Global Warming: Inhofe Out

Today NPR reports that Senator James Inhofe (R, Oklahoma), Chair of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works, is giving up his gavel following the democrats appropriation of the majority. For those who still believe global warming is a giant hoax, this is really bad news.

Inhofe, who has led the committee since republicans took control of the senate in 2002, has been an outspoken advocate of evidence disputing the hypothesis that the world is getting warmer as a result of carbon-dioxide emissions and rampant deforestation. He has called this hypothesis, which he distrusts so immensely: "A great hoax perpetrated on the American people."

If you've seen the movie Thank You for Smoking, you are familiar with the type of work Inhofe has done these past four years. He insists the evidence of scientists is inconclusive in order to stall legislation that would hurt the oil & gas industry - which incidentally provides more campaign funding to Inhofe than to any other Senator in the United States (with the possible exception of John Cornyn (R, Texas)). In his own words Inhofe is insisting "on sound science," a seemingly respectable pursuit - albeit an impossible one.

A scientific hypothesis is, by its very nature, unprovable. A hypothesis can be supported or substantiated, and subsequently earn widespread credibility. But a hypothesis is just a working assumption which must concede to disproving evidence should it appear in future experimentation.

To stall policy while waiting for proof could stall policy indefinitely.

Here I must point out: it is one thing for scientists to reserve judgement ad infinitum, but another entirely for legislators to mull over evidence for centuries. The term given to lengthy study in science is 'investigation.' In congress, it's dubbed 'polemics.'

I'd like to be as objective as possible in my treatment of individuals on this site. To this end, I will try to assume that all human beings are well intentioned. Thus, I credit Inhofe for his judicious scrutiny of evidence and general consideration for the merits of many opinions. But I'll say flatly: I just do not see the same benefit to political inaction.

Politicians are supposed to be decision makers! Which is to say that they are effectually hired guessers. Confident guessing is part of the job!

In case you think Inhofe waits patiently for evidence in all matters, consider his reasons for the U.S. backing the Israeli state: "I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a right to the land. This is the most important reason: Because God said so. As I said a minute ago, look it up in the book of Genesis. It is right up there on the desk."

First I want to know how a Christian bible has infiltrated the Senate floor. Second, I wonder what sound science Inhofe has studied to cite the English translation of an ancient manuscript as a literal transcription of this god (of allegedly supreme credibility). Finally, I want to know why Inhofe's god has dominion over policy of the secular United States government. I wonder if Inhofe is familiar with more recent text: The U.S. Constitution.

According to Establishment Clause of the First Ammendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." So much for the actionability of the word of God.

If you've read Al Gore's book or seen his 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, as Inhofe has, I think you've seen compelling evidence that the earth is baking. While we can't prove the global warming hypothesis, the theory is widely credited.

The evidence is in! Inhofe's out! It's time for the committee to start acting!

A Tear in the Canvas

Let me paint the scene:

It's a gorgeous, Saturday morning in San Francisco. I'm sitting on a park bench by the bay with a cup of coffee, a lox and cream-cheese bagel, and an enthralling book. I watch a light wind blow ornate kites over the heads of delighted toddlers. Alcatraz, The Golden Gate Bridge, and the hills of Marin County form a panorama beyond the choppy sea as boats sail in the marina. A crew of men around my age are outfitted with flags playing football on the green while dog-walkers, bikers, and tandems of joggers pass by. From the distance, I hear the muted trumpet of an ocean-liner approaching the harbor. Occasional susurruses of laughter escape from a bunch of sailors by the docks, who are packing in their rigs.

I smile. Such beauty!

I'm still in my reverie as I meander up Fillmore Street, by the Marina school - its marble facade glistening in the afternoon sun. The land beneath my feet is the rubble of the great quake from 1906. I marvel that the stately houses around me are built on ash and mortar bulldozed into the sea. Tragedy decomposed into such splendor!

Just then a bicyclist at the intersection stops abruptly. A black sedan following too closely nudges his rear tire. The cyclist dismounts, removes his helmet, and kicks the grill of the car as the demure lady behind the wheel mimes frightened apologies. Obscenities echo off of the walls of surrounding buildings like the bursts of firecrackers. People stare. "She hit me!" shouts the pedestrian, scanning the sidewalks for support, and finding only aghast onlookers with open jaws. "I've got to teach this woman a lesson!" Remounting his bike the cyclist plants himself in front of the car at the intersection, refusing to budge. Within seconds, horns blare, but the impetuous cyclist remains motionless. The woman in the car sighs and rests her head on the window, exasperated.

At last - a tear in the canvas.

In a Lifetime

I wonder if there will be stories like this one about people in our own generation. Frankly, I doubt it.

I found a Wikipedia entry about a man named Henry Burrell.

