On Vouchers

Now that Utah's voucher bill has gone down to epic, humiliating defeat (67% against vs. 33% in favor), I'm taking a few minutes away from my latest conspiracy theory[1] to think on what that means.

Honestly, what does it mean? On paper, it looks great. The reddest state in the Union overwhelmingly repudiates one of the far-right's most important pet projects, saving itself from the same sort of privatization schemes that brought us Enron, Halliburton, and Blackwater! Go Blue!

I hadn't seen the polls in the run-up to the referendum, and I was sure that voters were going to buy into the "liberal, east-coast unions want to trap your kids in their failing schools" chatter on TV. When state rep. Greg Hughes said, "This is a Ronald Reagan solution, this is a Mitt Romney solution, this is a Governor Huntsman solution... lets trust those we've elected, and let's follow their advice, and let's vote for it,"[2] I thought the "follow the prophet" mantra would be convincing to a lot of people.

Something is going on here, something that doesn't jive with my impressions of Utah as a state that is actively hostile to "big government", and a state that wouldn't put much stock in the church-state issues that plaguevoucher proposals. The most kooky, right-wing reason I could think of was "fear of government-funded madrassahs"[3], but that's an argument I never heard. A lot of rural voters voted against it simply because there were no private schools in their areas. The 100+ mile commute was a bit of a dealbreaker for them.

My current theory is that the public school system isn't what most Utahns envision when they think of "big government." I don't mean that in the "keep government's hands off my Medicare" sense, but in the "we're too busy thinking about arrogant political bureaucrats and welfare queens to think about our neighborhood elementary school." Or maybe voters really do recognize the value of the public education system as the foundation of a diverse, egalitarian society.

Naaaah.

Let me close with the words of Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, who donated more money to Parents for Choice in Education than the rest of the country put together: "[Utahns who voted against Referendum 1] don't care enough about their kids. They care an awful lot about this system, this bureaucracy, but they don't care enough about their kids to think outside the box."

He also said that the state failed its IQ test. Can you say "sore loser?"


Notes:

1) The writer's strike is a transparent attempt by liberal unions to derail Stephen Colbert's presidential campaign.

2) KCPW's vouchers debate, closing arguments. (mp3)

3) Islamic schools with a reputation for backward and anti-Western teachings.

Some sorta enviro-bloggy dealie

Cory Doctorow says that today is Blog Action Day, and everyone is supposed to blog something about the environment. But it's late, and I've got nothing, so I guess I can just link to No Impact Man instead of doing anything constructive myself. He's good.

The return of St. Krugman the Outraged

After two years in the wilderness, I am mere hours from being able to read Paul Krugman's columns again (Tom Friedman I didn't miss so much). That's right, folks: the New York Times' TimesSelect experiment is dead.

Since NYT put its opinionators behind the Great Wall, I've seen almost nothing of Krugman online. It's been a huge loss, because I think his opinions on social justice and income inequality really deserve a broader hearing. His opinions on Bush and Iraq are also noteworthy, though folks like Sidney Blumenthal and Gary Kamiya are acceptable substitutes, so I don't feel the lack so keenly.

Anyhow, welcome back to the bloggytubes, Paul. Watch out for freepers.

Have a patriotic Burning Man!

The theme for Burning Man 2008 is American Dream. I wrote this back to the Element11 group. It feels good to just wallow in idealism from time to time.

Catching up on old mail here.

Like you, my initial reaction was one of shock and awe. "Why? Why do they hate us so? They must hate us for our freedoms! That's it!" But I quickly came around to Jodie's line of thinking.

We've really reached a nadir of national pride, especially among the left. I can't ever remember a time when it was so hard to say, "I'm proud to be an American."

Someone mentioned elsewhere (in the 'assholes at Burning Man' thread) that we tend to dissociate ourselves, both physically and mentally, from people whose behavior bothers us, when it might be better to try and connect. The last several years, we've seen increasingly incomprehensible and heartbreaking behavior from our country, starting with the twice-over election of an incompetent warmongerer to the White House, and culminating in a brutal and utterly unnecessary occupation of Iraq that has killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens and thousands of our own military men and women, with a thousand shameful steps along the way.

So it's unsurprising that many of us have lost faith, severing (or at least straining) our connection to the vast, sprawling, infinitely intricate idea poorly contained by the words "The United States of America." The actions of the United States in the world and at home seem like the outbursts of a lunatic, not behaviors that we would voluntarily associate ourselves with. So we dissociate ourselves from America, leaving behind the land of televangelists, guns, SUVs, depressing suburbias, preemptive wars, and rapacious, self-entitled consumption. It's not us. That's not what we're about.

