Fifty thousand Earth scientists call for climate action, but is anyone listening?

The American Geophysical Union, representing some 50,000 scientists and students in 137 countries, has staked out significant new ground on the issue of climate change. The question is, have they gone far enough?

At a press conference in Washington, DC on 24 January, they released a terse statement saying that “Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming,” that many facets of the climate system “are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural,” and that these changes are best explained by increased levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity.

They were equally clear about probable impacts—reduced agricultural productivity worldwide, widespread loss of biodiversity, and, if warming greater than two degrees Celsius continues over centuries, melting ice sheets leading to a sea level rise of several meters.

“The scale of change we’re seeing is something modern society has never seen,” said Michael Prather, who chaired the AGU committee and was also lead author of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Nor did the group rule out the possibility of “surprises that may cause more dramatic disruptions than anticipated.”

Unlike the Bush administration, which has steadfastly resisted international efforts to set specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions, the AGU was not afraid to lay out numbers. “If this two degrees Celsius warming is to be avoided,” they write, “then our net annual emissions of carbon dioxide must be reduced by more than 50 percent within this century.”

When I asked the AGU panel to explain the statement that Earth’s climate is out of balance, Prather said it meant that the climate is no longer cycling slowly within a fixed range. “It’s not a balanced system,” he said. “We’re starting to slide.”

Does that mean that we’re sliding toward an irreversible tipping point? Prather would only say, “We’re moving.” He would not say if that meant “crossing a single critical threshold” or “death by 1000 knives.”

In either case, the panel agreed, concerted, coordinated, and targeted international action is needed.

“If you don’t start on a trajectory downward [for greenhouse gas emissions], you won’t be able to stabilize climate change,” said Prather. “We have to turn it over and bring it down. What we’re really looking for are much larger reductions, greater than 50 percent, by the end of the century.”

Given the clarity and urgency with which the AGU presented the case for urgent action, I was disappointed by their lack of a specific action plan, even for their own organization. “It’s our responsibility to go out and talk,” said Prather, and of course to provide society with the best science possible. But individual members need to decide just what they want to do.

AGU president Tim Killeen also emphasized education, outreach and greater interaction with policy makers, but cautioned that the AGU is determined to stay within its scientific role and not be drawn into “debilitating political controversies”.

Clearly, the AGU deserves kudos for stating the science clearly and for issuing yet another strong wake-up call to citizens and policy makers worldwide.

Still, given the powerful economic and political interests who are fighting any caps or cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, much less 50 percent reductions, I suspect that the AGU is overestimating the impact of good science, education, and outreach alone. After all, energy producers, smokestack industries, automakers and other great producers of greenhouse gasses are not shy about exerting all the political influence they can muster or buy.

To the extent that the AGU and its members take their own work and warnings seriously, and want those warnings to lead to real change, they are going to have to venture out of their comfort zone and into that unfamiliar and risky political arena both farther and faster than they might like.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Stand up to Bush

According to NASA researchers, the arctic is melting faster than even the most outspoken scientists predicted just a year ago. Climate researchers warn that the Earth is on the cusp of a tipping point, beyond which a vast release of greenhouse gasses from melting permafrost and warming seabeds could irreversibly multiply the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions. Likely impacts include rapidly rising sea levels, coastal flooding, more frequent and powerful hurricanes striking heavily populated regions, more frequent and intense droughts and floods, devastation of the Amazonian rainforest, the extinction of corals and many other species, the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, and increased threats to the stability and security of many nations, including the U.S.

With this catastrophe fast approaching, the continued intransigence of the United States with respect to negotiating meaningful international emissions goals has become not just an embarrassment but a clear and present danger.

The Bush administration has shown a remarkable indifference to any restraints, whether from scientific research, the U.S. Constitution, the American public, or world opinion. Their behavior in a variety of areas from climate change to war can best be characterized as, “We’ll do exactly what we want, and push our agenda as far as we can, as long as we can get away with it.”

Someone, somewhere, needs to set limits, call Bush’s bluff, point out that this would-be emperor has no clothes.

How remarkable, then, to find that courageous stance coming not from the cowed and cowardly U.S. Congress, nor even from other great nations, but from Papua, New Guinea, a nation of just six million people, most of whom make their living by subsistence farming.

