleconference and has even failed to provide his lawyers with a copy of the warrant.

Again, none of this is proof either that he's not guilty or that it is a scheme to extradite him to the US in secret, but - well, the whole thing just seems kinda fishy, okay?

Finally for this part, there is of course the decision by PayPal to cut off WikiLeaks, thus denying it a significant source of cash flow. PayPal, like Amazon, gave the usual blah blah blather - "illegal activities," and whatnot harrumph cough and the fact that it came in the wake of Joe Lyingman crowing about Amazon's capitulation and demanding that "any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them" had nothing to do with it, it said - but no seems to be able to recall an earlier occasion when the outfit was so quick to act against supposed illegalities in the absence of the not-so-subtle prompting of high officials of the US government using terms like "outrage" and "terrorist" and introducing new punitive bills specifically aimed at the supposed offender. PayPal was not WikiLeaks' only source of cash flow - there are others and you certainly could consider tossing them a few bucks - but still it surely hurt.

And, as I said towards the top, it's all part of the campaign to isolate WikiLeaks, to cut it off from the rest of the world and deny it support. To, that is, destroy it. Because while information may want to be free, governments want to keep it in thrall.

As long as I'm on the subject of taxes, #3

When the current discounted federal income tax rates were set in 2001, they were, again, avowedly temporary. I didn't buy it. I said the "temporary" part was a scam.

I said that when the time came for the rates to revert to what they had previously been, a great hue and cry would be raised about how "You want to - gasp - increase taxes! Tax and spend! Tax and spend! Higher taxes! Oh, the horror!"

Which is pretty much what's happened, save that the Dims had enough political wit this time to claim a desire to continue the current rates for almost everyone, forcing the GOPpers to come up with that "job creators" bullcrap. Even so, the game has played out pretty much as I predicted, with everyone and their brother saying how we can't "raise taxes" - even though, again, that's not what would be happening by any logical understanding of the matter.

Now that the plans to continue the lower rates but limit them to the first $250,000 (and, on the second vote, $1,000,000) of income, somehow anything below a cool quarter-million a year being "middle class," have failed, talk has returned the earlier notion of extending the lower rates on all income - but only for two years for the exospheric end of the income spectrum.

Again, I call bullshit. I call scam.

Does anyone really think that in a presidential year the Dims are going to stand up against GOPper cries about the need to "head off" the "coming tax hike" on "America's job creators?" Does anyone think that the GOPper-controlled House would not pass a bill making the lower rate permanent for the ultra-rich and then send the bill to the Senate, daring the Dums to vote against it and thus, they will crow, "killing jobs?"

In fact, do you really think that no one, neither Dum nor GOPper, has thought of the fact that if the current rate sale is allowed to expire, that could happen now? That first thing in the new Congress, the GOPper-run House could re-pass the present rates, including for the very rich, and dare the Senate to reject it, thus, they will say at every opportunity, "voting in favor of raising taxes on all hard-working Americans already overburdened by the failed liberal policies of tax-and-spend?"

In fact, that possibility seems so obvious to me that I really wonder, really truly wonder, how much of what we're seeing is really just shadow-boxing with the outcome already fixed.

I'll say it again: We are so screwed.

As long as I'm on the subject of taxes, #2

Something that really yanks my chain about the whole tax business is how everyone keeps referring to a tax "hike" if some new deal is not made, about how taxes will "go up" on January 1.

I contend that there is no impeding "tax increase." That taxes are not going to "go up." When the current reduced rates were set, the cut was sold, avowedly and specifically sold, with the reassurance that this was temporary. The rates were going to expire and return to the previous ones after a specific time, that time being December 31, 2010.

Consider this: If a store you shop at ran a week-long sale - say your local grocery store has a special on canned tuna - would you feel it reasonable to go into the store on the last day of that sale, storm up to the manager, and loudly complain about the plan to "raise the price of tuna tomorrow?" I really doubt you would. There was a sale, the sale is over, the price goes back to what it was.

The case with the taxes is not precisely the same but it is more than close enough: The end of a temporary tax cut - a tax sale, in essence - is not a tax "increase." It is the end of a special deal that was only supposed to last a certain time.

This, it should be clear but my experience tells me that it probably isn't because there are always those who insist on reading things a certain way so I figure I have to say it, has nothing to do with whether or not extending the lower rates for anyone or someone or everyone is a good idea or not. It has to do with accuracy and with refusing to absorb right-wing memes. It has to do, I suppose, with framing, which for some reason appears to have fallen into disrepute among a number of lefties as a cliche fad.

