For those who believe that science is apolitical, allow me to present Exhibit A: rare photographs from Hiroshima.
I’m not saying the relationship between politics and science is inherently good or bad. But it is and scientists need to accept and act upon this fact.
The Texas Railroad Commission, for reasons that I assume have to do with keeping an antiquated state agency relevant, regulates energy policy for the Lone Star State. The TRC met with President Obama recently.*
What kind of quality energy policy advice did our Texan friends give for the president?
Take John Tintera, executive director of the energy regulating Texas Railroad Commission, who said, “Frankly, we ought to franchise the Texas Railroad Commission like Kentucky Fried Chicken and make a little money off of it. This is the last state that needs additional federal oversight.”
Yes, it’s hard to see why Texas would need more federal oversight, given its notoriously high rankings in every social index. Moreover, what possible problems could result from franchising energy policy to anyone who wants to make a buck? It’s hard to think of any problems at all!
* How annoying must it be for a man like President Obama to have to meet with a bunch of morons like the Texas Railroad Commission.
The legendary climate change scientist and brawler against denialists Peter Gleick is in some serious hot water because he has admitted to passing along the internal Heartland Institute documents that detail, among other things, the coordinated attempt by right-wingers to fight against anything that would stop climate change.
Imaging yourself in Gleick’s position. You are a committed activist with a long history taking on horrible people doing horrible things. You can be a feminist, gay rights activist, environmentalist, unionist, whatever. You are on these people’s e-mail lists. And suddenly they include you on an e-mail where they spill the goodies.
What are you going to do? “Oh, dear sir, I think you have made a mistake! These documents detailing exactly how you intend on destroying the world are not intended for me. Please remove me from your e-mail list!!!” Of course you aren’t. You are going to string this out to get the dirt. What do these people really do behind the scenes? And then you are going to give the information to your friends in the media and embarrass the hell out of these jerks.
But that kind of behavior is highly unacceptable to the New York Times, or at least to Dot Earth writer Andrew Revkin, who writes:
One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).
Really? Because I don’t see it that way. See, I’d call using a false identity to get inside a diabolical organization “journalism.” It might not be respectable and won’t get you invited to fun corporate-sponsored events. But Gleick has thrown the curtain back. And of course, he’s at fault here. Even if he broke the law, is that the real issue here? What is worse, using a false identity or advocating for policies that will destroy the entire nation of Tonga? Using a false identity or lobbying the U.S. government to halt changes in mileage standards for cars so that we don’t become a bunch of hippie Europeans or something and continue to change the climate with ever-greater rapidity? I think I know which side contains the moral monsters here. And it ain’t Peter Gleick.
Of course, Andrew Revkin has no credibility on these issues. As Joe Romm notes in his policy ripping Revkin a new one, Revkin has made dozens of ridiculous and false statements on these issues over the years and has never once issued an apology on the Times website, including smearing Al Gore. Romm is a must-read on the matter.
The Heartland Institute is also throwing out claims that Gleick forged the climate part of the report. I am skeptical. Obviously it would be different if he was making things up. But I don’t see any reason why he would do this, if for no other reason than he obviously couldn’t get away with it. McArdle has of course bought this whole hog. She is outraged. It’s hard to imagine how she wouldn’t be, a woman with such high journalistic standards who never ever associate with people who might twist science for their own purposes. Nope, ethical high ground all the way here.
I was actually e-mailed the Heartland document about 36 hours before the Times first covered it. Now I’m really mad at myself for not jumping all over it.
Climate-change villain and sociopath
I’m not minimizing the fact that inefficient cookstoves in the developing world cause a lot of problems, including lung disease in the women who use them, deforestation, and other important issues. In fact, there’s been a multi-decade effort to introduce more efficient cookstoves into the developing world.
But to hear American leaders talk about cookstoves in Bangladesh and Ethiopia as a primary culprit in global warming is completely fraudulent.
In the United States, you have massive vehicle emissions, the agricultural industry, the heating and cooling of ever-growing megamansions and large office buildings, a road system designed for environmental inefficiency, etc., etc. These things all lead to gargantuan carbon dioxide emissions.