At the just-ended climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, it was Kevin Conrad, the representative of New Guinea, who stood up to the recalcitrant U.S. delegation in a tumultuous public session and demanded, “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”

Bravo for New Guinea. Perhaps, as small and poor as they are, they have little to lose by standing up to the U.S. Certainly, as an island nation in the tropics, they have a great deal to fear from global warming. Whatever their reasons, they did the right thing.

It’s time for the rest of the world to stand with them.

And it’s long past time for the U.S. to take their advice and get the hell out of the way.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Even weirder quantum weirdness

It’s not often that one gets the chance to learn, or say, something new about reality itself. So when I came across an article entitled “An experimental test of non-local realism” (Nature, 19 April 2007, p 871), I couldn’t resist looking into it.

I don’t like giving away the conclusion before telling the whole story, but when talking about such basic matters, it’s best to be clear. What the authors, seven quantum physicists in Austria and Poland led by Anton Zeilinger, conclude from theory and experiment is that “any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive.”

By that understatement they mean that some of the most fundamental assumptions scientists and lay people make about reality are almost certainly wrong. At risk are such fundamentals as Aristotelian logic, including for example the idea that a proposition cannot be simultaneously true and false; or that the universe is deterministic; or that the present cannot change the past.

“We believe,” the authors write, “that our results lend strong support to the view that any future extension of quantum theory that is agreement with experiments must abandon certain features of realistic descriptions.”

It might be helpful to define some terms. By “realism” the authors mean a point of view that assumes that something exists, that events occur even if not observed, and that the outcomes of observations depend on pre-existing properties of objects, properties that themselves are independent of the observation.

“Local realism” is where Einstein famously dug in his heels. It assumes that events in “space-like separated regions” cannot influence each other instantaneously—what he disparaged as “spooky” action at a distance. The current authors point out that a long series of increasingly refined experiments dating back to 1972 have definitively proven Einstein wrong on this. Local realism now rests alongside other quaint and outdated scientific ideas such as phlogiston and the aether. Physicists do believe in spooks, at least of this sort.

Still, some aspects of realism might be salvaged through a set of theories based on “non-local hidden variables.” Those theories (which, to give the game away again, the current authors have now tested and found to be wrong) make three assumptions:

--Realism: measurement outcomes are determined by pre-existing properties of particles.

--Hidden variables: the physical states of particles are statistical mixtures of sub-ensembles which themselves have definite properties (for example, polarization).

--Averaging: taken together, the sub-ensembles obey physical laws (in the case of polarization, Malus’ law, which states that the intensity of a polarized beam that has passed through a polarized filter depends on the cosine of the angle between the polarization of the beam and the filter).

The core idea here is that particles such as a pair of entangled photons speeding away from each other are composed of hidden parts which, taken together, carry properties, such as polarization, that show up if and when they are measured at a particular point in space and time.

The authors point out that theories based on these assumptions have been proposed to explain those “spooky” correlations between spatially separated but entangled, particles. These theories have been successful in that predictions based on them have matched the results of all relevant entanglement experiments prior to those the authors undertook.

So what did these authors do? They tested the class of non-local hidden variable theories by measuring the polarization of entangled photons. However, unlike previous experiments, their detectors did not lie in the same plane with respect to the photon source. This novel geometry was needed to test an inequality first derived by Anthony Leggett in 2003. The inequality is based on a very simple property of integers, that, when applied to the quantized properties of entangled particles, allows a thumbs-up, thumbs-down test of non-local realism.

It took some careful tweaking to minimize the noise in their measurements, but the researchers were able to generate entangled photon pairs and compare their polarizations within the correct geometry.

The result wasn't even a close call. They found that Leggett’s inequality was violated by nine standard deviations. If extraordinary conclusions demand extraordinary proof, there it is.

This result does not say as much about what reality is as what it is not. At the very least, particles can not be said to carry hidden information that could do away with that pesky action-at-a-distance spook. The properties of particles really are random until they are observed, and measuring one member of an entangled pair really does determine the corresponding properties of the other, no matter where or when they are measured.

More strongly, the authors suggest that the universe in which we live may not oblige our prejudices by, for example, following Aristotelian logic. The statement, “Their properties really are random until they are observed,” may be both true and false. Present events may be able to influence the past. And—yet another blow to Einstein—the universe may simply not be deterministic.