Which is unfortunate, because framing really is a valuable political skill. For more years than I care to remember, I have been saying that in any political dispute, it is a terrible mistake to let your opponent set the terms of debate. But it's a mistake we make over and over again and now are making it again in talking about how the end of the "Bush tax cuts" means tax "increases."

I'm just really tired of own goals, okay?

As long as I'm on the subject of taxes, #1

The GOPpers and their Dimcrat allies keep talking about not "raising taxes on the job creators," that is, the rich. Yeah, the "job creators." They're not greedy goons who have ripped off the rest of us to line their own pockets to the point where

[t]he U.S. income gap between rich and poor is the greatest among Western industrialized nations,

on no no no. They're the "job creators." Giving them more money through tax cuts creates jobs! It's amazing!

Well, to any bozos out there who bought into and/or repeat that crap, I have a simple question: Where are the damn jobs? The official, understated, unemployment rate was 9.8% in November. That was the 19th straight month with unemployment above 9% and it ain't goin' down anytime soon:

November's figures suggest that many U.S. companies — especially manufacturers — have found ways to supply any growth in demand for their products without expanding payrolls. ...

"We've found ways of doing things faster and better," said Alan Parkhill, president of Banner American Products Inc., a maker of machines for schools and the print industry. The Temecula, Calif., firm employs 25 workers, down more than 20% from late 2007 when the recession started.

"It's sad to say, but … you get rid of somebody and thought they were integral but then you find out you don't suffer," Parkhill said. "You realize you were bloated."

All that points toward the prospect that high unemployment levels could stretch much further into the future than most economists had expected.

The tax rates at issue were reduced in 2001. They have been in effect since the early days of the Shrub administration. If a lower tax rate for the richest is so great as a job creator, then where are the damn jobs?

In June 2001, when the cuts were first signed into law, the unemployment rate was 4.5%. In the 107 months since then, unemployment has been at or just barely below that figure just eight times, all in a nine month period from September 2006 to May 2007. The last time unemployment was under 6% was in July 2008. Where are the damn jobs?

The fact, the fact, is that this business of giving the rich more cash equals more jobs for the rest of us is crap. It has failed, miserably, thoroughly, completely, it is failing, miserably, thoroughly, completely.

But the only argument the Dims raise against continuing to throw money at the rich is, essentially, that we can't afford it because of da-da-da-DUM the deficit. Not that it's a waste, not that if we really wanted to help the middle class, the working class, and the poor (increasingly the same thing) we'd raise taxes on the rich to where they were several decades back, not that the rich already have, dammit, more than enough and those who gained the most should give back the most - oh, no, none of that, we can't have any of that, why that's class warfare!

No, what the Dims say is, "We're against continuing the special tax breaks for the rich because we're the real Deficit Hawks!" In times past, the Dims tried to out tax-cut the GOPpers. They couldn't. Now they're trying to out deficit-hawk the GOPpers. I expect the same result.

We really are so screwed.

Noted in passing

We now have yet another demonstration, if one was needed, of the complete and utter failure of the media to actually inform the public and thereby serve the public interest. The opening paragraph of the Roll Call story on today's Senate tax votes read this way:

Senate Democrats remained defiant Saturday after Republicans easily defeated their middle-class tax-cut proposals and said they would simply allow all of the Bush-era tax cuts to expire if the GOP does not relent.

John Stanton, the staffer who wrote that, is either a jackass or a liar. The GOPpers did not "defeat" the two proposals, they successfully filibustered them. They successfully prevented them from coming up for a vote. But oh no, according to Roll Call, they weren't blocked, they weren't filibustered, they were "defeated." Easily so, in fact. Bullshit.

Revealingly, Stanton does not include the actual votes, which were 53-36 in both cases. I expect that was because it's hard to argue that the GOPpers "easily defeated" the proposals when the opponents got 17 fewer votes than the proponents did.

I want to note clearly that I'm not presenting this as a case of "GOPpers bad, Dims good." It's a case of "media bad." Again.

We interrupt our doom and gloom...

...for some good news.

The Illinois legislature has passed a bill establishing civil unions in the state. It passed the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Wednesday. Despite the no-surprise opposition from the Catholic church, Governor Pat Quinn, who is Catholic, announced his intention to have a bill-signing ceremony early in the new year. He praised the bill and called its passage "historic."

The bill makes "marriage" and "civil union" essentially identical for all legal purposes in Illinois, including recognizing same-sex civil unions and marriages performed in other states as civil unions in Illinois.