So we go do "something else," things that we hope will make the world a better place, something that sets us apart from the nightmare America that shames and haunts us. Whether it's creating art, doing volunteer work, trying to be more environmentally aware, or political activism, we revel in the feeling of being a bit "unpatriotic," as though we're going against what everyone thinks it means to be "American."

I guess that's the magic of America. The concept is huge enough to incorporate this broad current of selflessness and creativity, to let it flow in and draw strength from it. Whether your thing is organic foods, hyperlibertarianism, mass transit, socialist utopianism, gay rights, human rights, animal rights, eco-communities, or just committing yourself to being less of an ass than Bill O'Reilly, your dreams and your longings are as much part of the American Dream as the dreams of any avaracious financier or cookie-cutter suburbanite.

So I like the theme. There is room for great creativity and expression in it. Together we can explore the America that once was (or maybe never was), the America that we fear and love today, and the "city on a hill" that we keep climbing towards, but seem unable to reach. It forces us to take a deep look at ourselves, and to help us understand and accept our connection to this concept of nationality. In doing this, in redefining and reenvisioning what it is to love our country, maybe it will give us the strength and the passion that we'll certainly need to undo the fear and anger that has driven this nation these last several years.

I'm ready to burn Red, White, and Blue. Anyone else?

Front page over at Salon.com: Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Technically, it would be more correct to say that the CIA gave him very compelling evidence that there were no WMDs, and Bush chose to believe a taxi driver and con artist named Curveball instead.

Still, what's done is done, and it only divides the country when we start asking impertinent questions about how we got into this quagmire in the first place, right? The fact that the administration lied to Congress and the American people about why we needed to invade Iraq shouldn't mar their credibility when they say we need to stay in Iraq. None whatsoever.

Rise of the environment-killing pedestrian zombies

Why are most of my blog posts just repostings of letters I wrote to the forums at Salon.com? Maybe because I expect that someone will actually read. Or maybe it's because I need a fire lit under my butt before I produce anything I consider worth reading.

Today's kindling is brought to you by "leading environmentalist" Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life and foremost proponent of the new and evil "driving is more eco-friendly than walking" meme. I attached this lengthy letter to Andrew Leonard's skeptical analysis of the claim.

Goodall's basic claim is that, if you have to choose between walking to a grocery store 1.5 miles away and driving the same distance, the food needed to replenish the burned calories has a bigger greenhouse gas impact than the gasoline burned.

There are obvious problems with this research (beyond the fact that his book's website breathlessly announces this conclusion as "new research", without mentioning that the research is entirely his own). First, and most suspicious, he assumes that all the calories come from factory-farmed beef, which has enormous environmental impact when compared to eating lower off the food chain. The other factor which severely undermines his conclusions is this: once a person decides on a car trip, it becomes very easy to travel further. Rather than the three miles in Goodall's calculations, they might go ten miles to take advantage of the two for one sale at a competing grocer, or a few more miles to go to multiple grocers, or another dozen miles to Costco to stock up on soy milk (guilty as charged).

There are other, less pressing inaccuracies, some of which actually help his case. He forgets that starting up a cold engine for a short trip uses more gas than a car's MPG rating would indicate. He also ignores cycling as an option (cycling burns about half as many calories per mile as walking). He forgets that you would burn more calories walking back, because you're carrying a lot of groceries. He seems to have made a mistake converting from miles to kilometers. A three mile walk should burn 300 calories, not 180. 180 is more likely from a three kilometer walk.

This crappy, back-of-the-napkin calculation doesn't warrant near the publicity it's receiving; it certainly shouldn't drive anyone's lifestyle changes. When I first heard of this, I (like Andrew Leonard) assumed that the calculation was just hyperbole designed to show how woefully inefficient our industrialized food production is. But reading Goodall's own "research", he mentions replacing walking with driving as the environmentally friendly option, not replacing that slab of factory-farmed steak with some peaches from the local farmer's market[1]. Sure, towards the end he makes a wistful comment about "reduc[ing] the greenhouse gas intensity of our foodstuffs." But it is supremely irresponsible for anyone who touts himself as a "carbon-reduction guru" to make "walk less, drive more" his only concrete suggestion.

