Ways of thinking about history

I started doing some Civil War reading this year, before I even thought about the whole 150 year anniversary business, currently being well-chronicled by the New York Times Disunion blog and The American Interest's Long Recall. I listened to the Yale history course on the subject by David Blight. This isn't a new thought by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just amazing how the South won the narrative of Civil War and Reconstruction memory for over a century. I think about reading JFK's (ghost-written, but still) Profiles In Courage in high school. One of the profiles is of Edmund Ross, the Kansas Republican Senator whose vote was decisive in the acquittal of Andrew Johnson after his impeachment trial. The whole tone of the profile is how the Radical Republicans in Congress were overreachers, pushing the South too hard, and attempting to make an unconstitutional power grab for Congressional supremacy over the Presidency. There's certainly a strong case to be made for Johnson's acquittal: the Tenure Of Office Act which he unquestionably violated was an awful law, correctly ruled unconstitutional later. But elided in Kennedy/Sorenson's profile was the simple fact that Johnson was a terrible, terrible president (Lincoln's greatest mistake), attempting to block the Radicals' efforts to achieve some measure of justice and equality for four million former slaves. The South left to its own devices would do everything in its power to grind those people back into servitude, and remove their newly won suffrage. As Northern Republican will faded through the 1870s in the face of Southern political terrorism and an economic panic, that's exactly what happened. The Redeemer governments replaced Republican rule in the former Confederacy, and they were all permitted to utterly ignore the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for nearly another one hundred years.

Yet in the face of all that, the dominant narrative as late as my own schooling in the 70s and 80s was that the bad guys of Reconstruction were the Republicans, the black Southern officeholders of the time, and the carpetbaggers. I also recall the attitude we all have when we're first coming into a more adult way of thinking about the world: we want the enjoyment of a sophisticated attitude, eschewing the simplistic narrative told to us as children. So we were taught and embraced the idea that the "Civil War was about slavery" narrative was childish and mostly false. There's plenty of complexity in why the war happened, but the childish explanation is really the correct one. Lincoln was elected, the South feared that having lost control of the federal government, abolition was in the cards, not immediately but inevitably in the decades to come. So they left. They didn't leave because of tariffs, and they didn't leave because of any nebulous states rights. They couldn't have been any clearer about it. They proclaimed it for all to see in their secession announcements. (One of the great ironies of the secessionists is what a colossal blunder they made. They feared the eventual loss of slavery many years hence, but their choice meant the near immediate end of slavery, beginning less than two years later, completed in five.)

But having lost the war, they immediately set about rewriting it, with the greatest of success. The victors lost interest and mostly capitulated, settling in to the enjoyable reunionism of mutual valor and Blue-Gray soldier's gatherings. The essential, one sentence truth about the war, that a monstrous ideology was defeated, was turned by the Lost Causers into a simplistic lie, believed only by the infantile.

Clearly a final decision about gay marriage can only be properly made by

the wisest, most powerful man in the world.

This is the craziest thing ever

If you were of a certain temperament as a child, you spent a lot of time looking for loopholes in various rule systems. You'd think of things like: what if the presidential election was a tie? What would happen if a baseball team just couldn't record any outs? Unlike youth leagues and such, Major League Baseball has no mercy rule. If it's 39-0 with still nobody out in the top of the first, you play on. (OK this one has an obvious answer: the team that's way ahead would just purposefully strike out all the time to get the game over with.)

One of the most tantalizing loopholes was always to figure out how a game could stay tied forever. How long would the powers that be let it go on if a baseball game got to 47 innings or a basketball game got to its 15th overtime?

