Later On

We’ll see drumbeat of stories like this over the next decade. This is by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the NY Times:

As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

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David Sirota in Salon:

Here’s a truism: The wealthiest 1 percent have never had it so good.

According to government figures, 1-percenters’ share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1-percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms. And most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.

But what really makes the ultra-wealthy so fortunate, what truly separates this moment from a run-of-the-mill Gilded Age, is the unprecedented protection the 1-percenters have bought for themselves on the most pressing issues.

To review: With 22,000 Americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, Congress is considering universal healthcare legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 — that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1-percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1-percenters received from the Bush tax cuts. In fact, it is so minuscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year — or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul.

Nonetheless, the 1-percenters have deployed an army to destroy the initiative before it makes progress.

The foot soldiers are the Land Rover Liberals. These Democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink-ribbon lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion rights. However, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic interests. Hence, this week’s letter from Democratic dot-com tycoon Rep. Jared Polis, of Boulder, Colo., and other Land Rover Liberals calling for the surtax’s death.

Echoing that demand are the Corrupt Cowboys …

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Paul Krugman in his blog:

Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.

Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.

There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.

This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.

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Glenn Greenwald:

Neil Barofsky, the chief watchdog over the $700 billion TARP bank bailout program, is one of those rare creatures in Washington:  he takes very seriously his responsibilities of independent oversight and accountability.  A career prosecutor, Barofsky is a life-long Democrat who donated money to Obama’s presidential campaign.  But ever since he was appointed to head the oversight office created by Congress when it enacted TARP — an office designed to ensure transparency and accountability at the Treasury Department and in the banking industry — he has repeatedly clashed with Obama’s Treasury officials over their lack of transparency in how the trillions of dollars in TARP-related funds are being sent to and used by the banking industry.  So seriously does Barofsky take his oversight duties that, as a Washington Post profile noted in March, "he refuses to eat with senior administration officials in the [Treasury] building’s executive dining room to maintain his independence."

Barofsky’s clashes with administration officials have intensified of late.  Last week, he issued a report documenting that the actual amount of taxpayer money theoretically put at risk in the bank bailout — once Federal Reserve, FDIC and other programs are counted — is $23.7 trillion, not the widely cited figure of $700 billion, a report that prompted attacks from the White House and Treasury on his credibility.  Separately, Barofsky has continuously disputed White House claims that it’s impossible to account for what has been done by banks with the TARP funds.  Barofsky wants to compel banks to account for those funds and then publicize that information, while the administration opposes such efforts, claiming that accounting for TARP monies is impossible due to the "fungibility" of those funds.  To disprove that claim, Barofsky sent out voluntary surveys to the bank which proved that those funds could be tracked (and he found TARP funds were being used by receiving banks largely to acquire other institutions and/or create "capital cushions" rather than increase lending activity, the principal justification for TARP).

Most significant of all, and obviously due to Barofsky’s truly independent oversight efforts, the Obama administration is now …

Continue reading. More of the Bad Obama, unfortunately. The Bad Obama seems very tight with the financial industry.

Watch carefully the demonstration above. Here’s how it works.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has a very good post on this. Read it, please.

Charles Duhigg explains in the NY Times:

It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market, peek at investors’ orders and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices.

It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets.

Powerful computers, some housed right next to the machines that drive marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange, enable high-frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed and, their detractors contend, reap billions at everyone else’s expense.

These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike. And after growing in the shadows for years, they are generating lots of talk.

Read the rest of this entry »

I did follow his suggestion and send money to the family. His column today begins:

After being kidnapped at the age of 16 by a group of thugs and enduring a year of rapes and beatings, Assiya Rafiq was delivered to the police and thought her problems were over.

Then, she said, four police officers took turns raping her.

The next step for Assiya was obvious: She should commit suicide. That’s the customary escape in rural Pakistan for a raped woman, as the only way to cleanse the disgrace to her entire family.

Instead, Assiya summoned the unimaginable courage to go public and fight back. She is seeking to prosecute both her kidnappers and the police, despite threats against her and her younger sisters. This is a kid who left me awed and biting my lip; this isn’t a tale of victimization but of valor, empowerment and uncommon heroism.

“I decided to prosecute because I don’t want the same thing to happen to anybody else,” she said firmly.

