Scalia open to regulating guns?

Odd thing for him to say. From National Journal:

Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Supreme Court's most vocal and conservative justices, said on Sunday that the Second Amendment leaves room for U.S. legislatures to regulate guns, including menacing hand-held weapons.

"It will have to be decided in future cases," Scalia said on Fox News Sunday. But there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers that banned frightening weapons which a constitutional originalist like himself must recognize. There were also "locational limitations" on where weapons could be carried, the justice noted.

When asked if that kind of precedent would apply to assault weapons, or 100-round ammunition magazines like those used in the recent Colorado movie theater massacre, Scalia declined to speculate. "We'll see," he said. '"It will have to be decided."

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Video: This man is having none of Romney's bullying

Interesting point the man raises - he himself was a childhood victim of bullying (two kids held him town and shaved his head) - how do you not remember physically assaulting someone?

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A British perspective on Romney's visit to 'England'

If Romney wanted to start his visit to my home country, the UK, on the right foot he could at least get the name of the country right.

“I will leave Reno this evening on a trip abroad that will take me to England, Poland, and Israel.”

It may seem a trivial point, but Prime Minister Cameron is the leader of what used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party. They changed the name, but its members still believe in maintaining the unity of the United Kingdom as one of their principal political goals.

The United Kingdom, while it is one country itself, also consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  When you say "England," instead of the United Kingdom, you leave out three of those countries.

To understand the political faux pas involved, imagine if a French Presidential candidate announced a visit to 'Quebec, Poland and Israel'.  Canadians who don't live in Quebec probably wouldn't be terribly amused.

This may seem a trivial point of diplomatic protocol, but this statement came in a speech on foreign policy in which Romney was trying to establish himself as a foreign policy expert.  While it may be a common mistake for many Americans to call the UK "England," people running for President should know better, especially when they visit the place.  Did the man get no briefings whatsoever?

Rather more serious was the gaffe by Romney's spokesperson that John posted earlier.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

The problem here is not just the casual racism on the part of the speaker, but the assumption that these views are typical of the UK. Cameron and Clegg must be very offended by the suggestion that they could not work with a black US President. Such views may be acceptable in LDS circles, which only abandoned Brigham Young's loathsome 'Mark of Cain' racism in 1978 (under duress), in the UK they are not.

Try as they might to prove how they understand 'England' better than Obama, Romney's advisers only succeed in demonstrating how little they understand us at all. Take this passage in the original Telegraph piece, for example:

“Obama is a Left-winger," said another. "He doesn’t value the Nato alliance as much, he’s very comfortable with American decline and the traditional alliances don’t mean as much to him. He wouldn’t like singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory'.”

"Land of Hope and Glory" is a British patriotic song that extolls the virtues of imperialism and colonialism.

"Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet."

It is not quite as explicitly jingoistic as Rule Britannia, and nowhere near as embarrassing as the third and fourth verses of the national anthem, God Save the Queen, but they're hardly sentiments that are widely shared in modern British society. It is a song that is very rarely heard outside the Last Night of the Proms, and on similar (rare) occasions.

I would not expect Obama or Romney to sing it any more than I, as a Brit, would recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In fact I would be rather offended if either of them did sing it. For better or worse, Land of Hope and Glory is a part of our heritage. It belongs to us. It certainly does not belong to either Romney or Obama. I would certainly hope that Americans would be outraged if their President did so, just as Brits would be outraged if their Prime Minister recited the
Pledge.

Finally, note the elegance of the last graph in the Telegraph piece, that neatly exposes the advisors as hypocritical liars:

The advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity because Mr Romney’s campaign requested that they not criticise the President to foreign media. After another adviser criticised Mr Obama in a German magazine last month, the President sharply instructed them that “America's political differences end at the water's edge”.

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Romney praises Jews' cultural ability to make money

I can see why the Palestinians are ticked, but no Jews have a problem with Romney coming to Israel and praising their "cultural" ability to make money?

Romney said some economic histories have theorized that "culture makes all the difference."

"And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things," Romney said, citing an innovative business climate, the Jewish history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the "hand of providence." He said similar disparity exists between neighboring countries, like Mexico and the United States.

Palestinian reaction to Romney was swift and pointed.