Well we're finding out how tennis handles it: they play on. And on. John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, two players unknown to the world outside hardcore tennis fans, had their first round match at Wimbledon suspended by darkness last night after four sets. That's perfectly ordinary, and unworthy of attention. They'd play the fifth set today, the winner would lose soon after in a later round, and that would be that. The fact that the match was played on Court 18, which looks pretty much like a high school court with a few more seats, exemplifies how mundane this match should have been. Except that the fifth set could not be completed in one day, because they're tied at 59 games each. Fifty-nine! The score of the match is 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 59-59. To say that's a record is to understate it. I can't find the record for most games in a set, but it looks like it might be something like 46, and these guys are at 118. The fifth set by itself would have shattered match length records, both on number of games and elapsed time.

That's the kind of loophole you pester your dad about: what if two tennis players can't break each other's serves, at all? Do they just play until somebody passes out? Irritated dad eventually responds that somebody always wins eventually, and don't you have some homework to do? But what if they don't win, you ask yourself silently, and you wonder if you'll ever find out.

Slovenia math

Let X be the number of times an American has said the word Slovenia today.

Let Y be the total number of times an American has said the word Slovenia in all history except today.

I bet X/Y > 10.

National Motto of Slovenia: We Are Not Slovakia, Even Though The Slovenian Name For Slovenia Is Slovenija And The Slovakian Name For Slovakia is Slovenska. We Are Sorry This Is So Confusing For Everyone, But Not As Sorry As Those Poor Bastards In Slovakia Who Can Only Dream Of Being Slovenians.

The brain is not a computer

The other day, for some reason my mind wandered to a birthday party my daughter had attended. I was trying to remember when it was, eventually deciding (correctly, it turned out) that it was about three months ago. The way I decided was by analyzing how old the memory felt. I knew it wasn't a day old memory, and yet I also sensed that it wasn't a year old memory. How did I know that? Computers certainly don't work that way. A piece of information is either stored in a specific place or it isn't. It doesn't get hazier with time.

Anyway, isn't that kind of wild, that the brain somehow works like that? Eventually when we figure out how it works, we'll probably laugh at the late 20th/early 21st century view of the brain as a computer. Same way we kind of laugh now at the early 20th century view of the brain as a telephone switchboard.

Great screwups of American history

Big picture, you'd have to say things have gone very well for the US since its founding. From a few million people clinging to the East Coast, praying that Britain and France remained occupied with each other to continent-spanning hyperpower, that's about as good a couple of centuries as a country's going to have, geopolitically.

Much credit, frequently bordering on hagiography, is generally given to the revolutionary generation, for winning independence, then framing a sturdy constitution. But there have been some glaring missteps here and there. Mostly little things--I'm not talking about slavery here, which was basically baked in to the early USA and wasn't going anywhere without eventual bloodshed. Some notable screwups:

1. Electing the President and Vice President. That was just a mess in the Constitution. It relied on electors managing to conspire to give one vote less to the desired VP. That worked sort of OK for the two Washington-Adams coronations, but was a serious trainwreck in the next two elections. In 1796, Jefferson ended up VP to his bitter opponent Adams. 1800 was even worse, with Alexander Hamilton working against Adams for the more reliable Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and a miscommunication leading to a tie between Jefferson and Burr, despite everyone knowing that Burr was supposed to be the VP. Multiple rounds of voting in the House failed to resolve the issue, with the Federalists supporting Burr to deny Jefferson, their bitter enemy, the presidency. Finally Hamilton signaled support for Jefferson as the less dangerous man, and the vote went to Jefferson in the 36th ballot.

Soon thereafter the 12th amendment was passed, clearing the situation up by making the electors cast specific votes for President and VP. That explicitly prevented the 1800 scenario from occurring again, and effectively prevented the 1796 scenario (President and VP being opponents). However...

2. It still left the vice presidency vacant if the VP ascended to the presidency. Which turned out to be a common enough occurrence--John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson were all to serve without a VP (until/unless they were re-elected in a later election with a new running mate). Only in 1967 did this finally get resolved with the ratification of the 25th amendment, allowing the nomination of a VP by the president, to be approved by Congress. Within a few years this was useful twice. First when Spiro Agnew resigned for being the 97th most corrupt member of the Nixon Administration, to be replaced by Gerald Ford. Second when Nixon resigned, Ford replaced him, and then nominated Nelson Rockefeller to replace himself as VP.

