Photo by Jared in Kansas, poem by me.
Line across a great expanse
runs reddish barbed wire;
It never came to much,
perimeter of ranch ire.
Twisted and tied
to strangle post rock;
Does it bring freedom
or just startle livestock?
Category Archives: History
An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore presents a story that has strong citations, impeccable source material, and uncontestable imagery. We know the world is round, and yet there will always be those who insist they are living on a flat surface. Gore points this out right away, when he quotes Mark Twain:
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know.
It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Take for example Kevin Carr. Carr is not only known for publically embarassing himself in a noodle-eating competition by puking up the four pounds of noodles he shoved in his mouth (the winner ate less than three pounds, just to put his passion versus sensibilities in perspective), but he also fashions himself as a writer and movie critic.
Here’s how he passed judgement on Gore’s work before he even saw the movie:
There was a time when I thought that no other filmmaker in the history of America would be considered more partisan than Michael Moore. All that changed when I heard that Al Gore was coming out with his own film.
Imagine Roger Ebert saying “I heard a movie was coming out and so I give it a thumbs down.”
Carr then explains why the movie fulfilled his expectations:
Even if I liked Al Gore, I’d have trouble stomaching this movie, which is completely biased, partisan and loaded with bait-and-switch arguments. I could have stood for more real science and less Al Gore.
I suppose this noodle-puking expert has a lot to say about what he can and can’t stomach these days, but one has to wonder what really motivates someone to try and eat four pounds of anything in just a few minutes. My guess is Carr prefers less-filling material to the hard stuff, even if you measure by weight. On that note, Carr actually called up a fellow Gore-a-phobe to help chill the “theory” of global warming. First, consider who he asked for a “balanced” perspective. Western Fuels and other energy companies hired Balling to create doubt about the effects of CO2 and warming:
From 1991 to 1995, Dr. Robert Balling received about $300,000 from Cyprus [Development Corporation], the British Coal Corporation, the German Coal Mining Association and OPEC. In his collaborations with Dr. Sherwood Idso, Balling has received about $50,000 in research funding from Cyprus Minerals, as well as a separate grant of $4,900 from Kenneth Barr, at the time CEO of Cyprus. The German Coal Mining Association has provided about $80,000 in funding for Balling’s work. The British Coal Corporation has kicked in another $75,000. Balling also received a grant of $48,000 from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science as well as unspecified consulting fees from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. Balling’s 1992 book, The Heated Debate, was subsequently translated into Arabic and distributed to the governments of OPEC. The funding for this edition of his book was provided by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.
Apparently some people will say anything for money. Second, it seems that Balling’s arguments were actually covered in Gore’s movie as the common tactic used by large companies to fight the facts that they can not disprove. Since there are no counter-arguments, they instead argue “not good enough” and “that’s just speculation since nothing is ever watertight”. One thing Gore missed, actually, is that the uncertainty argument swings both way and things may be far worse than estimated.
A perfect example of this is Balling’s Thank you for Smoking style of argument about tornadoes. He tells Carr:
it’s almost foolish to show this whole plot that indicates tornadoes have been on the rise. That’s not even true. Actually the plot might show damage from tornadoes is on the rise. But the idea that we have more tornadoes now because of global warming is not supported at all by the literature
“Almost” foolish. Upon closer examination, this claim is based upon the idea that better discovery tools allow you to say nothing is changing, even when logic and reason tell you otherwise. Here’s how it appears to work:
- Official records show the total yearly number of tornadoes occurring in the United States has increased from 100 to nearly 1400 since 1916
- New technology, such as radar detection that was started in 1953, is designed to find and track tornadoes in more remote areas and is therefore responsible for some of the higher numbers
- Some of the higher numbers might also be due to people settling in areas where tornadoes would otherwise go undetected (nevermind the overlap with the radar argument and the fact that rural populations are often actually shrinking) or it could be from storm chasers (they’ll find things radar can’t, right?) and then television and radio could also help increase the number of reported tornadoes as well…
So the feeling you are probably meant to have is that the trend would be flat-lined if measurement tools had been the same over time. In other words, they admit that data shows a trend, but they dismiss that certainty with an uncertainty about today’s technology in 1916. You can’t really argue against that bit of fantasy, now, can you?
To highlight the silliness of this perspective try asking yourself what the charts would look like if dragons and unicorns existed in 1916.