This does not, of course and unhappily, apply to any federal benefits because the right-wing nutbags who wield too much power there have made legal recognition of same-sex couples illegal. But that is nothing new.

One interesting and I think amusing little sidebar is that the bill also allows straight couples to enter a civil union rather than a marriage. One possible reason would be the example of a couple who would not qualify for some federal benefit because of their combined income but who would be eligible as individuals. By having a civil union, they obtain the benefits of marriage at a state level but are still regarded as single - and thus eligible for the benefit - at the federal level.

Opponents of the measure - naturally - claimed it will lead to the imagined horrors of same-sex marriage. "Think of the children!" is the cry.

Actually, we have thought of the children and those who grow up in same-sex households do just as well as those brought up in opposite-sex ones, thank you very much. And marriage is yes, the goal. As I put it in a discussion of "civil union" versus "marriage" in the wake of the Massachusetts court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in 2003:

My concern is that as long as we use different terms, there will always be the notion that one ("marriage") is somehow better, superior, to the other ("civil union"). "Oh, well, we're married, you see. You just have one of those civil union things." It implies a judgment.

It's been nearly 50 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that "separate but equal" is actually "inherently unequal." I do not want to see us repeat that mistake [of endorsing "separate but equal"] in the case of same-sex marriages (yes, marriages). As long as we allow different terms, we allow the perception - and thus justify the practice - of actual difference.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley gets that: He applauded passage of the civil union bill but urged lawmakers to "move faster" into "this new century" and legalize gay marriage. So there is hope that those who opposed the bill are correct that it's a step on the road to recognition of same-sex marriage.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled gloom and doom.

Footnote to the preceding

I was just wondering about something.

Between November 28 and December 1, a string of right-wing outlets, including the Washington Times, the Daily Caller, FrontPage, Pajamas Media, NewsBusters, Investors Business Daily, the Media Research Center, PowerLine, and the Wall Street Journal (I stopped counting at that point) all slammed the New York Times on exactly the same basis: the paper was "hypocritical" for publishing the WikiLeaks document dump when it had not published all the emails purloined from the CRU the year before.

Is there some Central Command that sends out a daily email to these sorts of outfits telling them what to be outraged about and what to say about it? I mean, if not, how is it that they so rapidly focus on making the same point, often in exactly the same words?

Warms your heart, Part Four

Last for this round of global warming posts.

The evidence for a significant human fingerprint on global warming has become sufficiently compelling that even some former skeptics have come around. (Note I refer to "skeptics," who I define as people who had honest doubts on the matter. The nanny-nanny naysayers, even those who pretend to a scientific interest, deny global warming for other, usually ideological, reasons. They will never change their minds, they will just eventually die off. Or drown in a melting ice cap.)

Significant among the defectors from the ranks of the skeptics in the opinion of a good number of commentators came in August in the person of Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. That volume, published in 2001 to the utter delight of the right wing and the general run of environmental naysayers, argued that things really were pretty good on the environmental front and that concerns about matters

including pollution control and biodiversity, were either overblown as threats or amenable to relatively simple technological fixes.

Lomborg agreed that global warming was real and caused by human activity, but

argued that the governments spending billions to curb carbon emissions would be better off diverting those resources to initiatives such as AIDS research, anti-malaria programs and other kinds of humanitarian aid.

The two things that always irritated me about Lomborg were first his condescending aloofness, his "hey, BFD" attitude about environmental issues while parading his supposed street cred on the environment, and second and more importantly, his utterly incomprehensible contention that it was an either/or: either work on global climate or (for example) malaria prevention, it being impossible, he essentially argued, to do both.

Now the one-time vociferous opponent of the Kyoto protocol is calling for an investment of $100-150 billion a year to combat global warming and mitigate its impacts, writing in a soon-to-be published book:

If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming.

Some have dismissed his change of heart, either regarding him as a Bjørn-come-lately or a self-promoter who wants to get on the bandwagon. To the first group, I say he's here now and it's a really dumb idea to make it more difficult for people to admit they were wrong. To the second group, I say that even if that's true, it's good news because it shows which way that bandwagon is traveling.

The more serious problem I have with Lomborg is that he is still hung up on technological quick-fixes such as "climate engineering" where, having screwed with the climate, we screw with it some more to try to negate what we already did with our previous screwing. He considers it a matter of a cost-benefit analysis - but proposes to apply it to technologies some of which exist only in hypotheses and whose net benefit (benefit minus unintended consequences) are unknown. Meanwhile, he continues to dismiss out of hand the necessity of reducing CO₂ emissions on the grounds that it's too expensive - without regard, it seems, to what not controlling those emissions would cost.