Overall, you've got to give the framers a little crap for not foreseeing any of these issues.

3. The House of Representatives is supposed to be volatile, with lots of turnover every two years in response to changing public opinion. Instead with gerrymandering, safe districts, and fundraising advantages, incumbents tend to be very difficult to defeat. House turnover is generally rather low (though this year is probably going to show a big move).

4. Political parties--the founders totally missed out on them. The system they designed is almost guaranteed to produce two strong parties, but they Madison, Hamilton et al. were all idealistic about how legislators would decide each issue on its merits, then fall back into neutrality. By 1796 the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were all but official. With minor interruptions (the Federalists faded, leaving the D-R's alone on the field for awhile, until they split into the Whigs and Democrats, then the Whigs faded to be sort of replaced by the Republicans) we have had two strong parties ever since.

5. States. The first thirteen were existing entities in 1787, so it's entirely understandable that they were admitted intact despite their disparate sizes. But as the continent was conquered and purchased, the new states should have been more judiciously drawn. Most egregious was the decision to make California a single state, which now has about one ninth of the entire US population, yet as many senators as Wyoming. California has sixty times as many people as Wyoming. That is ridiculous. Also, did we really need a North and a South Dakota? That's a lot of senators to hand to fairly empty farmland. Surely one Dakota would have been OK.

6. Federalism. The idea was that local government is closest to you, state government next, federal government the farthest away. Closer would mean more responsive. But really, doesn't it seem like moxg people don't even know the names of their city council and state representatives? Everyone knows who's president, most people know who their senators are, same for governor. How responsive can local government be if 85% of the voters don't even know who they are? I don't have the slightest idea what my city is doing most of the time. State government has seemed inept and corrupt every place I've ever lived.

The talk about yourself meme of the month

There's a meme going around to list and discuss the ten books that have influenced you the most. Not your favorite books necessarily, not the best books you've ever read, rather the books that really changed the way you think about life and the world. In no particular order:

1. Let's start with something that isn't even a book. In the early days of the internet I was an e-mail discussion list about politics. Also on that list was a young Jimmy Wales, who went on to co-found Wikipedia. He described his philosophy as a desire to "believe true things." That stuck with me as a very concise way to put it (though I doubt he invented the phrase). There's a strong cultural message out there, given to our kids from sources as varied as Disney movies and schools, to "stand up for what you believe in." Which is great and fine, but don't forget to check whether what you believe in is true.


2. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So. All about the cognitive biases that plague us in the whole "believe true things" quest. About our confounded brains' desires to see patterns where none exist, and to construct post hoc narrative explanations for those patterns. About confirmation bias, which gives us the happy, false feeling that we've been right all along. About the Dunning-Kruger effect which leaves us more confident the greater our ignorance. Knowing about these and other cognitive pitfalls certainly doesn't inoculate us against them but at least can put us on our guard.

3. Richard Dawkins, probably any of his evolution books, but we'll go with The Selfish Gene as a stand in for the lot. There is no greater explainer of the concepts of evolution to a general audience. You read his stuff and you get it, and you get how marvelous and fascinating it all is. The perhaps unfortunate side effect is that it leaves you with a tired feeling when you encounter creationist arguments and see how terribly ignorant they are of the deep body of knowledge they reject. Unfortunately Dawkins also has the tendency to throw in irrelevant asides which will put off people he should be trying to reach. The Ancestor's Tale is a terrific book, marching evolutionary history backwards until we're at the last common ancestor of all terrestrial life, several billion years ago. Early on, a propos of nothing, he puts in a diatribe about George Bush and Tony Blair. What's the point?

Dawkins's lifelong opponent, Stephen J. Gould, is also an engaging popular writer on evolution, though where they differ I tend to favor Dawkins's views. Not that I'm qualified to make that call, just that Gould on issues where I am more conversant tends to strike me as a little off sometimes.