Assiya’s case offers a window into the quotidian corruption and injustice endured by impoverished Pakistanis — leading some to turn to militant Islam.

“When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the police,” said Dr. Shershah Syed, the president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan. “Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.” …

Continue reading.

Good question, and the Boston Globe has a column by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum that tries to answer it:

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science unveiled the latest embarrassing evidence of our nation’s scientific illiteracy. Only 52 percent of Americans in their survey knew why stem cells differ from other kinds of cells; just 46 percent knew that atoms are larger than electrons. On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming.

Scientists are fond of citing statistics such as these in explaining conflicts between the public and the scientific community. On politicized issues like climate change, embryonic stem cell research, the teaching of evolution, and the safety of vaccines, many Americans not only question scientific expertise but even feel entitled to discard it completely. The reason, many scientists infer, is that the public is just clueless; perhaps we wouldn’t have these problems if the average citizen were better educated, more knowledgeable, better informed.

Yet while scientific illiteracy is nothing to shrug at, the truth is that it’s only part of a broader problem for which scientists themselves must shoulder a significant portion of the responsibility. Decrying ignorance and scientific illiteracy, many scientists treat their fellow citizens as empty vessels waiting for an infusion of knowledge. That is exactly wrong, and exactly why so many people, in turn, see science and scientists as distant, inscrutable, aloof, arrogant. Rather than blaming, scientists ought to be engaging with the public, trying to personally make their knowledge hit home and to instill by example (rather than from a distance) the nature and virtues of the scientific mindset – while also encouraging average Americans to ask their own questions and have their say. Scientists must make it clear that while they don’t have all the answers, science is about searching for the truth, an imperfect process of doing the best one can with the information available, while knowing there is always more to learn – the epitome of humility.

Ask yourself: How much would more scientific literacy help the public, really, in understanding the toughest, most contentious issues? Undoubtedly, the more scientifically literate Americans are, the more they’ll understand newspaper articles about science, and be able to follow public debates. But there’s a limit: Scientific literacy is no shield against anti-evolutionists or global warming deniers, for example, who are often scientists themselves, who couch their arguments in sophisticated scientific language, and who regularly cite articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Having the knowledge equivalent of a PhD is more along the lines of what’s necessary to refute them, and even then, the task requires considerable research and intellectual labor, far more than most people have the time for.

If members of the public aren’t all going to earn PhD’s, they need something else, an attribute the standard “scientific illiteracy” survey questions don’t really measure. We would describe it as …

Continue reading. The writers are the co-authors of the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, upon which this article is partly based

The CDC has a new report (PDF) on sexual and reproductive health trends, and the news is not good. Take this chart, for example (click to enlarge):

As the CDC explains:

The report addresses three primary topics: 1) current levels of risk behavior and health outcomes; 2) disparities by sex, age, race/ethnicity, and geographic residence; and 3) trends over time. The data presented in this report indicate that many young persons in the United States engage in sexual risk behavior and experience negative reproductive health outcomes. Although the majority of negative outcomes have been declining for the past decade, the most recent data suggest that progress might be slowing, and certain negative sexual health outcomes are increasing.

In their press release, they note:

Findings include:

• There were approximately 745,000 pregnancies among U.S. females under age 20 in 2004.
• In 2006, the majority of new diagnoses of HIV infection among adolescents and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24 occurred among those aged 20-24 years and among males.
• About 1 million adolescents and young adults aged 10-24 years were reported to have chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis in 2006. Nearly a quarter of females aged 15-19 years, and 45 percent of those aged 20-24 years, had a human papillomavirus (HPV) infection during 2003-2004.
• Approximately 100,000 females aged 10-24 years visited a hospital emergency department for a nonfatal sexual assault injury during 2004-2006.

Although the sexual risk behaviors and negative health outcomes tended to increase with age, the youngest age group – youth 10-14 years of age – were also affected:

• An estimated 16,000 pregnancies were reported among females in this age group in 2004.
• Approximately 17,000 young people in this age group were reported to have a sexually transmitted infection in 2006.
• During 2004-2006, 30,000 females in this age group visited a hospital emergency department because of a nonfatal sexual assault injury.
• Approximately one third of adolescents had not received instruction on methods of birth control before age 18.