Although Zeilinger suggests that any or all of these implications of quantum weirdness may be the case, he advocates caution. Writing about Einstein and Schrödinger, both of whom had deep reservations about what quantum theory said about reality, Zeilinger writes, “Yet it is very much to their credit that they both clearly understood which radical changes in our view of the world (Weltanschauung) quantum mechanics in the end necessitates. Changes which might be so radical that it is certainly reasonable and understandable to thoroughly investigate all other possibilities before taking the leap.”

As to what those other possibilities might be, Zeilinger remains agnostic. He quotes the Nobel prizewinning physicist, Isidor Rabi, who said, “"The problem is that the [quantum] theory is too strong, too compelling. I feel we are missing a basic point. The next generation, as soon as they will have found that point, will knock on their heads and say: How could they have missed that?".

Whatever that head-banging enlightenment may be, it's still very much missing.

Robert Adler

For the institute

Baby bookies

Robert Adler

“Every child is born a genius,” my mother liked to say, usually with the rueful implication that it’s life’s hard knocks that dim that initial promise. A recent study reminded me of her firm belief in the innate brilliance of babies.

Here’s the core of the study:

A one-year-old baby sits on its caretaker’s lap in front of a computer screen. A movie runs for a few seconds showing four objects—three identical and one different--bouncing around inside a circle with an opening at the bottom. Most adults would recognize this as depicting a very simple lottery, but an infant, one assumes, knows nothing about such things.

The scene blanks out for a second. When the circle re-appears, one object tumbles out, leaving three behind.

The question is, can a one-year-old differentiate between outcomes that are more or less probable, that is between trials in which one of the three identical objects exits the circle versus less likely sequences when it’s the unique object that falls out?

If you predicted that one-year-olds can perform this remarkable probabilistic assessment, congratulations. Your high expectations for the cognitive abilities of infants have just been confirmed by an elegant series of experiments carried out by Ernõ Téglás and Luca Bonatti, cognitive scientists at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, and their colleagues, detailed in a recent paper (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 27, 2007).

The researchers found that one-year-olds looked at improbable outcomes significantly longer than at probable ones—for 12.5 versus 9.3 seconds on average. The length of time infants pay attention to an event or scene is a well-established way of determining what gets and keeps their attention, for example things that are unexpected or surprising.

In other words, if one-year-olds could wager, they would be able to bet on the more likely outcome of this lottery based on an apparently innate sense of probability.

The team used carefully designed control sequences to see if the infants might be responding to non-probabilistic aspects of the scenes such as the objects’ shapes or colors. These tests confirmed that the babies looked longer at the unlikely outcomes simply because they violated their intuitive expectations.

“We found that infants can form these expectations, without any need to experience the outcomes of the lottery before,” says Bonatti. “Thus, they can reason about the future independently of their knowledge of the past.”

The researchers went on to show that similar intuitions about probability shape the responses of children at least through the age of five. At three, in fact, the children’s intuitive expectations—in this case anticipating whether a ball will escape from a box through the side with one hole or three holes--trumped what they actually experienced. Three-year-olds continued to favor the intuitively more probable outcomes even when the experimenters made them happen infrequently.

It was not until age five that children’s intuitive sense of probability could be modified over time by the actual frequency of the events they experienced.

So, not only are intuitions about probability in place by the age of one, independently of experience, but they turn out to be both strong and long-lasting.

These new findings add a surprisingly high-level skill to a long list of what Bonatti characterizes as the “stunning cognitive abilities” of babies and young children, revealed by research over the past few decades [New Scientist, 17 May 2003, p 42].

Bonatti notes that by four months of age, babies can differentiate between small numbers of objects, and even respond to addition or subtraction. Infants respond differently to “possible” and “impossible” events. They can categorize objects based on multiple characteristics simultaneously. They know that animate objects can do things that inanimate ones can’t, and that what they do is driven by goals. Most recently, researchers found that six-month old babies can infer character from behavior (New Scientist, 22 November, 2007).

Bonatti is convinced that we humans come into the world with vastly greater and more structured cognitive capabilities than suggested by John Locke’s blank slate or William James’ “buzzing, booming confusion.”