Listen to this: the man was a stand-up comedian who took an interest in platypuses. By loafing around platypus habitats in his free time, he learned how to build enclosures keep platypuses alive in captivity at a time when no one else could. He was honored by the British Government for this discovery with knighthood (or, at least, something close to it).

Sometime later, he took a photograph of a taxidermed thylacine (a foxlike creature from Tasmania) with a chicken in its mouth and submitted it to a newpaper. The photo, when printed, led farmers to believe the thylacine would prey on their poultry, even though the animal was no more of a danger to their hens than fingerless persons to string cheese. For fear of poultry-predation by roaming thylacines, farmers subsequently hunted the species to extinction!

Finally, before the man died he "was stricken with paralysis," but then, "recovered!"

All I can say is: What a life story!

That one person could have such storied adventures and misadventures in life is really quite flooring. Think of it: we're all brought up on candied expectations that we'll lead prolific lives. (I was convinced I'd be a professional baseball player and be president of the United States while curing cancer and designing my own videogames). But few people amass biographies that even begin to match the dynamism of early-life designs. I think the days when one person might realistically play many significant roles in a lifetime are simply gone.

Let's face it; the work of dilettantes today will not merit encyclopedic entry. The frontiers of knowledge in many fields, and especially in the biological sciences, have advanced far beyond the range of dabblers and tyros. To be a contributer to the scientific knowledgebase today you need not only a doctorate, but years of post-doctoral work and a gaggle of peer reviewed papers to your name as well.

So much for the desultory labors of stand-up comedians.

Perhaps the community is better off now that rigorously prepared scientists map out new waters. The thylacines certainly wouldn't complain.

As members of the community, we do benefit from better information than we used to, and innovation occurs at a higher pace than it did previously. But now that the contributions come from highly specialized cells of experts, what can the laity aspire to?

I'll tell you. We resign ourselves to wallow as consumers. We bath in the neon glow of television sets and internet news sites, waiting for scientists to conquer the unknown for us. Also, as if it were too demanding to refer to scientists by name, we assign the bunch a sobriquet, the third person plural pronoun: They.

Did you know that They discovered a new element today? What will They think of next?!

We leave exploration to someone with expertise - narrow, vertical focus achieved through the sacrifice of broad experience.

The era of the generalist is concluding. Fewer fascinating biographies like that of Henry Burrell, will exist. Our progression will be a tragedy for humanists, who appreciate the twists and turns of an adventurous lifetime. But as I mentioned earlier, the thylacines would not complain.

A Big Brain: What a Burden!

The biggest drawback to having such big, clunky brains in all of our human skulls is that they simply will not stop thinking. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad we all can communicate and plan ahead, but usually, I think our massive brains act more like handicaps, contributing eccentrically and without solicitation like smoke alarms low on batteries.

Both a human and a squirrel can dream up a way to cross a narrow timber spanning a deep precipice. But while the squirrel plans a route out and darts ahead on it, the human, instead, gets these ideas in its big, old, workaholic brain that his palms should start sweating, his knees should start shaking, and his vision should become cloudy while takes his first steps on the rickety board. Now guess who doesn't make it across the timber?

When sleeping, our brains give us nightmares. When eating, our brains tell us the spaghetti looks like worms. When dexterity is needed, these brains will make our hands convulse like we're epileptics. So it is no surprise that during a job interview, our brains, CEO's of our bodies, will recall all of the ways in which our preparation is lacking.

There is no off switch for our mighty 3 lb. nerve center, either. Alcohol & drugs only distort the malevolent music of our brains like a fist in a sinister French horn.

So what do we do? We have to learn to function in spite of our brainpower. We must fight to ignore our brain - or at least, the images that our thought-center consciously presents. Only this way can a surgeon operate incisively, can a driver follow a straight line in reverse, or can a tightrope walker avoid a fall.

In short, it seems we all need to imitate squirrels to accomplish anything at all.

Whom Did We Elect?

A Democratic National Committee recruiter stopped me on the street today. She plunged headfirst into a ramble that was appearantly written on her eyelids, for she kept them closed. I easily could have walked away without her knowing, but I was interested to know what the party was up to recruiting on the street now that they had control of the house and senate. On perhaps her fourth or fifth sentence, just as she was breaking through a nebulous ensemble of banalities, she stumbled over her words and came bumbling into silence. I won't forget what she said next. It easily made me wonder just how faithful Democrats, now in office, would be to their campaign promises. What she said was this: "I'm sorry, they have just changed the rest of the pitch on me."

How to Write Like Kurt Vonnegut

Anyone who knows me well, must know that I am a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut's work. Half in tribute to his style and half wishing to emulate it, I sketched out a recipe for Vonnegut-like composition:

1) Write out just one action sequence. Circumstances need not be viable - you will make them understandable in the preceeding text, which you will write later. Instead just write the draft of the action scene.