I like what I do but if I had it to do all over again I might be an evolutionary biologist. As it is, reading about it makes up a fair chunk of my nonfiction reading. It's just so darn fascinating, with a nearly infinite variety of great stories embedded.

4. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. Another great populizer of difficult scientific subjects, this time on how the brain works at a physical level. The nature of consciousness that arises from the few pounds of meat in our heads is unbelievably interesting and weird. Unfortunately I get a sense that this body of knowledge may get more depressing the further it advances. How much of a real self is in there? How much do we actually control? Perhaps very little. But we seem to muddle on anyway in our sense that we are strongly free-willed individuals, so maybe it won't matter in reality.

5. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Austen is her strong views on character, on what it means to be a good person. The specifics of the morality of her times which differ from ours (the immorality of elopement or putting on a play) aren't the important things. It's the intensity with which the moral characters think about, talk about, and live what morality is. And even the characters meant to be the greatest exemplars of Austen character make mistakes despite all of that.

6. George Orwell, Essays. Politics and the English Language is probably the most famous, and it's a great one for sure. The one that hit the hardest though was probably Such, Such Were the Joys, his memory of misery in various boarding schools of his youth. An interesting comparison is to Roald Dahl's Lucky Break, which covers very similar ground. Both describe a system of nearly unbelievable cruelty, from both the adults in charge and the older boys with their petty tyrannical powers. These weren't orphanages, these were 'good' schools that people paid dearly to send their children to. All this emphasizes the changes and continuities of history. School cruelty still exists and always will, but parenting has changed. There's certainly a case to be made that with smaller families and a more comfortable existence, we have swung to an overprotective mode of parenting, but better that than sending them away to be beaten by twisted old men.

7. William Schlesinger, Biogeochemistry. This was the text for a grad class on global biogeochemical cycles, and it introduced me to the mental model of fluxes and reservoirs. Still the way I visualize lots of things, especially in earth sciences. If the concepts behind this image were understood by more people, we'd have fewer poor arguments in the debate.

8. Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. This book from Heinlein's adult prime introduced me to the concept of libertarianism and negative vs. positive rights. It did not exactly take, for I did not become a libertarian per se. But it did allow me to see the case for it, to understand the arguments. I read it when I read most of my science fiction, in junior high and high school. That was the early 1980s. I hung with a liberal crowd, and like most teens, I was pretty much were sure of myself without really being able to understand the people and arguments I opposed. Now I at least think about the libertarian argument whenever I think about a political issue.

In the end Heinlein got a little tiresome, because he kept writing about nearly flawless supermen and women, the exemplars of his moral philosophy. This he shared with his more famous contemporary, Ayn Rand, who introduced readers to libertarianism in rather greater numbers. Heinlein's supermen were considerably more likable than Rand's Galts, Roarks, and Reardens, who felt just as strange and inhuman as Rand herself. Heinlein could at least laugh.

9. Bill James, The Bill James Baseball Abstract, a yearly that came out through the 1980s. This is on the list partly because of my lifelong baseball fandom, but mostly due to the way it changed the way I thought about truth-finding as a way of life. In that sense, it pointed me toward becoming a scientist.

James's story has become somewhat famous with the publication of Michael Lewis's Moneyball. James was working in a Kansas City warehouse as a security guard. He spent the long nights there thinking about baseball. Specifically he thought about how good baseball teams win games, and about what good baseball players do to aid in that cause.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that at the time hitters were judged on batting average, home runs, and RBIs, whereas pitcher value was boiled down to wins and losses, ERA, and strikeouts. James noticed that there was quite a bit of potential value that those numbers missed. Batting average dated from baseball's 19th century infancy, when for reasons which are fairly obscure and meaningless to modern baseball, walks were excluded from consideration. They were included in neither the numerator nor denominator of batting average. For the purposes of the stat, it's as if a walk were equivalent to the batter just skipping that plate appearance. Now obviously it wasn't skipped--he's on first base now, and he may have moved some other runners up as well. That's considerably more helpful towards the goal of scoring runs than a skipped PA.