But leave that aside for the moment and just realize that his change of heart (which he would insist is merely a change of emphasis) is a blow to the nanny-nanny naysayers. Unfortunately, that, however, will not stop them from rehashing refuted arguments or engaging in witchhunts. Indeed, I suspect we can expect more of the latter because increasingly, that's all they have: distortion, innuendo, and character assassination.

A good example of a recent witchhunt was the so-called "Climategate" non-scandal. I had some initial comments on this when it first happened, which came down to, in a single-phrase summation, there's nothing there.

And there wasn't, it was all "Ooh, look at THIS! Evil!" and when that one got shot down it was "Ooh, look at THAT! Evil!" and so on until they reverted to the first one again. Which delighted our Entertainment Tonight news media, which loves conflict and despises resolution and eagerly adopted the "Climategate" meme right along with the name. Even today, a year later, you will still find articles about global warming including references to the "credibility" of the science having being "damaged" by the emails stolen from the server of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

That continues despite the fact - all but invariably not mentioned in those articles - that there were six separate investigations into the matter and every one of them cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing. Two of them were done by PennState (because one of the scientists whose work was questioned, Dr. Michael Mann, is on staff there), one by an international committee organized by the University of East Anglia and the Royal Society, one by the university itself, one by the UK's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, and one by the UK government responding the the Committee's report. (Links to all the reports at the above link.)

The most comprehensive was likely the international committee one. It criticized the scientists involved for "failing to display the proper degree of openness" in response to Freedom of Information requests but also said

we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

[Emphasis in original.]

In other words, despite any personal failings they may have displayed, the science remains sound and robust.

(In addition to these, AP did its own review of the emails and concluded that "they didn't support claims that the science of global warming was being faked." So did Popular Mechanics, which concluded pretty much the same thing as many of the others: The scientists did not act well on a personal level in the emails but the professional honesty in their work was not in doubt.)

Another example of a witchhunt would be the campaign of the Sunday Telegraph (UK) against Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the IPCC. In December 2009, the paper printed an article claiming that Pachauri had made millions of dollars in consulting work obtained as the result of his position with the IPCC. A month later, it published another article by the same two authors about a group Pachauri headed which was designed to raise questions about its financing and his income, referring to "secretive" arrangements and the "mysterious" nature of the group's finances.

[O]ur investigations pose some questions which Dr Pachauri may not find easy to answer,

they insisted.

Apparently answering wasn't what was hard, it was getting the paper to acknowledge the answer. But in late August, faced with both the results of an independent audit of Pachauri's finances and a threat of a libel suit in the wake of its consistent refusal to make corrections, the Telegraph pulled the first story from its website and issued a half-assed apology to Pachauri, saying the article

was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC.

Which of course is exactly what it was intended to suggest with its allegations of his "making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies" and the "conflict of interest" with his role in the IPCC. And the apology, of course, will do no good. Nanny-nanny naysayers still cite the smear even as the authors real their true colors: In September, one of the authors, to the giggling delight of the other - wrote an article published (of course) in the Telegraph, describing a UN-ordered inquiry into the procedures of the IPCC as "A cunning bid to shore up the ruins" of the agency.

Both authors, it turns out, are just nanny-nanny naysayers convinced the whole IPCC and the thousands of scientists around the world and over the years that have been involved with it are engaged in a "corrupt" enterprise to - well, it's not clear exactly what but it undoubtedly has something to do with SOCIALISM! and besides, global warming doesn't exist.

The reason this remains important is two-fold: One is the obvious one that the media's continued perpetration of the "damaged credibility" routine despite the evidence to the contrary is itself damaging to hopes for combating global warming.

Two, more importantly, there is every reason to fear the witchhunts will not only continue, they are about to increase in intensity.

An article in Mother Jones ran down three of the clowns - er, clouds - on the horizon:

- Rep. Darrell Issa will be chairing the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He's pledged to hold hearings on the "Politicization of Science," the purpose of which can be seen in the fact that

he's argued that it's "very clear that [climate scientists] played fast and loose with both the truth and our money."

He also wants to go after the EPA's coming regulation of greenhouse gases.

With Issa in charge, the oversight committee will devote a good deal of time to hauling government and university climate scientists before Congress.

- Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who stands to become chair of the Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming,

has said he wants to use the panel to probe what he has called a "massive international scientific fraud." ...