"It is a racist statement and this man doesn't realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation," said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Romney's off to Poland next. Get ready for him to praise their contribution to American humor. Read the rest of this post...

Koch-funded climate denier reverses: "Humans almost entirely the cause" of global warming

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
________

I've seen this story in too many places not to bring it to you, even though it interrupts the order of my climate pieces.

So far we've been dealing with the science, the global warming numbers, in a series listed at the end of this post. The bottom line regarding the temperature increase numbers:

  1. The do-nothing scenario ("business as usual") gives us a global temperature increase of 4°–7°C (up to 12½°F) by 2100.

  2. James Hansen's mass-extinction scenario occurs at 3°C (5½°F).

  3. Staying below 2°C (3½°F) will take urgent, deep and long-lasting cuts in fossil fuel use, and active preservation of the world’s forests.

  4. This is at heart a political problem, not a scientific one.

And we've started dealing with the politics, the place where the numbers intersect with the dollars.

Oil Baron dollars. Koch Bros dollars.

Now the news. One of those Koch Bros scientists is off the high-dollar reservation. The LA Times (my emphasis and paragraphing; h/t Robyn O'Brien for the link):

The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago.

The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.

In an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times titled “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,” Muller writes:

“Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

The Berkeley project’s research has shown, Muller says, “that the average temperature of the Earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”

Kudos to Dr. Muller for what he calls his "total turnaround."

I won't speculate on the causes except to say that — in general — there sometimes comes a point when a compromised professional (and Koch-funded warming deniers are indeed compromised) has to choose between his economic advantage and his reputation as an actual professional.

In other words, it's often possible to serve yourself economically by serving up the fog your paymasters are paying for — and still keep your professional reputation intact.

But sometimes the fog clears, and you're left naked where everyone can see. The hand with the dollars is out and the truth is in a whole other place. Do you take the dollars? If you do, you're not only a hack — you're a known hack. Time to choose. Paymaster, or profession?

Dr. Muller has chosen to support the facts as established by his profession. Again, kudos.

What we learn from Dr. Muller supports the numbers as we've examined them recently. Note the temperature numbers in the quote above. According to Muller:

• Since 1760 ("250 years" ago), temperatures over land have risen 2.5°F (1.4°C). This is worse than the global (over land and water) increase shown in the first figure here.
  
  
• Since 1960 ("the most recent 50 years"), temperatures over land have risen 1.5°F (almost 1°C). Again, horrible news if we're fighting to stay under 2°C increase from 1800–2100.
  
  
• Almost all of this is human-caused. (Take that Messrs. Koch & Koch. This is on you.)

This is why we're on track for the Koch Bros Scenario — a life-killing 7°C temperature rise — that's 12½°F, folks — by 2100. And all of the number are coming in worse than expected.

Read the rest of the LA Times piece; there's interested responses from the Koch Foundation, climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, and the still-bought people on the right who need to spin this differently.

Raw Story has a little more:

A Greenpeace report earlier this year found that the Koch’s had given nearly $61.5 million since 1997 to groups denying climate change. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation donated $150,000 to the BEST [Dr. Muller's "Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature" group] study, more than any other single organization.

Dr. Muller's original NY Times piece is here.

Our global warming ("climate catastrophe") science posts:

  ■ Intro: Hugging the monster: Climate scientists and the C-word

  ■ Hansen on what happens if we hit 3°C increase: Quarter to half of species on earth may die from global warming

  ■ Exploring Hansen's 3°C scenario: What is "climate catastrophe"?

  ■ McKibben on staying under 2°C increase: Three Numbers—Measuring the march toward climate catastrophe

  ■ A long-range picture: Illustrating global warming—What does "a 2°C increase" refer to?

  ■ A near-range picture: One more climate chart—We're on track for 7°C temperature rise by 2100

  ■ This post, which includes latest over-land temperature increase numbers: Koch-funded climate denier reverses: "Humans almost entirely the cause" of global warming

Your bottom line? Hug the monster and don't despair. This game isn't over. The next few posts will deal with the politics. We've already looked at what doesn't work. We'll start looking at alternatives next.