Not to mention the industry in China and other nations that serve American consumer interests.
And the U.S. is going to focus on an Ethiopian woman cooking injera on her stove.
I guess if there’s no political will to do something about climate change in Washington, we can always blame poor brown people.
This is an interesting piece at Rustwire on Cleveland’s constant attempts to rebrand itself over the past 40 years. As industry left the city, Cleveland suffered an identity crisis as real as its economic crisis and continues to struggle with both today. The city has responded through a series of rebranding efforts, culminating in the theoretically fortuitous popularity of Drew Carey in the 1990s and his identification with the city in his popular show. Even that didn’t lead to any large-scale changes in fortune for the city. In fact, while the popular vision of cities absolutely matters, I do not believe that you can hire advertising agencies to change your brand. It’s way too complicated than that. Here’s my favorite of the rebranding efforts highlighted in the Rustwire article, this from the 1970s:
I spent last year in northeastern Ohio, teaching at a college in a small town about an hour outside in Cleveland. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in this town so we went to Cleveland pretty frequently. I really love the place. It has major problems of course. Whole sections of the city are essentially depopulated. White flight is a major problem. The industrial jobs are almost all gone and, although there is a slight uptick in manufacturing jobs recently, aren’t coming back with any kind of scale.
Moreover, Cleveland faces a crisis of leadership and identity that you can see in these rebranding efforts. It wants to recapture its past glory. Cleveland identifies as a working-class white town and wishes it could be that again. It’s hardly alone here. Cities from Detroit to Butte have had a really hard time letting go of their vision of what their city to rethink was what their city could be.
Last spring, I read an article about Detroit that I wish I could find. It was a letter to the editor of a Detroit business journal by an out-of-town executive who had recently visited the city. He said in no uncertain terms why his company would never move to Detroit. He wrote that white flight continued to destroy Detroit because that city was so dependent on cars and suburban living that it had not developed any of the 21st century infrastructure that is bringing young people back into cities. You can’t walk anywhere. Public transportation is a disaster. His company’s young workers wouldn’t move to Detroit, not because of its history but because of its present. This executive blamed a lack of leadership in Detroit, telling its politicians it needed to think about the future instead of the past.
I read this article in a link off of a Cleveland blog and the commenters there really agreed with this sentiment in regards to Cleveland. Local politicians there want the old industrial jobs back and have a heck of a time thinking beyond that. These commenters really wanted Cleveland to succeed and felt that investments in public transportation especially would make a huge difference.
The thing is though that Cleveland has some amazing neighborhoods developing without a lot of outside assistance. The Great Lakes Brewery and West Side Market anchor a very small but pretty cool walking neighborhood west of downtown that includes several excellent bars and restaurants, including the superb Bier Markt and the new Market Garden Brewery, owned by the former brewmaster at Dogfish Head. Tremont is another awesome neighborhood, combining cool old homes with excellent bars and restaurants and the Christmas Story house (where you can buy a leg lamp).
I haven’t been to Detroit, but I understand there are also little islands of interesting things happening there. In both places, with little to no municipal leadership, young people are beginning to move in and open businesses. Is this going to replace industrial labor and save the city? No, but these businesses do build off each other. Can the city help? Absolutely, but it takes shifting the political emphasis away from the 20th century and into the 21st. Can that be done without essentially lending government support to gentrification? I don’t know. That’s a concern of mine. Cleveland does have image disadvantages that are hard to overcome. It’s very cold and is littered with industrial ruins. Maybe that can be turned into something positive. At least this person is trying to build off the city’s less than ideal past with humor.
Given that wait staff is one of the most visible labor forces and that we are made to feel good about ourselves by tipping them whatever we think is appropriate, it might be surprising (unless you know people who work in the industry) that they are often extremely poorly paid. Moreover, for women workers at lower-end establishments, working conditions can be poor and wages, even including tips, below the federal minimum wage.