"There's increasing evidence of scientific fascism that's going on," Sensenbrenner declared during a hearing last year.

- Rep. Joe Barton, who could chair the Energy and Commerce Committee thinks global warming is "absolute nonsense," and in his previous round as chairman launched an investigation into Mann and other scientists.

MJ also notes that fully half of the GOPper caucus openly denies that global warming is real and only four of them openly accept the science.

Scientists are bracing for what is likely to be at least two years of renewed attacks,

MJ says.

It could be even worse, if you can believe it: Competing with Barton to head up the Energy and Commerce Committee is one John Shimkus, who at a Committee hearing a year and a-half back picked up a Bible and read from Genesis and Matthew to argue that by the "infallible, unchanging, perfect" word of God (as recorded in the, I take it, "infallible, unchanging, perfect" words of the Bible and never mind all those different translations) that "the Earth will end only when God decides it's time to be over" and therefore, apparently, humanity is incapable of damaging the environment or the biosphere.

Nice separation of church and state there, Johnny and by the way, who among the most radical environmentalists has claimed that global warming will "destroy all living creatures" or put an end to "summer and winter, day and night?"

It's going to a long at least two years, which makes it more incumbent on us to aggressively defend not only the science of global warming, but science itself.

Warms your heart, Part Three

Before any nanny-nanny naysayer turns up here to blather on with one of the long-since stale and refuted claims that always seem to come up whenever global warming is discussed (see Rule #11), let me deal with a few:

1. Yes, global warming is real. I think I already covered that.

2. Yes, it is caused by human activities. On that point, you could look at the list of ten indicators of a "human fingerprint on climate change" offered up by Skeptical Science.

(Quick sidebar before someone goes off on this: The terms "global warming" and "global climate change" mean the same thing and are used interchangeably. Some prefer the former term because that is what is happening - the world as a whole, i.e., the waters, the land, and the atmosphere, is on average getting warmer - and some prefer the latter because they think it more accurate; they think the former implies everywhere will get warmer while in fact some places will get colder even as the world average temperature goes up. Both terms refer to the same set of facts and the same set of predictions.)

Getting back to the point, you could check out the fact that last March, the Met Office, the UK's national weather service, issued an analysis of 110 peer-reviewed papers on climate change that have appeared since the 2007 IPCC report and determined that the evidence for a human impact is stronger than ever.

"What this study shows is that the evidence has strengthened for human influence on climate and we know that because we've looked at evidence across the climate system and what this shows very clearly is a consistent picture of a warming world," said Dr [Peter] Stott [of the Met Office].

A couple of months after that, in May, the US National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a set of three reports that described the case that climate change is caused in large part by human activities as "compelling."

The core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations.

"Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems," the report concludes.

Finally for the moment anyway, at the end of September the Royal Society, one of the world's leading scientific academies, issued a "Summary of the Science" of climate change. It begins by saying this:

There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, including agriculture and deforestation.

Climate Progress, a leading global warming science site, trashed the report as "bland, pointless, and confused" and a waste of time because it gave some of the uncertainties in understanding climate change equal attention to the parts that are settled science - such as that yes, we are screwing with the climate, reflected in the fact that, as the document says,

each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it.

Now, it is true that some naysayer sites grabbed onto the report, citing its reference to uncertainties and claiming the Royal Society had "joined the deniers." Those naysayers, of course, were distorting the report for their own ends via cherry-picked paragraphs and edited quotes. But I still think the Climate Progress attack, which seemed mostly concerned with the opening the document provided for the naysayers, was off-base and unduly, very unduly, harsh, especially considering this was a consensus document that included two self-proclaimed skeptics among its co-authors - which means even those skeptics had to agree with the statement that it's human activity that's driving the warming.

3. No, it is not the Sun, as a lot of peer-reviewed studies have shown. For example, a 2009 study concluded that no more than roughly 14% of the currently-observed warming could be from the Sun. Another from 2009 said the Sun was responsible for no more that 6-8% of the warming over the entire 20th century and its effect was "negligible for warming since 1980." A third from 2008 put the maximum effect at around 10%.

And those are the high end. Other studies over the past few years (this is one example) suggest that over the past few decades, below-average solar irradiance may have actually generated a slight cooling trend, which would mean that instead of causing global warming, the effect of the Sun of late has actually been to conceal the true extent of human-caused warming.

As a side note, the range of possibilities in those studies, from generating a slight cooling to 14% of the warming, does not prove the models and analyses are "unreliable." It does demonstrate the great complexity involved in trying to pin down the size of various forcings and effects, which no one denies. The point, however, is that the studies agree that the Sun's effect on observed warming is small; they only disagree on just how small.