2) Find details that are intriguing, coincidences that are remarkeable, and parallels that are noteworthy. Resolve to discuss these throughout the course of the plot building up to the action sequence you have already composed.

3) Write out the necessary plot to arrive at your action sequence. Open windows into each of the lives of your characters. Make sure some have interesting beliefs that expose the puzzling nature of human morality. Make certain all have at least one aspiration, even if it is for "a glass of water." Most importantly, monkey around with their histories as you write. Let some of their paths cross serendipidously.

4) Give away the outcome of your action scene early and often. While you will, in effect, spoil the ending, it will sound as though the coming action sequence very urgently needs to be read.

5) Above all, concern yourself with humor. Understanding that even the most soft-brained, intuitive, poorly researched remarks will be well recieved if delivered conciscely with humble and comedic authority.

Blog-mania

Personally, I am concerned over the evanescence of quality in media as a whole. With the emergence of blogs, podcasts, and video-sharing sites we are all empowered to be the (1) creaters (2) fact-checkers (3) editors and (4) publishers of content. Millions of amateurs now flood the information space with (1) hastily created (2) often baseless (3) unedited material that, worst of all, is (4) professionally published!

Perhaps there never has been an absolute assurance of quality in media. The New York Times has likely never put an issue in print without a few typos. But out of concern for reputation, and for the cost of production too, there has been a rigorous filter determining what gets published and what gets pidgeon-holed. Now that everyone and their mothers can publish online with virtually the same visabilty as The New York Times, NPR, or Miramax, the online landscape is becoming less and less readable. Ladies and gentlemen, static has filled the airwaves.

Adsense

As a new blogger, and a new user of Google's AdSense, I have a few questions. The most pressing one is this: Should I be concerned that the advertisement most frequently selected for my blog is for oppium rehabilitation?

Writing for the Count

Check out this entry I found on a blog for writers the other day:

I'm at 10,548 right now... I should get my 3,000 words for the day easily and might push all the way up to 12,000. My boss at work asked me today, "What's the point of writing so fast if it's not going to be any good? If you're just going for word count, what difference does it make?"

The words are those of a science fiction novelist Jeff Kirvin, who is one of over 75,000 individuals participating in NaNoWriMo, a web-chic sobriquet for the “National Novel Writing Month.” It's an event, held annually, that asks would-be-novel-writers for a pledge to type 50,000 words (at minimum) for a manuscript, from scratch, within the month of November.

Should the endeavor seem less than daunting, consider that a participant would need to generate an average of 1,667 words (four single spaced pages) of original composition on each of thirty consecutive days through the span of the contest. Also bear in mind participants are, by and large*, amateurs with day jobs who have to pad their scripts in their free time. And finally, understand that there is no financial reward upon the completion of this Augean task (instead the author’s name finds will find its place on a list), and you will realize why less than 12% of those who register for the event actually submit the minimum word count by December 1st.

Masochistic undertaking that it is, enrolment figures for NaNoWriMo have swelled significantly over the years since it began in 1999 as a formal pledge between Bay Area friends. With the aide of a website and the munificence of individual donors, NaNoWriMo has become a registered non-profit organization that spurs thousands each year to make their literary splash.

Chain a monkey to a laptop, and glue at least one of his thumbs to the space bar; I'll guarentee you his name could grace the list of winners in December. That is - provided he didn't select all of the text by depressing the command and "A" keys simultaneously, and resume typing - effectually deleting his text. My point is that if he'll win your race, why run it in the first place? Or as Kirvin's boss asks "If you're just going for word count, what difference does it make?"

The answer: a successful novelist has to be a good writer, and to be a good writer - this is intuitive - one needs to practice writing! Amateurs need the pressure to write, perhaps more than accomplished writers do. What's worse, there is no one to apply it to them. A publisher is not calling up three times a day to check on the progress of a promised title. Fair chance is that novel will never materialize. A novice to the writing myself, I'll admit that without some big ugly deadline breathing down my neck, like a stranger checking out my iPod on the MUNI, I will find something 'better' to do with my time than to stare at my computer phrasing and rephrasing for hours on end. The editting is so excruciating! The pleasure I get from rewording a sentence is about the same as I would fetching honey from a beehive. So, NaNoWriMo helps. The pledge silences the editor within, puts a toy gun to the writers temple, and yells "who cares how it sounds, just write!"

I'd worry about the reader. I find this quote, from Pascal, germane: "I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter." So the idea in NaNoWriMo is to hammer out a draft. Subsequently, however, the author had better apply a red pen.