It's not as if this was actually unknown to baseball people. They knew a walk was a significant offensive event. It's just that, possibly because of the long unexamined history of batting average in baseball culture, the walk was considered to be a pitcher's mistake rather than a batter's accomplishment. James quickly saw this was nonsense. (To be fair, he wasn't the first. Branch Rickey was on to this in the 1940s.) Hitters walked as a repeatable skill. The same guys who walked a lot one year tended to walk a lot the next year. Furthermore, it wasn't just the power hitters that were the big walkers due to pitchers being afraid to throw them strikes. Some power hitters (e.g., Dave Kingman) were free swingers who walked rarely, and some slap hitters (Pete Rose) walked a lot. Nobody was intentionally putting Rose on base ahead of Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Tony Perez. Rose was just letting bad pitches go by.

It wasn't just the reliance on stats as an evaluating tool that led to the undervaluing of walks. The attitude was also reflected in the scouting reports that were filled out on every young prospect. Hitters were famously graded on the ability to hit, hit for power, run, field, and throw. A prospect who can do all that is still known as a five-tool player. Nowhere on the form was a space to evaluate the prospect's batting eye and strike zone judgment. This was despite the fact that Ted Williams, one of history's most devastating hitters, had told the world that the secret to hitting was getting a good pitch to hit. Letting balls go by led to hitting in good counts, which meant getting more fastballs over the middle, which could be hit a long way. Williams's approach also led to lots of walks as both a side effect and an addition of substantial offensive value. Note that it's a skill as well as a strategy: differentiating a ball from a strike in the vanishingly brief window of time available before the swing must be initiated is terribly difficult. Dante Bichette was a famous free swinger for the Colorado Rockies in the 1990s. He freely admitted that he knew the Williams approach was the right one, he just couldn't implement it. By the time his eyes and brain could evaluate a pitch, it was pretty much by him. So he swung at nearly everything.

So James saw that an entire billion dollar industry was making decisions that could be demonstrably and significantly improved by a fairly simple change in the metrics it used to evaluate its employees. Just moving from batting average to on base percentage (which is roughly batting average with a walk treated as a hit and an at bat) and slugging percentage (which counts extra base hits more than singles) moved you much closer to an accurate rating of a hitter. There was much more you could do too, and James investigated these and other baseball questions with intelligence. Furthermore, he wrote very well and engagingly. Eventually baseball started hiring people who didn't turn up their noses at the ideas of James and his many ideological descendants.

What was important to me about all of James's work was that it was not a simple matter of reflexive contrarianism, of declaring that baseball executives were pure idiots. There is a great deal too much of that attitude to be found out there these days, the frisson of cool that people get from believing that everything the world knows is wrong. Contrarian chic is perhaps personified by New York Times columnist/blogger John Tierney, who proudly proclaims on his site that his guiding philosophy is to disbelieve something if lots of other people believe it. It's a stance seemingly bent on making sure above all that one is never caught in the position of "believing the hype." It's also a terrible way to best orient your beliefs with actual truth. Conventional wisdom is not reliably wrong any more than it is reliably right. And really, it has to be right more often than not. Conventional wisdom correctly tells us that Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart were great composers, and that living within one's means and saving is a path to financial security. Just as it incorrectly tells us that eyewitness testimony is reliable and that the Massachusetts Senate election killed healthcare reform.

So that's a long time to spend on book number nine! Short version of what I took from James: see what you can do about figuring out the truth. Give the CW the respect it has earned. Figure out why lots of people believe it, then figure out if you should believe it.

10. Alfred Cobban, A History Of Modern France, Vols 1 and 2. Probably the first history I read for pleasure as an adult. Also the first time I thought about history in a thematic way, rather in the one-damn-thing-after-another sense I had in high school. France spent the 18th and 19th centuries trying to decide whether it was a republic, monarchy, or empire, and whether it was a Catholic or secular state.

