Global warming activism / (the dream)

(This poem is meant to be read as two simultaneous voices.)

Global warming activism		(the dream)
Michael Stipe didn't quite get it
With the lead and feathers
They only fall the same in vacuum
Air makes them fall differently
Air is always falling on you
Light, air, all needs to fall just right
For you to keep on going
1995
There's a problem
Bouncing light, re-radiation
Infrared hits ground again
Before it leaves the air		(Cue R.E.M.)
They said it's not real at all		Buy the sky and
And it's really better for us all		sell the sky and
And we can't fix it at all		tell the sky and
And fixing it would cost it all		tell the sky
I thought the denialists would fall
The brand new "Web" site
Got a scientist
In with Congressional staff
I didn't think they could last
2000
		There's the progress
We have found a way		We have found a way
To talk about the problem		to talk around the problem
The call from Munich Re
They insure insurance
They were helpful
Got numbers from them about
Costs of great weather disasters
We ran ads we ran lots of ads
It turned out not to matter
Munich didn't help
Foresight isn't worth anything at all		Foresight isn't anything at all
2005
		Well I would keep it above but then it
Bodies floating by in New Orleans		wouldn't be sky any more
2009
Can we agree on cap and trade?		Buy the sky and
We can make a scheme for trade		sell the sky and
They say they believe in trade		lift your arms
They don't believe in trade		up to the sky
They built on trading in racism
Millions will be killed
They'll say they didn't know
2013
Revealed preferences:
What people want is what they buy
American Electric Power is #1
They want AEP, they don't want power
Can't buy public goods
2014
What do people actually want to do?
I heard on the radio, you're happy
"if you feel like a room without a roof"
Well yeah! finally a plan we can do
Hurricanes and floods will do it
Everyone can have a room without a roof
We can be happy and not down		And ask the sky
CO2 high won't bring me down		and ask the sky
Our system's wrong and will fall down		Fall on me
Ask the sky to pour it down		Fall on me
And fall, fall on me

---

Lyrics quoted from R.E.M. "Fall on me" 1986, Pharrell Williams "Happy" 2013

Elite conflict as pointless politics

I've been too busy to post much here, but I thought that Feinstein's speech on the CIA was well worth reading.

I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

So Feinstein is finding out that being a Senator doesn't protect her from having her documents read and seized and her people threatened with media leaks and trumped up legal action, just like anyone else.

Does this matter to anyone not in the elite? I don't see how it does. Feinstein herself is horrible on these issues and has voted repeatedly to inflict this kind of regime on everyone else. If she wins, she wins protection for herself and for her cronies only. It's important to her, and it's important to the legal advisor for torture at the CIA, but there's no real public policy as such involved in this presumptive Constitutional crisis, only a question of whether one set of elites is going to guard their privilege against another.

It's a perfect illustration of the pointlessness of formal American politics at this time. No important problems can be addressed -- even now some other Senators are concluding a climate change talkathon and being congratulated for bravely bringing up the issue. But they couldn't propose actual legislation to do anything about it, because everyone knows that a U.S. Senator is as helpless to do anything involving legislation as anyone else.

Greenhouse 100

The latest project that I've worked on, PERI's Greenhouse 100, is here. It's a publicly accessible EPA database of greenhouse gas polluting facilities, summed up by parent company. I think that it's the first list of its kind that includes both power plants and other industries.

Today's poetry draft: Landscape

Landscape

Pink age, blue
Twisted limbs fight
Perched on plastic
Who are you?
That first light
Stretch elastic
Trajectories in air
Always land somewhere

Green age, brown
Growing schemes
Until the hoped-for second
Drive out of town
School clocks redeemed
Coin clicks reckoned
Moment of panic
Machines are organic

Red age, gray
Heart pounding still
Potential gone kinetic
Accumulate the day
Do what you will
All apologetic
Just three days more
This is what you're for

Age of gleaming white
One fourth less
Starting to stammer
Was that right?
Ordinary mess
Waiting for a hammer
Goes fast and slow
Hard to let go

Occupy series

I wrote a 5-part series on the life and death of the Occupy movement, as seen through my small-town experience. Links to it are:

I. What did Occupy want?

II. The encampments

III. The clash

IV. Homelessness

V. The post-encampment phase

I plan on writing a sixth part, about ideology and organization, at some point.

Much later, this sixth part was added here.

Lesser evil won

Today the liberal blogosphere is full of everything that annoyed me about it ever since Obama made it clear that he'd continue Bush's most objectionable Presidential policies. We won a great victory, apparently, because the GOP would always be worse. And those reality-denying Republicans fooled themselves, unlike us, and we can contentedly laugh about that, while of course not expecting any actual political progress beyond Obamacare because " with Republican control of the House an ambitious agenda is moot".

At least the orc rogue won.

Good for Mitt

From: David Atkins:

Mitt Romney may be the most dishonest politician I've ever had the misfortune of watching. This is a man who seems to literally believe that there is no consequence at all for shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next.

Those who believe that Mitt "won" the first debate hands down seem to believe that Romney is justified in his complete cynicism about the process and the electorate. Those who believe, as David Axelrod and I do, that Romney mortgaged long-term political pain for a 24-hour news cycle win, have just a little more faith in this creaky old electoral system.

American democracy is broken. But it's not that broken.

Mitt was losing. So he decided to win. And everyone agrees that he won the debate. So far there have indeed been no consequences for him shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next. And why should there be, among the small pool of voters who have not yet made up their minds?

Meanwhile, why didn't Obama talk about Romney's 47% comments in the debate? From here: "'It just didn’t come up in the debate,' Messina said. 'It wasn’t a deliberate decision.'” I guess that no one in the Democratic Party has ever heard of bringing up talking points about one's opponent in a debate, to define them. They didn't think about it so hard that it wasn't even deliberate that they didn't think about it. After all, the basic attitude is this: We must be bipartisan -- above the fray -- and work together on a Grand Bargain to destroy Social Security. And those 47% are sort of shameful, aren't they? Why would anyone speak up about them when they don't have to?

American democracy is that broken.