And by the way, no, it's not cosmic rays or any of the rest of that nonsense, either.

4. No, I have not been cherry-picking research papers and yes, there is a consensus not only about global warming but about our role in generating it. For one thing, the academies of science of 19 nations plus a large number of non-governmental science bodies agree with the contention of human-caused global warming.

Consider this: A 2009 survey of over 3,000 scientists in a variety of related fields that "included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions on global warming theory" found that 82% agreed that "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures." What's more,

[i]n general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement

with that statement: Among climatologists who are "active publishers on climate change," that is, who do research on climate change and publish in peer-reviewed journals, agreement that humans are a significant contributor to global warming reached 96%. Those who insist there is a scientific "controversy" are either misinformed, uninformed, or lying.

I know that I've not even begun to exhaust the list of nanny-nanny naysayer nitpicks - Skeptical Science has a list of 130 of them (with their refutations) - but I figured that "Yes, it's real; yes, it's us; no, it's not the Sun; and yes, there is a consensus" covered the obvious ones.

Something I have noticed, though, about naysayer arguments: Like the good right-wingers most of them are, they will simply deny reality until it becomes undeniable, at which point they will start saying "Well, of course, that. We always knew that. The real issue is this over here." That is, they will airily acknowledge what they previously vociferously denied without ever admitting to the shift. (Consider it a variation on Rule #3.) So perhaps I should take some comfort in the fact that those among the nanny-nanny naysayers who actually try to argue the science have been forced to go from denying that global warming even exists to denying humans had anything to do with it to denying that humans had a lot to do with it to arguing that "it won't be so bad" to, largely, nitpicking at individual graphs and data points. Gradually, they are being brought to heel by the harsh reality of fact.

Take what comfort you can from that.

Footnote: One more tidbit for the nanny-nanny naysayers. A link to a video showing that global warming was considered a problem by at least some scientists - in 1956. (Thanks go to DD at Notes from Underground for the tip.)

Warms your heart, Part Two

Just as the evidence for warming continues to mount, so too does evidence of visible impacts. I mean beyond things like the loss of ice, which are taken as evidence of warming, and I don't mean future impacts, I mean present-day impacts on animals and people.

Besides the already-mentioned thousands of walruses forced onto the land in Alaska, there is the fact that

researchers said last winter's massive snowstorms that struck the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic U.S. states were tied to higher Arctic temperatures.

"Normally the cold air is bottled up in the Arctic," said Jim Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. But last December and February, winds that normally blow west to east across the Arctic were instead bringing the colder air south to the Mid-Atlantic, he said.

Others have pointed to the record-breaking heat wave in Russia thus summer and the nationwide floods in Pakistan. Meanwhile in Mexico, research points to a drying out and shrinking of farm output in some regions. At the Cancun summit,

[a]gronomists are due to report on shifting weather patterns that are destabilizing the world's food supply and access to clean water, and that could lead to mass migrations as farmers flee drought or flood-prone regions.

Meanwhile, the UK is seeing abnormally early snow and bitter cold weather.

Now, as I've said many times in the course of arguing this topic, individual weather events prove nothing in themselves: One cold snap does not disprove global warming any more than one heat wave proves it. But enough individual events gathered together can create a pattern of anomalous weather that is a sign of global warming that does impact human societies.

Even more direct, however, is the plight of low-lying island nations, who earlier this month called for

urgent funding to help combat sea level changes that are already damaging many coastal communities.

At a climate change conference in the South Pacific nation of Kiribati, President Anote Tong called for the quick release of funds to help vulnerable states deal with climate change impacts. ...

[C]oastal areas of low-lying island states are being inundated by rising sea water levels. States like Kiribati and Tuvalu in the South Pacific and the Maldive islands in the Indian Ocean are seeing coastlines, coastal villages and gardens drowned under high tides. ...

Low-lying Kiribati is suffering sea water incursion into its 32 coral atolls that reach no more than 6 feet (2 meters) above sea level....

In parts of Kiribati whole villages have had to be relocated due to severe coastal erosion, food crops have been destroyed and fresh water wells contaminated by sea water.

At the Copenhagen climate summit last year, the developed nations agreed to establish a fund of $100 billion annually to aid poor and small nations such as Kiribati deal the with impacts of global warming. To give you an idea of how much (or little) that is, it is less that three-fifths of what the US alone will spend on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Fiscal 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service. (See Table 1 in this report.)