Love and squalor

My relationship with literature has not been an academic one, outside of high school English and a couple of laughably ghettoized "humanities" courses at Michigan, taught within the engineering college. I've had some peripheral contact with the academic lit community through friends though, and I've gathered that the now late J.D. Salinger is not generally well regarded there. He's considered juvenile, paternalistic, and that most cutting of academic putdowns, middlebrow.

I can see all that, but I don't really care. It's probably an age thing. When in your teens and early twenties, you tend to look to novels (and definitely to music) as life rafts in a shipwreck. Life is so hard, and finding art that resonates with youthful pain just means so much at that stage that it can hardly be overstated. You're looking for people to tell you how to live. You really feel like the right album or the right book can save you. I'm not alone in remembering in listening to albums over and over as a sixteen year old, devouring how true it all felt, ecstatically grateful to discover that there was meaning out there beyond suburb and high school. Is it that awful that so many teens found something in Holden Caulfield? You probably should think he's kind of a toothache of a person if you're 43. You definitely don't want to live your whole adult life feeling you're too good to live in a world of phonies. But once in awhile it's OK to remember that feeling, and Salinger wrote how it felt better than anyone. If nothing else it will help you remember when it comes time for you to deal with gawky, pained teenagers, all raw nerve endings. Maybe it will stay your impulse to tell them their problems are trivial.

Salinger's faults were real. He doesn't convey the breadth of human experience. His focus was fairly narrow. If the accounts of his children and lovers are to be credited he turned into a weird, unpleasant man after he stopped publishing. I sort of saw what he was going for with the whole Jesus Prayer business in Franny and Zooey, but I didn't really feel it. The whole Glass family business got a little precious. If he's your guide to life and you're older than 23, you're doing life wrong. Etc., etc. I'm glad Salinger existed and wrote though. Mostly what he did he did great. You write better stories than Bananafish or Esme and I'll read them.

Goodbye to all that?

(This is meant as kind of a placeholder for various climate debate thoughts I've expressed over the years. Full disclosure: I work as an atmospheric science researcher, on matters tangentially related to global warming. These thoughts are mine alone and have no implied relationship to my employer.)

I have probably been involved in pointless internet climate change debates for over fifteen years, on and (thankfully mostly) off. I think I've got to let it go. Though it's an interesting subject scientifically, in terms of politics and public opinion it's going to remain a blue/red shout machine deadlock. Some points which will likely be as true twenty years from now as they are today:

1. The world probably isn't going to emit less CO2 any time soon. There is lots of chatter about whether we should stabilize at atmospheric concentrations of 350 parts per million, 450, or whatever. It all seems fairly academic, like two falling people arguing whether they should start levitating 100 or 200 feet from the ground. If we do not hit 500ppm in my lifetime I will be very surprised. (We're around 387 now, up from 280 pre-industrial.) Barring an unforeseen breakthrough in energy sources, the growth of China and India alone make it almost impossible for emissions to drop. I hate to be that pessimistic; it's just hard to figure that the people and governments of the world will accept any immediate economic pain to avoid harm a generation or more in the future. History is full of unpredictable technological breakthroughs, so maybe we'll hit upon something huge we're not even thinking of right now. It's a tough thing to rely on though.

2. The earth eventually warms around 3°C per doubling of CO2. The number might be 2 or it might be 4 but it's very likely in that range. Note to Americans: 3°C is 5.4°F. That's a very sizable change in global average temperature. I just think we're going to have to live with and adapt to it, and hopefully the consequences are just bad rather than really terrible.

3. The warming will be fitful, with flat or even down periods once in awhile, especially if there's a major tropical volcano eruption. Internal variability of the climate system is very high on the scale of months to years, and an imposed 1 to 3 degree change per century trend does not suddenly remove the large month to month and year to year variability. And that's not even accounting for the fact that the global temperature time series is very, very much smoother than an average over a smaller region, such as the US, never mind an individual city. In short, though there were many times more record highs than record lows in the 2000-09 decade, there were still thousands upon thousands of record lows. All of which it seems like were headlined on the Drudge Report. (As the New Republic blog noted, it's always snowing on the Drudge Report.) There is no danger whatsoever of this blog ever running out of material as long as its proprietor wishes to keep it going; people will be making the it's-cold-where's-your-global-warming-now-OMG-LOL joke forever.