GP

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How Wikileaks helped foment a culture of investigative journalism in Brazil

A really neat story from the Nation about how Wikileaks strategically went through classified cables in order to create their own news, and how it ended up inspiring a culture of investigative journalism in Brazil.  This is an excellent story.  I'm posting a snippet, but do read the first part of the article that details "how" Wikileaks coordinated the release of its information in order to maximize the newsiness, and impact, of it.  Really smart.

By Natalia Viana in the Nation:

By the middle of January 2011, it was clear that the two Brazilian partners were losing interest in the cables and were dedicating less and less space to “Cablegate” stories. I started a blog, which attracted a strong readership. That’s how Phase II of the WikiLeaks coverage—engaging the nontraditional media—began.

Rather than deciding myself what to cover, I let the public select issues that were of interest to them. Using the WikiLeaks database of Brazil-related cables, I requested that my readers submit topics to search for in the collection. After conducting a search, I would send the relevant documents to a group of bloggers, who would then publish stories based on them. This generated some interesting articles—revealing, for example, the meetings between US officials and opposition leaders like presidential candidate José Serra, who hinted at a closer relationship with Washington should he win. Neither Folha nor O Globo, who were seen as harsh critics of the Lula government, published any stories about opposition leaders.

As the bloggers’ interest in the cables faded by mid-March, with hundreds of documents yet to be reviewed, I and a group of women journalists decided to create Brazil’s first nonprofit center for investigative journalism, called Publica. Based on similar US media organizations like ProPublica, it would publish stories that could be freely reproduced under a creative-commons license. Our first challenge was to review the remaining WikiLeaks documents and see what stories they held.

Staffing a temporary newsroom with fifteen volunteer journalists, we were able to publish another fifty articles based on the cables. My favorite new revelation was the secret transfer to Brazil by the United States of thirty Drug Enforcement Administration personnel who had previously been expelled from Bolivia for spying and aiding the opposition. The new stories created another stir in the Brazilian press. But more than that, they proved it was possible for an independent investigative group to match the traditional news outlets when it came to producing professional journalism—and to following the story where the mainstream media would not take it.

The impact of WikiLeaks on the Brazilian media community has been unmistakable: within a couple of months, articles based on documents from Brazil’s dictatorship period started popping up in the press. Folha de S. Paulo started its own WikiLeaks-type section, the “FolhaLeaks,” and established an investigative unit in Brasília. More investigative stories are being produced by both the traditional and the independent media. A year later, corporate media outlets such as Globo and Grupo Bandeirantes—major TV networks in Brazil—are fighting to sponsor the annual congress of the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism. And Publica is now up and running.

The response to the leaks also demonstrated that, more than twenty-five years after the end of military rule, the Brazilian public is ready and eager to advance toward a more transparent and accountable society. Brazil’s “Cablegate” generated a much-delayed debate about the lack of transparency in government and the need for a Freedom of Access Law. Journalists’ associations ramped up their demands for such a law to be adopted at once. Fernando Rodrigues, who was a director of the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism, wrote an article criticizing how slowly the law was being debated in Congress. When the president of the Senate, José Sarney, declared that documents should remain secret because “we cannot do a WikiLeaks of Brazilian history,” he was heavily criticized.

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One more climate chart—We're on track for up to 7°C (12½°F) temperature rise by 2100

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
________

This is a quick follow-up to this post about that 2°C global temperature increase most of us are hoping to avoid.

In that post, I showed you the chart below, a reprint of Figure 21 from the Copenhagen Diagnosis (pdf), a very readable "where we are" science paper presented in advance of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. (Thanks to Dr. Michael Mann for pointing me in this direction.)

Note the projected IPPC scenarios in this chart, especially the top one — the red band — labeled A1F1. I'm calling that the Koch Bros Scenario — McKibben calls it the "do nothing" or "business as usual" scenario.

This is what will happen, in other words, if we keep making the Oil Barons rich. Following that scenario, we get to a monstrous 7°C, or close to it, by 2100.

Figure 21. Reconstructed global-average temperature relative to 1800-1900 (blue) and projected global-average temperature out to 2100 (the latter from IPCC AR4). The envelopes B1, A2, A1FI refer to the IPCC AR4 projections using those scenarios. The reconstruction record is taken from Mann et al. (2008).