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* The expression “by and large” originated, interestingly enough, as a nautical parlance for the impossible feat of sailing “by the wind” (into the wind) and “large” (perpendicular to the wind). Thus “by and large” derives its meaning: to consider all perspectives simultaneously.

Football Addiction

It strikes me that men in most American households use their free-time tediously. Rather than read, write, paint, or call up old buddies on Sunday, forty million males in our nation resign themselves to a couch and take in between six and nine hours of televised football. Imagine - we spend six to nine consecutive hours prostrate, with our feet in the air staring at a piece of glowing glass. There are methods of tortures less injurious!

Let me add perspective to my criticism with a confession: I, too, am an addict. Between the months of September and January, I watch a full day of professional football once every week. Living on the West coast, this means I am a vegetable on Sundays from 10 a.m. to about 7 p.m. What's worse: so as to catch every minute of footage between the first kick off and John Madden's burly adieu, I rarely shower. Yes, I am an unclean vegetable.

So what do I do while I watch? Well nothing really. I recline and root for particular players (members I've selected for my 'fantasy team') to hemorrhage through defenses, rack up yardage, and score touchdowns so that a tally of their combined statistics will top an aggregate from others that a friend has selected. I also cheer for the United States Saints - but then, who doesn't?

What does football do to me while I watch? With the drought of locomotion my knees stiffen, through each score and pause my heartbeat races and slows, and, absorbing the polemic from commentators, the creative half of my brain withers into oblivion. Patiently, though, I am an eager witness to each play, replay, and analysis. At the end of the day - when the television tells me to do so - I switch it off and step outside. The world has spun halfway around, and there is a chilly darkness out there to greet me.

Like so many other men, and like so many other addicts, I can justify what I've done with my time today, for I am happy - albeit complacently so. New Orleans has won, and I feel a bounce in my step knowing my favorite team is atop its division. I mull over their improbable victory with glee, which is tempered by the knowledge that my 'fantasy team' has been defeated, and I must endure groundless smack talk from a friend in the morning.

Look at the broader picture: Through the week I work feverishly, cursing a lack of time, and falling dangerously low on sleep. At my job I have day-dreamed of spending hours with my girlfriend, reading, learning more Mandarin, writing parts of a short story, or phoning family or friends. I have judiciously postponed all of these aims for the weekend. However, on Sunday night I lament, for I've spent the full complement of those hours as a spectator. With little to show for a day spent away from the job, I wonder: is my interest in football hurting me?

Using an internet search engine while watching football this past Sunday was a challenge, but I was equal to the task. I found that Bob Andelman authored a book: Why Men Watch Football (1993: Arcadian House Publishing), ostensibly exploring the roots of our addiction to the game and assessing the impact the game has on our lives. I was surprised to read that Andelman testifies on behalf of football, viewing spectatorship as a healthy diversion, something of a modern panacea for male psychological necessities.

Concede Andelman his points that men likely need to bond with other men and also need to vent aggression, and you will still find his conclusion objectionable. True: football constitutes the de facto lingua franca at the office water-cooler, and some violent men really do get their rocks off watching a quarterback go down under a pile of linebackers. Still, I wonder: How well does watching football serve us compared to other leisure pursuits? How efficiently am I bonding with other men sitting alone all day in my house? Does the slow-motion replay of a successful safety blitz provide the proper valve to palliate my ever-building aggression? In other words, do I really need football? Does anyone?

In spite of the gossip and schadenfreude we garner from an afternoon spent as spectators, we find ourselves bereft of accomplishments that we might marvel at once the set is switched off. Post-game broadcasts permit us to mull over the feats of our avatars, but concede only an ersatz sense of attainment. Our friends are still other places. Our welling vitriol has only been stirred.

Instead of watching LT bang through another shoddy run defense this Sunday, I am going to consider other pursuits - creating an artwork, penning a story (a violent one if necessary), or catching a meal with a friend. I would like to see if I am not more prolifically satiated. If I am, as I expect I will be, I will issue the following plee to all wives (football widows), girlfriends, concerned daughters, mothers, and friends:

On behalf of my community of circumspect football aficionados, I beseech you to come to our aide! We are adversely dependent on a Sunday routine and require your intervention. Will you kindly coax us from our habitual spectatorship and permit us to sample other, potentially more rewarding pastimes? May I suggest that next Sunday we try baking something as we watch the games? Next Sunday, we will watch only the post-game recap. In this way we might at least see what a full weekend in the Fall season could be had we not become compulsive voyeurs of the National Football League.

In the impending shake-up, the workplace may be transmuted into a Tower of Babble. Allegedly inexorable masculine rage may consume us. But I will be willing to bet that we will survive the traumatic excision of football from our lives. At the very least we will see some fruit of our own vitality, and, what is more, our knees may thank us on Sunday nights.