4. Mark Steyn, Glenn Beck, Glenn Reynolds, Rush Limbaugh et al. will continue to believe the whole issue is a hilarious, obvious crock. They believe it now, and they will believe it twenty years from now. Half the electorate will also believe it. It doesn't matter what actually happens with the climate over that time; as noted, cold weather will not be banished from your city.

5. Furthermore, those pundits will continue to accuse the accepters of the 3°C/CO2 doubling idea of having a religious faith in that idea, and gleefully describe themselves as heretics. But you know, it's possible that a teeny bit of religion inserts itself on the Limbaugh side of the debate as well:

That's another thing, folks. People said, "I don't get why you believe in God, Rush. Your belief in God, how does that tell you that global warming is a hoax?" Well, belief in God is a very personal thing, but I happen to believe in a loving God of creation -- and I just intellectually cannot accept the fact that a loving God which has created all this beauty and has blessed this country -- I cannot believe that a God like that -- would punish the human being he created for progress, for improving the quality of his life. No longer do we have to follow plow mules in the fields. No longer do we have to have kids out milking cows. We have enhanced human life, the life
experience, the quality of life, the standard of living. I refuse to believe that a God who created the universe would create creatures who, by virtue of improving their lives and making progress, would destroy another part of His creation. It just doesn't compute in a logical sense. If you don't believe in God, then you probably are a global warmist or a liberal..

I mean, this is clearly not a person who is going to be rethinking his position as more data rolls in, and he speaks for at least a very substantial part of half of the American electorate. Unlike perhaps many who "believe in" (terrible term but that's the common English expression) anthropogenic global warming, I am very pro-economic growth. Poverty is an awful soul-grinding business that is the defining fact ruling the lives of billions of people. Economic growth is the sole long term solution to it. But to assume that there can be no negative consequences to growth, even as growth nets out positive for human welfare, is willfully ahistorical. The Industrial Revolution brought Britain to where it is today, which is very good, but somehow God did not prevent a lot of killer air pollution in London for a century or so. Eventually wealth and technology allows for cleaner local conditions at a high economic level, but it's hardly instantaneous. Hundreds of millions of people have escaped poverty in China over the last thirty years, but a price has been just murderous air quality in the industrialized cities of the east and south. You don't need to be an atheist to note this. Similarly, the absorption spectrum of CO2 in the infrared is well known and obeys the very well supported laws of physics which underlie all the technology and progress Limbaugh supports. God isn't suppressing molecular absorption as far as we can tell. Doubling CO2 leads to an addition of roughly four Watts per square meter into the system. This is uncontroversial. But as he is also a creationist, Limbaugh is very comfortably accepting the fruits of modern science (computers, vaccines, satellites, etc.) while rejecting whole branches of that science.

In sum, I used to believe optimistically that truth eventually outs, that history is a process of people believing more and more true things, fewer and fewer false things. That was very naive in general, and specifically in the case of the climate change debate. I've got to accept that and move on with my life.

Virginia is like tepid bathwater

Frequently you'll see a list of the 50 states ranked by some criterion or another. Wealth, happiness, obesity, education, religiosity, population, cost of living, preference for Bugs Bunny vs. Mickey Mouse, whatever. Some states always end up at the extremes--Mississippi will be poor, religious, and obese. New York will be expensive and unhappy. Virginia is always in the middle. It seems to have no defining characteristics. It may be the most average state in the country. Maybe that's the list it can top.* Is this an example of the Interesting Number Paradox?

*Along with Number Of Throats Crushed On The State Flag, for which everyone else is tied for last.