“This report identifies a number of concerns regarding the sexual and reproductive health of our nation′s young people. It is disheartening that after years of improvement with respect to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, we now see signs that progress is stalling and many of these trends are going in the wrong direction,” said Janet Collins, Ph.D., director of CDC′s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Among the signs that progress has halted in some areas:

• Teen birth rates increased in 2006 and 2007, following large declines from 1991-2005.
• Rates of AIDS cases among males aged 15-24 years increased during 1997-2006 (AIDS data reflects people with HIV who have already progressed to AIDS.)
• Syphilis cases among teens and young adults aged 15-19 and 20-24 years have increased in both males and females in recent years.

The report also identifies a number of racial/ethnic disparities. Hispanic teens aged 15-19 are much more likely to become pregnant (132.8 births per 1,000 females) compared to their non-Hispanic black (128 per 1,000) and non-Hispanic white (45.2 per 1,000) peers. Additionally, rates of new HIV and AIDS diagnoses among young adults were highest among non-Hispanic black youth across all age groups.

Paul Rosenberg has a long post at OpenLeft in which he discusses the report. His post is the source of the chart above. As he notes,

The [chart above]—based on data from the report—is representative of a number of findings that found either a slowing or a reversal of progress in combating sexually-transmitted diseases and pregnancies by young women and girls under the Bush Administration, which aggressively pushed “abstinence only” sex-ed programs, despite a complete lack of evidence that they produced any sort of positive results…

Good question, eh? Marisa Taylor discusses in McClatchy:

Almost every day for three years, prison guards at one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prisons tortured Sami Alkarim.

Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the accomplished Iraqi artist is being treated like a terrorist by the U.S., the country where he sought refuge.

U.S. officials have told him they can’t give him permanent residency in Denver because of messenger work he did as a teenager for the same political party that counts the current prime minister of Iraq as a member.

Alkarim’s problems have their roots in post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism laws that the Obama and Bush administrations vowed to fix.

Despite that pledge, the number of people who’ve been told their requests for refugee status, asylum or green cards won’t be processed because of the laws has risen from 5,304 in December to 7,286 in June.

The broad language of the Patriot Act and other laws bars refugees and asylum seekers from living and working in the U.S. if they supported or were members of an armed group in their homelands. They’re considered terrorists or supporters of terrorists even if they opposed dictators or helped the U.S. government.

Although Congress has attempted to give the executive branch the power to grant waivers in such cases, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has yet to set up an efficient way to handle them, refugee advocates say.

"As far as I can tell, the situation has only grown worse," said Thomas Ragland, a former Justice Department lawyer attorney who now represents several immigrants affected by the laws. Ragland’s clients include an Iraqi, an Ethiopian, a Nepali, and a Burmese.

Department of Homeland Security officials in charge of reviewing the matter declined a request for an interview…

Continue reading.

Very good post by David Sirota. It begins:

The health care debate has reminded us that there really are three separate but coordinated armies that defend the status quo in Washington – and will defend that status quo, whether on health care or any other economic issue. In my newspaper column today, I look at who these factions are, and what their motives are. You can read the column here.

In a nutshell, you have the Land Rover Liberals, many coming from the 14 out of 25 wealthiest congressional districts that Democrats now represent. Right now, their opposition to health care and tax reform is being led by Boulder, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis (D).

You also have the Corrupt Cowboys – those lawmakers from very poor, mostly Southern and Western parts of the country. These people give themselves Americana sounding nicknames like "Blue Dog Democrats" or "Main Street Republicans" so as to pretend their opposition to health care comes from their being down home guys "representin’ the folks back home." Of course, these same lawmakers are among the most rapacious corporate fundraisers and lobbyist-connected insiders in Congress. And as I pointed out yesterday, there’s no evidence that the districts and states the Corrupt Cowboys represent despise health reform by virtue of the fact that they are culturally conservative bastions. In fact, Nate Silver says there’s exactly the opposite evidence: …

Continue reading.

I had a commenter recently point out a climate-change denialist site. It was sort of sad, actually: the overwhelming evidence for the global warming due to anthrogenic creation of greenhouse gases gets stronger and stronger. The Climate Progress site has a good post on the latest studies, which extend the hockey stick back in time, and they also point out that RealClimate has a post on this latest paper, “Progress in reconstructing climate in recent millennia.”