Still, many current developmental theories come down strongly on the “blank slate” side of the necessary interaction between innate capabilities and experience. For example, a widely accepted theory argues that the ability to assess probability necessarily requires previous experience with similar events. “This theory basically says that our ability to predict the future is entirely shaped by our knowledge of the past,” says Bonatti.”

Bonatti does not deny the importance of experience, but his findings emphasize what even very young babies bring to their encounter with the world. “Over and above our abilities to learn from experience, we also have logical and conceptual abilities that do not seem to derive from the world,” Bonatti says. “But, after all, why should this be surprising? We have ears, noses, eyes; why not also cognitive structures for reasoning about the future?”

Why not indeed?

If, as it seems, Bonatti’s findings show that there’s a lot more going on in the mind of a baby than meets the eye, or that modern-day “blank slate” theorists think possible, then it behooves us to look for even more high-level skills, and at even earlier ages. Like astronomers hunting for extra-solar planets, once our instruments allow us to find one, far more are sure to follow.

Ever since Copernicus dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe and Darwin showed that we are more closely related to apes than angels, science has dealt one blow after another to the human ego. In the face of this, I, for one, am thrilled to learn that human infants, at least, have much to crow about.

Not to mention that sometimes mothers get it right.


Robert Adler is a psychologist and science writer currently in Oaxaca, Mexico


Babies can spot the good, the bad, and the ugly
New Scientist, 22 November 2007
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn12948-babies-can-spot-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html

Bonatti and Téglás’ contact information
http://www.sissa.it/cns/lcd/members.htm

International School for Advanced Studies
http://www.sissa.it/cns/

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, November 27 2007:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0700271104v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Bonatti&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

The movies seen by the one, three and five year old children:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0700271104/DC1#F5

What every baby knows
New Scientist, 17 May 2003, p v2
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17823955.400-what-every-baby-knows.html

Has Bush seen the light on climate change?

Robert Adler

If we take President Bush at his word, the United States is ready, even determined to move to the front of the international community when it comes to climate change. “The United States is taking the lead,” the President announced on May 31, “and that’s the message I’m taking to the G8.”

Given the Bush administration’s long history of obstructing international action on climate change, starting with his rejection of the Kyoto accord months after taking office, I felt the need to ask one of his spokespersons on climate policy, Kristin Hellmer at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, if President Bush was serious about this.

“The President doesn’t’ announce things and not follow through with them,” she said.

Encouraged, I checked the details. It turns out that there is at least some substance behind the President’s bold statement. Jim Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental policy advisor, followed Bush’s speech with a press conference at which he presented a well-articulated plan. The U.S. wants to work with other nations to create a new framework for international climate negotiations that would have agreements in place and working when the Kyoto accord ends in 2012. “It’s our going-forward strategy on the issue of energy security and climate change,” Connaughton said.

Rather than trying to negotiate a global consensus on greenhouse gas emissions right now, the U.S. believes it would be more productive to bring together smaller groups of countries in negotiations that would lead to “the statement of a long-term goal for reducing greenhouse gases” by the end of 2008. “What the President is trying to do here is find that consensus that will allow for forward progress,” says Connaughton.

It’s worth noting that this is the first time that the Bush administration has indicated any willingness to set specific goals for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s perhaps a mark of how desperate other world leaders are for the U.S. to play a positive role with respect to the climate that both Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the Bush initiative, at least in public. It’s an “important step on the road,” according to Merkel, and “for the first time . . . the opportunity for a proper global deal,” said Blair.

The meetings are to start this fall with the 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, which would include the U.S., several European nations, plus rapidly developing economies such as India and China. The aim will be to forge agreements on “mid-term goals”, to be realized through nation-by-nation targets and strategies to reach them within a decade or two. They would also involve industry leaders from sectors such as transportation, power generation and agriculture in order to encourage technological innovation and rapid dissemination of best practices and new technologies, the latter aided by reducing tariffs and other trade barriers.

Connaughton points out that a focus on speeding technology transfer and encouraging individualized national targets and strategies may be a more effective way to encourage developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil to accept that they too need to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions, than the current cap-and-trade paradigm, which they, along with the United States and Australia, continue to reject.

Each nation’s unique recipe for reducing its climactic impact would be legislated and, in that sense, binding. “It’s the mechanisms that become binding,” says Connaughton. As an example of the kind of mid-term goals he envisions, Connaughton offered President Bush’s call during his January 2007 State of the Union address for the U.S. to reduce gasoline usage by 20% within ten years.