Laura Clawson has an excellent essay up about the poor treatment of female waiters, including discussions of sexual harassment, pay disparity with male waiters, and restaurant managers pressuring workers to accept sub-minimum wages if their tips don’t bring them up to the federal minimum wage.
Great story, if an infuriating subject.
“Unlike the Earth, we’re intelligent, and we can actually manage things,” Santorum said. In reference to liberals, Santorum said, “When it comes to management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones.”
If by “management,” Santorum means “allow mining and logging companies to tear the planet to shreds and make billions in profits that are held by the top 1% of income earners,” I guess conservatives have done a great job managing the planet.
Interesting Tim Dickinson piece in Rolling Stone about the Obama Administration entering into an all-out war on medical marijuana. Dickinson doesn’t provide many answers as to why this has happened, noting the relatively sane policy the administration took in its first 2 years and then a complete about-face in the last year. He suggests that it might be career drug warriors making a stand and a president who honestly doesn’t care very much about this issue. That does make some sense. Still, given the widespread support for medical marijuana and increasing support for decriminalization of the drug in small amounts, this is an unfortunate turn of events.
No doubt all those who are outraged at the federal government cracking down on “states’ rights” will find the DEA going after medical marijuana in California equally shocking…..
This year is the 100th anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight, when I.W.W. speakers were routinely denied their First Amendment rights for speaking in public about workers’ rights. Locked in prisons and beaten by police, it became a national news story. One of many free speech fights the Wobblies engaged in the American West during the period, the AFL-CIO blog rightfully notes its importance for both labor rights and speech rights today.
Thinking about Anthony Comstock and Gilded Age sexuality this week, I was reminded of the woman Comstock destroyed, the fascinating feminist and free-love advocate, Victoria Woodhull.
Born Victoria Claflin in Homer, Ohio in 1838, Woodhull became one of the most notorious figures of the Gilded Age. She entered a bad marriage when she was 15. She met an alcoholic doctor from Rochester named Canning Woodhull. She quickly had two children by him. It seemed like she would be become a pretty standard housewife of the mid-19th century. Thinking about her awful marriage though, she became attracted to free love. The mid-19th century was a time of great ferment in American society. Industrialization spawned a wide variety of reform movements from abolitionism and temperance to Mormonism and solitary confinement. Among these reforms were also feminism and different sorts of sexual experimentation which ranged from free love and polygamy to the weird celibate rituals of the Shakers.
Victoria wanted out of her bad marriage. Divorce was not easy to come by in these years. For example, I have examined state legislative records from Washington Territory from the late 1850s. To get a divorce, you had to have it approved by the territorial legislature. Sometimes they approved it, sometimes not. But it was certainly not easy anywhere in the country, especially for a woman. For Woodhull then, free love was about being with a partner of your choosing outside of marriage. She is sometimes seen as a pioneer of the sexual revolution, but that is not really accurate, for she believed in monogamy, just outside of the bonds of marriage. However, what is important here is that if the relationship didn’t work out, either party should be free to move onto another partner, which was farther than some free love advocates were willing to go.
Woodhull was also a bit of a financial genius. She was born to a very poor family, but got rich pretty young when she became a magnetic healer. This kind of odd spiritualism was again part of the societal upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and there was a real market for new religious movements, odd as they may seem today. In 1870, Woodhull joined with her sister to become the first woman stock trader on Wall Street. She knew Cornelius Vanderbilt and he backed her for this pioneering venture. While some newspapers thought this was a good thing, many New Yorkers were disgusted by the idea that a woman could be on Wall Street. Publications came out comparing her and her sister to prostitutes and showing them in sexualized positions (which to be fair, could have been showing an ankle or something. It was 1870 after all).