One good thing is that at the current rate, denialist will be confounded by events within a decade or two at the most.

This post is detailed and intriguing. I had no idea that Libby himself had tried to appeal directly to Bush for a pardon. The post begins—and it contains a lot—like this:

I thought I was done with the myth on the Scooter Libby non-pardon. But dday’s emphasis on the second most eye-popping detail from Time’s story–Libby’s unsuccessful attempt to appeal to Bush personally for a pardon (the most eye-popping being Bush’s consultation with his own defense attorney)–made me want to tell this story again to emphasize the known facts rather than Bush’s self-serving spin of those facts.

The short version, though, is that the White House prevented Libby from speaking to Bush directly about this case, all the while telling a narrative that the question of pardon pertained narrowly to whether Libby lied about his conversation with Russert and not the larger questions implicating both Cheney and Bush. After Libby appealed his case through Fielding indirectly to Bush, Bush consulted with his defense attorney. And the two of them–Bush and his defense attorney–apparently made the final decision not to pardon Libby just two days before Bush left office…

Continue reading.

This graph by Nate Silver tells pretty much the whole story:

Read Silver’s entire post. My own thought, from looking at the graph, suggests that if Specter wins the election, with no other election to face for 6 years, he’ll return pretty much to his GOP inclinations. The party loyalty he’s currently showing is, in my mind, just to get elected and will be dropped as soon as he can.

That astonishing statement comes, of course, from a Republican (they specialize in contrary-to-fact assertions), in this case Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC). She further stated that, "Everybody in this country has access to healthcare."

I don’t believe that’s the case, even when you include healthcare such as Wendell Potter witnessed, as described in this story by Paul Harris in the Observer. It begins:

Wendell Potter can remember exactly when he took the first steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and turning against one of the most powerful industries in America.

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. "It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America," he told the Observer

Potter resigned shortly afterwards. Last month he testified in Congress, becoming one of the few industry executives to admit that what its critics say is true: healthcare insurance firms push up costs, buy politicians and refuse to pay out when many patients actually get sick. In chilling words he told a Senate committee: "I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick: all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors."

Potter’s claims are at the centre of …

Continue reading. Is this what Virginia Foxx was referring to?

I missed this article when it came out last May, but I don’t much like the military direction scouting has taken. The article, by Jennifer Steinhauer in the NY Times, begins:

Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on the floor.

The responding officers — eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 — face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots — BAM! BAM! — fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and masks affixed.

“United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!” screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued.

It is all quite a step up from the square knot.

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”  …

Continue reading.

Good article by Suzanne Goldenberg and Damian Carrington in The Guardian‘s Observer (and click link to see photos):

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images – selected from the 1,000 photographs released – includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice – a record loss – were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

"These are one-metre resolution images, which give you a big picture of the summertime Arctic," said Thorsten Markus of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. "This is the main reason why we are so thrilled about it. One-metre resolution is the dimension that’s been missing."

Disappearing summer sea ice poses considerable dangers, scientists have warned. Ice shelves are used by animals such as polar bears as platforms for hunting seals and other sea creatures. Without them, they could starve. In addition, ice reflects solar radiation. Without that process, the Arctic sea could warm up even more. The phenomenon threatens to set off runaway heating of the planet, say climatologists.

The latest revelations have triggered warnings from scientists that they no longer have the funds to keep a comprehensive track of climate change. Last week the head of the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Professor Jane Lubchenco, warned that the gathering of satellite data – crucial to predicting future climate changes – was now at "great risk" because America’s ageing satellite fleet was not being replaced…

Continue reading. Here’s yet another example of accelerating change.

John Markoff in the NY Times:

President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration.

The official, Christine A. Varney, the antitrust chief at the Justice Department, has begun examining complaints by the phone companies Verizon and AT&T that their rivals — major cable operators like Cablevision and Cox Communications — improperly prevent them from buying sports shows and other programs that the cable companies produce, industry lawyers said.

At the request of some lawmakers, notably Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, Ms. Varney is examining whether small agricultural operations are being hampered unfairly by large food processors, particularly in the milk industry, congressional aides said.