Elsewhere, he has compared carbon credits to medieval indulgences[2], and has been commissioned by the Times of London to do a "carbon audit" of Prince Charles (a celebrity climate change crusader, somewhat akin to Al Gore on this side of the pond). Such behavior makes me suspect that the damage Gooding is doing to environmentalism is due to malice, not incompetence.

Update:

After a timely e-mailed response from Mr. Goodall, and a deeper perusal of lowcarbonlife.net, the author strikes me as sincerely committed to helping people reduce their environmental impact. I still worry that, on this particular issue, he's framing the story in a disastrous way, and a lot of people are going to take the message the wrong way. But I think his book has a lot of timely information, and it will be good for everybody if it sells well.


Notes:

[1] In several places in Gooding's report, he goes to great lengths to equate factory-farmed meat to all foodstuffs. Elsewhere, he calls ruminant-based food production "particularly damaging".

[2] I don't trust carbon credits yet, but I do believe that with better science, more auditing, and international agreements to give them more standing, they're going to become a key part of the fight.

From Salon: We're all going to die!

Malthus fascinates me. When someone mentions him, I have to chime in. Reposted from here for anyone who doesn't want to click on the link:

I'm in the "Malthus was right" camp. To me, the lack of a population crash thus far isn't evidence against his theory. Let me explain.

Malthus was certainly right in the trivial sense: exponential population growth cannot continue forever. But was he wrong for failing to predict the rise of the industrial agriculture and chemical fertilizers that have managed to feed our exponential growth? No. These developments didn't negate Malthus' theories. In fact, these discoveries may have worsened their eventual consequences.

Humans didn't find a brand new way to permanently increase our food supply. Instead, we started a straightforward oil for food program, where we pumped oil and natural gas from the ground, changed it into fertilizer and pesticide, and sprayed it all over the planet to increase our harvests. It's akin to the difference between getting a better job and finding a pile of money under a rock.

As a non-renewable resource, oil is a terrible basis for population growth. Once it runs out, the population supported by oil will need to either change their food source or shrink until it comes back in line with what the Earth can sustainably produce. If the supply of oil drops too suddenly, you end up with six or seven billion people living on a planet that can only really support a billion, all looking for their next meal.

Having that temporary infusion of resources has allowed humanity to far exceed the numbers that the planet can legitimately support. Malthus predicted that as we reached the limits of growth, there would be increasing downward pressure on the population, to the point that we could never overshoot carrying capacity by much. What he didn't foresee was a situation where the population didn't just reach the limits of subsistence, but rocketed past them, making the consequences of the eventual crash far more calamitous.

That's why I was a bit rankled by this post. Malthus' "limits of subsistence" are defined by the amounts that humans need in order to survive. It seems possible to reduce population growth by allowing each individual to consume far, far more resources than survival dictates. But whether the increased demands on resources come from our increasing numbers or our increasing consumption per capita, we're still putting ever greater stress on the planet's ability to sustain us.

Solving the population problem by bringing everyone up to a First World standard of living is a non-starter. The planet cannot keep up with the demands for resources humanity currently places on it. We need to scale back resource usage by either cutting back on people or resources used per capita.

Ah, for the good old days of government waste and mismanagement.

Conservatives, in the belief that government does things inefficiently, have outsourced waste and mismanagement to private contractors. Sure enough, they're far more efficient at wasting and mismanaging that money than the public sector ever was.

http://www.savannahnow.com/node/317101
http://www.supplymanagement.co.uk/EDIT/Top_stories_item.asp?id=16448
http://www.ciobinternational.org/en/news/1155

From the government report:

"The value of Federal contracts awarded without full and open competition has more than tripled since 2000. For the first time on record, last year more than half of Federal procurement spending was awarded through no-bid and limited competition contracts."

Not surprising that this trend has seen so much of an upswing since Bush took office. His tendency has always been towards greater privatization and less oversight.

Democrats are promising to look into this waste and abuse. Indeed, this report is a good start. I'm cynical enough to believe that this is intentional on the part of the Bush administration. No-bid contracts funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of shareholders, while bankrupting the government so as to make it incapable of providing for its citizens (as Grover Norquist put it, this helps make the government "small enough to drown in a bathtub"). Also, because we're getting so little bang for the buck, it makes the government look like a terrible mechanism for solving societal problems, which is how Bush-style conservatism wants us to view our government.

We need to demand oversight and accountability on every cent that the government spends, whether directly or through private contractors.

The Internet thinks I'm Gandhi.

The results of my latest Political Compass test puts me ideologically close to Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and The Dalai Lama. I'll take that as a compliment.

Take your own Political Compass test.