So just in this list we've got animal habits, weather patterns, food supplies, access to clean water, and the coastlines of island nations all already, today, being affected by global warming. The future is already here and it's just getting started.

Warms your heart, Part One

So yesterday another one of those global meetings about global warming began, this one at a resort in Cancun, Mexico because of course you can't expect all these important people to meet any place less than 5-star.

This meeting, however, is just a bit different: Instead of the grand pronouncements of sweeping optimism about how some incredibly significant new agreement was in the making, this one seems to be starting from the idea that real progress on a final, binding international agreement to actually control greenhouse gas emissions is going nowhere. Talk has turned to

debating how to mobilize money to cope with what's coming — as temperatures climb, ice melts, seas rise and the climate that nurtured man shifts in unpredictable ways.

That is, the focus has shifted from prevention to mitigation and the hope is not for agreements or solutions but for "incremental progress" on side issues such as establishing accounting rules both for "fast-start finance" aid promised to poor countries to help with mitigation and for nations such as China and India to report on their efforts to slow their emissions growth (not, note, to reduce emissions but to reduce their rate of growth).

This is going on even as the evidence that global warming is not only real but that its effects are already visible just keeps growing.

- In August, NOAA reported on Arctic sea ice, which had reached its minimum extent for the year. That extent was 22% below the 1979-2000 average and the 14th consecutive August with below-average sea ice extent. In September the sea ice extent was the third smallest in the last 30 years; the three smallest September extents have come in the last four years. Tens of thousands of walruses came ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest just wasn't there.

The agency's annual Arctic Report Card, based on the work of 69 researchers in eight countries, reported that temperatures in the Arctic had been running over 7⁰F. (over 4⁰C.) above normal for the first nine months of 2010. It also said that glaciers and ice caps in the region continued to lose mass an an increasing rate, the temperature in permafrost is rising, and Greenland was experiencing record temperatures and continued ice and glacier loss. It said a "return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely."

- In October

[t]he government's National Climate Data Center reported Monday that the January-September period is tied with 1998 for the warmest first nine months on record.

- Also in October, a new study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that

[t]he United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades.... [W]arming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.

Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, the paper finds most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia, may be at threat of extreme drought this century.

- NOAA maintains a list of 11 indicators of climate change, chosen because "we would unambiguously expect them to increase or decrease if the world were warming." Seven would be expected to increase, four to decrease. All 11 clearly show evidence of warming

Well, just last week there came a twelfth:

A first-of-its-kind NASA study is finding nice cool lakes are heating up — even faster than air.

Two NASA scientists used satellite data to look at 104 large inland lakes around the world and found that on average they have warmed 2 degrees (1.1 degree Celsius) since 1985. That's about two-and-a-half times the increase in global temperatures in the same time period.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver called the data "another brick in the wall." What some of the folks gathered at Cancun need is a brick to the head.

Click here!

From time to time you see those political ads on various websites that have keywords like "stop" or "prevent" or whatever. Often they are going on about Obama or "the left" or "Big Labor" or "environmental radicals" and so on.

I sometimes check them out because they can - and sometimes do - tip me to something I hadn't heard about that I should be in favor of.

Recently, the ad I've noticed shows a scowling Obama with the text "Tell the Senate to Oppose Obama's Latest Big Labor Scheme" which flips to "Police and Firefighters Forced to join a union?" The word "Forced" is in bold red letters. So I checked and this is what I found.

Turns out the ad is from the National Right to Work Committee, a well-known right-wing anti-worker outfit, griping about what they labeled the "Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill." (It's actual name is the "Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2009" - so much for the "latest scheme" part. It's only sponsor is Harry Reid. Oh, and it's a re-introduced version of the "Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2007" - so much for the "Obama" part.)

What the bill does is simply to extend some, emphasize some, of the protections of federal labor law to public safety workers - generally, police and firefighters - employed by state and local governments. In a majority of states, such workers already have the legal right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. In others, mostly in the South and the mountain states, they don't. One example of the latter is North Carolina, where state law forbids state or local government from signing contacts with any labor group representing any public employees. The bill would override such laws to the extent they affect public safety workers.

But when I say "some" protections, I mean it: The bill specifically bans any "labor organization" from engaging in a

sickout, work slowdown, strike, or any other organized job action that will measurably disrupt the delivery of emergency services and is designed to compel an employer ... to agree to the terms of a proposed contract. [Section 6(a)]

In other words, yes, you can have a union and yes you can have collective bargaining but no, you have no means beyond requests to obtain any goals. Saying you can have a union but you can't engage in any job action is like saying yes, you can have health insurance but it comes with a $25,000 deductible.