Ms. Varney has also challenged agreements that the Federal Trade Commission and consumer groups say discourage pharmaceutical companies from marketing more generic drugs. And she is examining a settlement between Google and book publishers and authors to make more books available online.

The more aggressive antitrust policy was described in interviews with officials at the White House, the Justice Department, other agencies and Congress. It is a major policy reversal from the Bush administration, which did not prosecute cases in which some dominant companies engaged in potentially anticompetitive behavior, often because those officials maintained such behavior was not harmful to consumers.

Democrats have spent years trying to gain the support of businesses, and the policy changes under way may have long-term political implications for their party. Some companies would like to see more aggressive antitrust enforcement against their rivals, while others could be hurt by it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Building on the previous post:

It’s clear that environmentalism will be an increasingly strong trans-national political organizing principle as the increasing degradation of the global environment due to global warming becomes undeniably evident—when millions die as a result each year, if not before. And since global warming is exponentially accelerating—only a person with serious mental problems could deny the graphical evidence based on actual observations—the time is drawing near when addressing global environmental issues becomes of paramount importance to all humanity. And at that point environmentalism will lead to a de facto if not de jure world government.

Environmentalists are often at odds with the business-government complex, and they have lost many battles. But they will win the war, partly because the health of the global environment will relatively soon (within two centuries, and more likely well within—exponential increase very cannot be ignored) be THE overriding concern of EVERYONE—all the people, not just business titans and high government officials—and partly because environmentalists make their case using rational argument and observed evidence. When push comes to shove—when your own life is at stake—whom would you trust: an educated and recognized expert, or some politician or industry group? Eventually, facts win, and denying facts postpones the victory at best, hastens it more likely.

The previous post gives a perfect example of this happening at the national level. Soon we’ll see it at the global level as the problems become (a) more serious and (b) more clearly global problems, unsolvable by any one nation or any group of nations in some voluntary association. That is, unless politicians in every country see what’s coming and jump quickly enough aboard that they can credibly claim to be leaders.

UPDATE: I realize that I wrote the above on the presumption that people would be smart enough to cooperate, but I should mention that the military has already begun strategic studies and war planning on the assumption that wars will be fought for control of the last of a dwindling resource, be it oil or water or food or oxygen.

UPDATE 2: On thinking about it, I realized that we’re facing a Malthus-squared situation: Malthus pointed out the problems that would come with an increasing population and fixed resources (such as food). We’re facing a crisis from an increasing population and decreasing resources (such as oil and water and, with environmental damage, food as well).

One possible outcome, of course, is that humanity will be, for all practical purposes, wiped out as a result of wars, famine, thirst, and the like.

Reagan may have helped, but the main credit (says this article) goes to a Hungarian biologist. The article begins:

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down, as the Communist regimes of eastern Europe fell one by one. Who was the first to shake its foundations? Was it cold warrior Ronald Reagan? Or Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev? Well, maybe they had a role. But step forward a tenacious biologist Janos Vargha, whose campaign to halt a dam on the river Danube brought Hungarian hardliners to their knees. When reformers took over in Budapest, their first act was to cancel the dam – and their second was to open the border with Austria. As thousands of Hungarians and East Germans flooded through, the game was up for communism. The wall fell and Europe was transformed.

THE story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 began nine years earlier, when Janos Vargha, a biologist from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences began a new career as a writer with a small monthly nature magazine called Buvar. In an early assignment, he went to a beauty spot on the river Danube outside Budapest known as the Danube Bend, the site of an ancient Hungarian capital, to interview local officials about plans for a small park.

It was humdrum stuff – until one official mentioned in passing that this tree-lined curve in the river, a popular picnic spot for Hungarians, was to be drowned by a giant hydroelectric dam being planned in secret by a much-feared state agency known simply as the Water Management.

Vargha investigated. He learned that the Nagymaros dam (pronounced “nosh-marosh”) would pond up pollution, destroy underground water reserves, dry out wetlands and wreck the unique ecosystem of central Europe’s longest river. But nobody dared object. “Of course, I wrote an article,” he remembers today. “But there was a director of the Water Management on the magazine’s editorial board. At the last moment, he went to the printers and stopped the presses. The article never appeared. I was frustrated and angry. But I was also extremely interested in why they cared enough to ban my article.”

He discovered that …

Continue reading. It’s a fascinating story and essential to my argument in the next post.