Now look at Figure 1 from the same document (page 11 of the pdf). It drills down, showing both projected and observed CO2 emissions for an overlapping period. The projections start in 2001 and include the previously noted IPPC scenarios, including A1F1. The observed CO2 emissions data goes through 2009.

The chart therefore serves to compare 2000-generated projections against eight subsequent years of observation and gives us a nice "what track are we on" look through 2009.

Here the IPPC A1F1 scenario is the red line. The information is startling. Take a look:

Figure 1. Observed global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement production compared with IPCC emissions scenarios (Le Quéré et al. 2009). Observations are from the US Department of Energy Carbon Dioxide Information Center (CDIAC) up to 2006. 2007 and 2008 are based on BP economic data. The emission scenarios are averaged over families of scenarios presented in Nakicenovic et al (2000). The shaded area covers all scenarios used to project climate change by the IPCC.

As of 2009, we're solidly on that A1F1 track, headed for 7°C. (Update: I should remind you that 7°C is more than 12°F. That's a ton.)

This means that Charles & David Koch (those nice people who finance Nova, for example, on that wonderful left-seeming PBS) are winning. And everyone on the planet is losing.

The Koch Bros Scenario — 7°C in your grandchildren's lifetime. A lights-out scenario for our species and so many more. Count on 7°C unless the Oil Barons are stopped.

"Triumph of the will" — what I've been calling "Trumpism" after the win-at-all-costs aspect of Trump's first book — is a hell of a disease for our New Barons to have caught, just when history placed the tools of species destruction right in their hands.

People took seriously the "nuclear destruction" possibility. This one is just as deadly.

More on the Koch Bros and the Koch Bros Scenario in the next climate post. Conscienceless.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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Is Romney more wimp or weenie?

Michael Tomasky pens a huge article for Newsweek about Mitt Romney as "wimp" (and then "weenie"). It's a tough article, and long (meaning, detailed). Here's an excerpt, but seriously worth a read.

He’s kind of lame, and he’s really ... annoying. He keeps saying these ... things, these incredibly off-key things. Then he apologizes immediately—with all the sincerity of a hostage. Or maybe he doesn’t: sometimes he whines about the subsequent attacks on him. But the one thing he never does? Man up, double down, take his lumps.

In 1987, this magazine created a famous hubbub by labeling George H.W. Bush a “wimp” on its cover. “The Wimp Factor.” Huge stir. And not entirely fair—the guy had been an aviator in the war, the big war, the good war, and he was even shot down out over the Pacific, cockpit drenched in smoke and fumes, at an age (20) when in most states he couldn’t even legally drink a beer. In hindsight, Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned ... French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?

In some respects, he’s more weenie than wimp—socially inept; at times awkwardy ingratiating, at other times mocking those “below” him, but almost always getting the situation a little wrong, and never in a sympathetic way. The evidence resonates across too many years to deny. What kind of teenager beats up on the misfit, sissy kid, pinning him down and violently cutting his hair with a pair of school scissors—the incident from Romney’s youth that The Washington Post famously reported (and Romney famously didn’t really deny) back in May? The behavior extends, through more sedate means, into adulthood....

And what kind of presidential candidate whines about a few attacks and demands an apology when the going starts to get rough? And tries to sound tough by accusing the president who killed the world’s most-wanted villain of appeasement? That’s what they call overcompensation, and it’s a dead giveaway; it’s the “tell.” This guy is nervous—terrified—about looking weak. And ironically, being terrified of looking weak makes him look weaker still.

Politicians change positions for three main reasons: financial ambition, political ruthlessness, and political cowardice. Romney already has the big money, so that’s out. Ruthless? Not really—a ruthless change of position is one designed to please one group of people but equally to piss off another group. Romney’s flip-flops are solely about making a group of highly suspicious voters like him. That, folks, is door No. 3.

But if Romney is elected? Be nervous. A Republican president sure of his manhood had nothing to prove. Reagan was happy with a jolly little shoot-up in Grenada, and eventually he settled down to the serious work of arms control, consummating historic treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev. But a weenie Republican—look out. He has something to prove, needs to reassert that “natural” advantage. That spells trouble more often than not.

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