Still, I suppose that anything that would chip away at anti-worker practices and policies is to the good. Again, however, there's an important word, in this case "would." There actually appears to be little chance the bill will come up and no action on it has been taken since it was reported out of committee in April.

So why the ads? It appears to be little more than the typical right-wing drum-beating, trying to get the base (or at least some part of it) all riled up about some phony crisis or horrible portent of imminent doom. Besides, with the state of the economy, continued unemployment, and people desperate for any work they can find, the right-to-workers (who have as much to do with the rights of workers as the right-to-lifers have with the rights of living people) haven't had a whole lot to do of late and a little "Big Labor"- and "Obama"-bashing are always good to put a few fund-raised bucks in the ol' pro-corporate bank account.

Happy Stuff-yer-face Day

Otherwise known as Thanksgiving. As a Thanksgiving Day gift to all of you, I'm going to tell you everything we know about the "first Thanksgiving," that 1621 event featuring the settlers of Plymouth colony and the natives.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And though it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

That's it. That's all of it. That is the only roughly contemporaneous description of the event that has survived. It comes from a letter dated December 11, 1621 which was written by, it is believed, Edward Winslow (although no name is actually attached). It was published in 1622 in a book commonly called Mourt's Relation.

The only other even near-contemporaneous account comes from William Bradford who wrote about it in his journal (published as Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647) at least 10 to 12 years later. Even there he just sort of brushes by it, endorsing Winslow by referring to "not feigned but true reports."

They now began to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses against the winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took in good store, of which every family had its portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to the proportion. Which made many afterwards write so large of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

So there you have it. That's what the entire "first Thanksgiving" story is built on. Yes, there are reasonable guesses that can be made and even reasonable conclusions that can be drawn about additional details, but the point is those range from "maybes" to "very likelys" and do not reach the level of "we knows."

We can say, for example, that the celebration very likely took place in late September or early October (because it was shortly after harvest). Among the foods, we can confident they had fowl (such as duck or goose and quite possibly turkey because Bradford specifically mentions turkeys), fish, and deer, since those are mentioned. We can assume some others such as squash (a common feature of household gardens) and a sort of coarse corn bread. It is very likely water was the only beverage as their supply of barley would be limited (Bradford elsewhere says the English grains "grew indifferent good") and there would not have been enough time for brewing since harvest.

One important thing - which actually does rise to the level of a "we know" - is that this was not a "thanksgiving" as they would have understood the term. To them, a thanksgiving was a day set aside for prayer to give thanks to God for some special and unexpected blessing. The first public day of thanksgiving in the town was in the summer of 1623: A crop-threatening drought had lead to a day of "humiliation," a day of fasting and prayer to beg forgiveness for whatever they had done to cause God to bring this on them. Literally immediately after, there came a soaking rain which saved the crops and so a day of thanksgiving seemed appropriate.

So no, this was not a thanksgiving. It was a very traditional, very secular, English harvest feast, a celebration of a good harvest to which it was customary to invite those who had been helpful to you over the course of the year (which is why the natives were there). Their harvest wasn't big (note that Bradford called it "small"), but they had one, which surely raised everyone's spirits and gave them confidence in the success of the venture: reason enough to celebrate, especially considering what they had been through so far.

It is truly amazing just how much misinformation, mythology, and general muddle-headedness there is out there on this topic, ranging from images of picnic tables laden with turkey, mashed potatoes, and apple pies surrounded by natives dressed like plains peoples and smiling "Pilgrims" dressed in the fashions of the 1690s to, more recently, scowling tales of drunken, bloodthirsty settlers facing natives "crashing the party" and doing it in such numbers because Massasoit feared he'd be kidnapped or killed otherwise. Both visions are an attempt to overwrite history with ideology.

Plymouth in the fall of 1621 genuinely was a scene of peaceful and friendly relations, of good feeling, between English settlers and their nearest native neighbors. It was brief enough, lasting by even a generous understanding no more than a few decades, and rare enough in our nation's history such that while "the first Thanksgiving" shouldn't be a source of happily-ever-after "why can't we all just get along" fairy stories, neither is there any need to co-opt it into the service of revisionist history that merely looks to change childhood tales of noble settlers and savage natives into one of noble natives and savage settlers. Let it stand on what the actual history tells us and be enjoyed for what it was: a moment of hope and fellowship.

Happy Thanksgiving.