Woodhull, along with her sister Tennessee, took the money they made on Wall Street and opened a radical paper in 1870. By this time, the reform spirit in the U.S. was pretty much dead. The religious movements of the antebellum days had sunk into obscurity or exile. The small feminist community was increasingly isolated. Temperance was still strong but concern for the rights of freed African-Americans was in decline. People began seeing Reconstruction as a failure. The Gilded Age was upon us. There wasn’t a lot of tolerance for an old-style radical. The Woodhull sisters did not care. Their paper published the first American printing of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto in 1871. It promoted such ideas as free love (still, the more conservative version of it), vegetarianism, women’s suffrage, and, God forbid, short skirts. The famous cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an image of her entitled, “Mrs. Satan.” She appeared as a devilish figure holding a sign reading, “Be Saved by Free Love,” showing it to a woman suffering from an alcoholic husband and poverty. The woman’s response, “I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps.” So as you can see, Woodhull kind of shook up Gilded Age men.
In 1871, she announced herself in her typically boisterous fashion to the American public. Thanks to one of her patrons, the Massachusetts Senator Benjamin Butler, Woodhull addressed the House Judiciary Committee, claiming that women already had the right to vote, which was guaranteed in the 14th and 15th Amendments. She quickly became a leader in the suffrage movement, even though her self-promotion and prickly personality quickly turned leaders like Susan B. Anthony against her. She also had the unfortunate tendency to brand her newspaper as a weapon. When people crossed her, she threatened to publish the sexual histories of her enemies, which included prominent members of the suffrage movements, as well as other prominent Americans. Suffragists later accused her of extortion, saying that she wanted $500 to keep quiet about their sexual activities. She denied this and said she just wanted them to stop gossiping about her.
In 1872, the newly created Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull for president and Frederick Douglass for vice-president, though the latter never acknowledged it. Anthony refused to vote for her, instead casting her non-counting ballot for President Ulysses S. Grant. Despite the abject failure of her campaign and the split it caused within the feminist movement, she became nationally known for her actions.
It was the paper that made Woodhull nationally notorious. First of all, there was her run for president which she promoted through her infamous media outlet. But if that wasn’t enough, she attacked an American religious institution on November 2, 1872, just before the election. For the nation’s most famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher, denounced her free love philosophy. However, she found out that Beecher was sleeping with one of his parishioners. She published this tale and all hell broke loose. Adultery was a crime. Her charges led to Beecher going to trial. It also helped destroy her. Woodhull, her second husband, and her sister were arrested on charges on indecency for sending such filth through the mail. This is where Anthony Comstock came in. Comstock, on the verge of becoming a nationally known figure, set his fangs of intolerance against her. He was as media-savvy as she; for both, the ensuing trial was a chance to press their agendas to a larger public. Although she was found not guilty by a technicality, Comstock won the ultimate battle. He went on to national fame. Her career was over.
Depressed, and abandoned by the suffragist movement, Woodhull left for England. She remained active in politics for a time. She married for the third time, to the English gentleman John Biddulph Martin, in 1883. She remained somewhat active in American life, trying to run for president again in 1884 and 1892. She ran a magazine during the 1890s. But after the death of her husband in 1901, she led the quiet life of a member of the landed gentry until her death in 1927.
For further reading, see Johanna Johnston’s Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull and Lois Beachy Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull. And like last week’s discussion of Comstock, Helen Lefkowtiz Horowitz’s excellent article, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” from the September 2000 issue of the Journal of American History was extremely valuable in putting this together.
I am outraged.
The Crazy Mountain Brewery in Edwards, Colorado, in the Vail Valley has a new brew. Its title: Lawyers, Guns & Money Barley Wine.
The site describes the beer:
This beer is a celebration of our first anniversary as well as one of our favorite songs. We use an assortment of malts and throw a little Belgian Candi into the Brew Kettle to give this beer a hearty maltiness. Dry hopping with American Hops gives this English style a refreshing American twist. Be cautious with this beer as overindulgence can result in the shit hitting the fan.
I think they meant “This beer is a celebration…of one of our favorite BLOGS.”
And I’ll tell you how some shit is going to hit the fan: If this brewery doesn’t send a case of LGM Barley Wine to all eight of us. It’s an obvious move for Crazy Mountain. Any of us would gladly shill for any product that pays us/provides us with free beer. We all like beer. We all like beer that is 10% ABV even more.
If Farley is ever going to bring his expertise on air power to bear on something useful, now is the time. We demand a case each or Farley is calling in the air strike!!!
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