I was surprised that I was categorized into the strongly libertarian camp, since I've gleefully criticized libertarians as self-aggrandizing morons. My impression is that most of them want the world should be one giant dog-eat-dog brawl where that they can better indulge the fantasy that they are the biggest, scariest dogs out there.

I distrust government power somewhat, but I distrust corporate power far, far more. The former needs to be powerful to act as a check on the latter. But government power also needs to be both highly responsive to the will of the people and highly respectful of personal individual rights. I respect the idea of voluntary, regional collectivism, but I don't see how it can answer the problems of global problems like global warming.

"Forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked"

I finished reading Hardcore Zen yesterday, then tried meditating for the first time in a couple of years. When I opened my eyes again, the world looked strangely blue-filtered, and it seemed to me that I had some interesting ideas rolling through my head.

My brief foray into zen mastery accomplished little, but it made a certain blogosphere mini-controversy particularly relevant to me. Yesterday, the proceedings of the U.S. Senate were opened for the first time by a prayer from a Hindu cleric. As he tried to begin, the prayer was disrupted by angry shouting from three protesters.

Talking Points Memo has the YouTube video and commentary. The TPM story says that the anti-abortion group "Operation Rescue/Operation Save America" claimed responsibility for the protest, but I don't see an indication of that in the press release they sent out. All I see is unwavering support for their actions, and a chilling manifestation of a Talibanesque mentality right here in the U.S. As published on christiannewswire.com:

Theology has moved from the church house onto the floor of the United States Senate, and has been arrested.

Contact: Dr. Pat McEwen, Operation Save America, 321-431- 3962

WASHINGTON, July 12 /Christian Newswire/ -- Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god. The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.

"Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' They were immediately removed from the chambers, arrested, and are in jail now. God bless those who stand for Jesus as we know that He stands for them." Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue

To Schedule Interviews with Rev. Benham:

Contact Pat McEwen: 321 431 3962

In the defense of the evil, backsliding, cowardly senators, all reports indicate that the Senate chambers were mostly empty. That's hardly unexpected, since half our senators are busy running for president. Anyhow, our senators are only paid the paltry sum of $141,000 a year. When you're paying such paltry wages, you have to expect a bit of sloth and indifference from your employees.

Cynical tangent aside, the press release sends a clear message. This government is the sole and exclusive property of our God, and any recognition of religious plurality defiles the original intent of our Founding Fathers.

I don't buy the whole "our Founding Fathers established a Christian nation" argument. First, whatever their personal beliefs about religion and spirituality, their intentions for the country can best be derived from the Constitution itself. The Constitution says surprisingly little about religion, except that religious tests are forbidden, and Church and State should keep their grubby paws off each other. If the Founders really believed as the righteous rednecks claim, they had ample opportunity to fill our nation's supreme document with all manner of pro-Christian items. They could have easily formalized the Constitution Party's belief that only believing Christians should be allowed to hold office. They could have easily forbid the government from passing laws contrary to the Bible. They could have required that all proceedings begin with a prayer by a Christian minister, to keep "a prayer of the wicked" from ever being uttered in the hallowed chambers of the Senate.

They didn't. Hell, when they were drafting the Constitution, they didn't even start their own proceedings with a prayer^[1]. If their goal was to create a nation founded on Christian principles, it seems like that would be the first order of business.

They didn't found a "Christian nation," because they knew that political power corrupts religion, turning it from a source of solace and inspiration into a tool for oppression. To imagine the country the Founding Fathers were striving mightily to avoid, just put yourself in the head of a protester who would shout "Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight," and imagine what sort of country he would found if given the chance.

Notes:

[1] Yes, we're all aware of Benjamin Franklin's famous plea that they do so. When I was a teenager, I was taught on numerous occasions (Church, Boy Scouts (basically the same thing)) that this speech marked a turning point in the Constitutional Convention. According to the legend, after he gave that speech, the logjam was broken and compromise became easier, all because God was now present at the proceedings. Perhaps his eloquent words did make people more generally inclined to compromise. But the hagiographical version of this story never fails to eave out one critical fact: Franklin's proposal was never voted on, and according to his own recollections, "except for three or four persons, [the attendees] thought prayers unnecessary." [source]

Of course, it's more complex than I'm letting on. It always is.


[Note: Blogger has Ctrl-P mapped to "Publish", when my EMACS-trained fingers think it merely means "move cursor to previous line". So when you see a half-written post, you now know precisely how I screwed up.]

[Frak! I did it again!]