In Kansas, this would be called the pile of bullsh*t that it really is…you can’t look at the numbers and just totally discount that the numbers have been steadily increasing because of radar. What about the rise prior to 1953? What if you try and correct the numbers for rural/unpopulated areas? That makes some scientific sense and would be a factual counter-claim to perhaps reduce the percentage of increase, but Balling’s response that an increase is “not even true” is actually an attempt to divert the listener to fantasy while making it seem that it is known that the numbers have not increased. And that clearly is foolish, as well as not true:
On the flip-side, therefore, you might say that technology begins to show that there are far worse events taking place than originally assumed, and it becomes even more imperative to take counter-measures immediately. In fact, this has often been my experience in information security. As you introduce testing and measurement methodologies into an ad hoc environment, you will see a large spike in critical bugs that need urgent attention. They are usually indications of bigger issues to come; not an anomaly. Woe be the company that dismisses this as a natural fluctuation in programming or refuse to act upon evidence of insecure code (e.g. CardSystems). I could draw some real-life parallels here, but let it suffice to say that I remember a CIO who always said the current global warming is just part of a natural trend and large amounts of insecure code pushed to production is just a fact of life. Another common theme in information security is when a product manager will ask for permission to release products with known flaws because some other product manager has flaws in their production code. Another arguement I am certain Ballinger uses — the US should just keep cranking CO2 since China and Europe are polluting too. As Gore said, once you realize the truth of the risk, these issues really come down to a question of morals.
More bad news for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld
The men who stole the 2000 election and promised not to waste American military resources continue to flounder in a foreign policy debacle, dragging the US down like a lead balloon. A study brings forward many concerned experts trying to sound the warning:
Eighty-four percent believe the United States is losing the “war on terror,” 86 percent that the world has become a more dangerous place in the past five years, and 80 percent that a major new attack on their country was likely within the next decade.
“We are losing the ‘war on terror’ because we are treating the symptoms and not the cause,” argued Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
“Our insistence that Islamic fundamentalist ideology has replaced communist ideology as the chief enemy of our time feeds Al-Qaeda’s vision of the world,” boosting support for the Islamic radical cause, she said.
[…]
Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, agreed that Washington was acting as its own worst enemy in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
“We’re clearly losing. Today, Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and their allies have only one indispensable ally: the US’ foreign policy towards the Islamic world.”
Scheuer’s expertise is most likely dismissed as non-loyal. After all, he quit the CIA in 2004 after he wrote the book “Imperial Hubris” to describe the Bush administration’s folly abroad:
I’m very much frustrated with the inability of our leaders to make more than a superficial effort to understand the enemy, not because we need to sympathize with them or empathize with them, but because he’s so dangerous. We really need to take the measure of the enemy and why the enemy is fighting us…. Islamic militancy is a complex issue, but it’s not impossible for Americans to understand if they’re talked to directly and frankly. So far, we’ve gone through 12 or 15 years with not a single frank discussion with the American people.
Perhaps he’s referring to this type of language, under today’s headline “Bush says enemies are vulnerable“:
This moment, when the terrorists are suffering from the weight of successive blows, is not the time to call retreat
That’s hardly what I’d call a pep talk. Compare Bush’s comments today to those by Roosevelt’s Fourth of July Address in 1942:
On the desert sands of Africa, along the thousands of miles of battle lines in Russia, in New Zealand and Australia, and the islands of the Pacific, in war-torn China and all over the seven seas, free men are fighting desperately–and dying–to preserve the liberties and the decencies of modern civilization. And in the overrun and occupied nations of the world, this day is filled with added significance, coming at a time when freedom and religion have been attacked and trampled upon by tyrannies unequaled in human history.
Never since it first was created in Philadelphia, has this anniversary come in times so dangerous to everything for which it stands. We celebrate it this year, not in the fireworks of make-believe but in the death-dealing reality of tanks and planes and guns and ships. We celebrate it also by running without interruption the assembly lines which turn out these weapons to be shipped to all the embattled points of the globe. Not to waste one hour, not to stop one shot, not to hold back one blow–that is the way to mark our great national holiday in this year of 1942.
To the weary, hungry, unequipped Army of the American Revolution, the Fourth of July was a tonic of hope and inspiration. So is it now. The tough, grim men who fight for freedom in this dark hour take heart in its message–the assurance of the right to liberty under God–for all peoples and races and groups and nations, everywhere in the world.
Rugged and inspirational but, above all, honest. Sadly, Bush does not seem to grasp what “Freedom from fear” really means, or is it possible that freedom just doesn’t suit his purposes?
General Sherman’s 4th of July
The following excerpt is from William Tecumseh Sherman’s (1820-1891) speech in Salem, Illinois, on July 4, 1866, according to research by James Heintze:
The Spaniards have nearly vanished from our territory, but the English, the Swedes, the Germans, the French remain, and their posterity will remain till the end of time.
From this I infer the fact that the soil and climate such as you enjoy here in Illinois is the wealth of America not alone its mineral resources. They are incidental. They are dug up and are taken away, but this soil remains to you today, next year and forever to the end of time; and will produce food and raiment for all men on the face of the earth.
Then comes the intellectual part of our history. Look at Franklin drawing from the clouds the agency of electricity, so that now you are able to communicate with your friends far away that you are well and comfortably assembled together. He is also another man whom we should cherish with pride–he and other men who made your constitution according to the best of their understanding, believing that it would fulfill the destiny for which they contemplated it. No one doubted that it was fair upon its face; every paragraph had been well studied, and it did work like a charm, and I still think it is the best heritage which they could have given us.
But like many of the people of the world, are we not governed by reason alone. We are full of passion; I am full of passion and sometimes act wildly. So do you, and so do all men. We do not follow the dictates of our intellect and reason; but are swayed hither and thither by passion. Passion carried us into one war with England; then came the Mexican War, and finally the great war which is now over, thank God, and you are the living witnesses of it.
Sherman makes a strong point about the nationalities who “remain”. Wonder why? He does say that the natural bounty is for “all men on the face of the earth”.
Either we are governed by the constitution or passion? This is usually where a politician would bring in religion, but not Sherman. Perhaps his “act wildly” comment is meant to help lay the foundation for his defence against accusations that he destroyed Georgia:
Now you all remember when we took Atlanta it looked as though with our army strung along a line of six or seven hundred miles the head of the column would be crushed.
If I had gone on stringing out my forces would there not have been a time when the head of that column would have been crushed in? You soldiers are generals enough to see that. Therefore I resolved in my mind to stop the game of guarding their cities, and destroy their cities. [Cheers.]
Seems to have been a reasoned tactic after all. His position thus becomes clearer and more pronounced:
Now, my friends, I know there are parties who denounce me as inhuman. I appeal to you if I have not always been kind and considerate to you. [Cheers.] I care not what they say. [Bully for you and cheers.] I say that it ceased to be our duty to guard their cities any longer, and had I gone on stringing out my column, little by little, some of your Illinois regiments would not have come home, but would have been crushed. Therefore I determined to go through their country, and so I took one army myself and gave my friend George Thomas the other, and we whaled away with both. [Loud cheers.] Therefore we destroyed Atlanta, and if we had destroyed all the cities of the South in order to bring about the result in view it would have been right. [Loud cheers.]
The course we pursued did produce the desired result, and now, ladies, you see your young friends returned to you, wives see their husbands– all reunited in this beautiful grove in Illinois, and God knows, I hope you will never be sent forth again; but if you are, I know you will respond more promptly than you did before. [Loud cheers.]
The old ends justify the means theory. Note, however that he does say his end was to achieve peace so that Illinois civilians could return to their normal lives, and that’s not just any “end”.
As to the future, I have been over all that part of the country which is assigned to me, and I have never yet, at any period of our history, seen the country looking so prosperous, the grain growing so luxuriantly, and the people so well contented and happy, the table so bountifully spread; and all this, too, out on the plains of Kansas where, six years ago, it required an escort of three hundred men to guard an officer sent to pay off a garrison. Now I can go, and anybody can go with a single horse a way out to the limits of Kansas, or even to Colorado, without an escort, and that too at the close of a long and terrible war. So that I say that we are progressing to the end we have in view, and that whether the politicians, whether the statesmen, I will call them, the judges and lawyers, will adopt a policy to produce the desired result, I don’t know and don’t much care, because it will be done anyhow. [Laughter and cheers.] I say if the farmers, mechanics and businessmen will go on and attend to their own business the people of Missouri will do the same. Iowa the same, and so it will be all over the Western and Northern country, and politicians will be compelled to adapt their policy to this end–and that is the true end, namely, the great prosperity of our country.
Therefore it is unnecessary to even allude to the position in which our national affairs are placed, for I do not pretend to comprehend or understand them. It is not my task; but it is my task to see that the forces placed at my disposal to put down opposition to the laws quickly and forever, do their duty. [Cheers.] Whenever the United States Marshal comes to me and tells me that his power is resisted, and he has not sufficient civil force to execute the laws, if I have soldiers I will go to his assistance and see that the laws are enforced. And my friends, if that rule is carried out in the land, if the laws of Congress are to be enforced wherever this flag floats, then in truth are we a nation to all intents and purposes, at home and abroad.
The comments about an escort of 300 men are curious. Kansas was called “bloody”, but I’ve not seen a reference that spells out how much security and stability of a military unit actually cost back then. He says “at home and abroad” but later in the speech calls out Congressional oversight and due care in foreign intervention:
when it becomes necessary to assert our authority with foreign nations, let Congress and the Executive do it by due course of law, and then it becomes our right and not before