Has the Bush administration seen the light? Can Blair, Merkel, and other world leaders expect to hear “It’s a deal,” rather than “Dead on arrival,” (then U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous reaction to the Kyoto protocol) in response to the next rounds of climate negotiations? Is the U.S. truly ready to take the lead on this vital issue?

One clue lies in the U.S. proposal itself. Its real focus is on getting other countries to lower trade barriers to U.S. technology and services. “We want to drive to agreement on a schedule of eliminating these tariffs in the Doha round by the end of next year,” Connaughton said. (The Doha round is a series of negotiations sponsored by the World Trade Organization that started in Doha, Qatar in 2001, aimed at a worldwide reduction of tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers.)

Unfortunatly, the President’s plan is not nearly as strong on lowering greenhouse gas emissions. According to Connaughton, any greenhouse gas or temperature targets would be “aspirational” rather than binding.

A second clue lies in the timing of Bush’s climate-change initiative, just a week before the start of the G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany. Chancellor Merkel has staked her credibility on getting the G8 to set concrete goals on greenhouse gases and global warming now, not at some indefinite date in the future. This in turn has turned up the heat on the U.S. to do something positive about climate change. Bush’s response—to create a whole new framework for climate change negotiations—undermines Merkel’s initiative.

But the clearest indication of what the U.S. really intends to can be found in a heavily blue-penciled draft of the proposed G8 climate agreement leaked from a U.S. government source to the environmental group Greenpeace and published on 26 May. At the top of the draft, the U.S. declares that the G8 plan and language “runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple ‘red lines’ in terms of what we simply cannot agree to.”

A few of the hundreds of statements the U.S. found unacceptable and blue-lined out:

“ . . . tackling climate change is an imperative not a choice.”

“ . . . resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living.”

“We will strive to reach a necessary global agreement by 2009.”

So no, Bush did not hear the voice of Gaia on the road to Heligendamm, and we are not going to witness an epiphany at this time. At the G8 and beyond, the new Bush climate program is far more likely to muddy the waters than clear the air.

From our point of view, the sooner Bush and his cronies leave office, the better for America and the rest of the world. To help move him along, we're including this helpful countdown to when the U.S. will be out of the bushes and into the fresh air and sunshine once again.

Who speaks for Oaxaca?

by Robert Adler, Jo Ann Wexler and Monica Trueba

Oaxaca, Mexico, November 27, 2006

You hear it said many times a day here in Oaxaca: Tenemos que aguantar—we have to endure.

You won’t hear this from the principal actors in the political drama which is being played out on Oaxaca’s stage. The leading roles are played by Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Oaxaca’s, much-despised governor; the PRI, the deeply entrenched political party to which Ruiz belongs; the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), the increasingly radical activist group demanding Ruiz’s resignation; and the PRD, the opposition party of defeated presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, which has acknowledged bankrolling APPO. They are all determined to win their high-stakes struggle for state and national power, and for international support.

It’s only the long-suffering and essentially voiceless people of Oaxaca who tell each other over and over, “We need to endure.”

Oaxaca’s troubles began in May, when the union representing most of the State of Oaxaca’s 70,000 teachers went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions, as they do every year. This year the governor didn’t award them the raises they expected, since (according to his detractors) he had already spent the money on pet projects which, coincidentally, put money in the pockets of his relatives, political supporters, and the PRI.

APPO occupied Oaxaca following Governor Ruiz’s ill-fated attempt to dislodge the striking teachers on June 14. Voicing idealistic goals, activists barricaded streets, blocked highways, burned dozens of buses, occupied most city and state government offices, and splattered just about every building in Oaxaca with anti-Ruiz graffiti. They turned Oaxaca’s normally enchanting central square and surrounding streets into a tense and sullen encampment. As the situation became known in the international press, tourism, Oaxaca’s major source of income, plummeted to less than 10% of normal.

As the months passed without resolution of the teachers’ issues, Oaxaca’s 1,300,000 school-age children, already among the most poorly-educated in Mexico, slid deeper into the trap of endemic, multi-generational poverty from which APPO claimed to be fighting to free them.

Ruiz’s presumed minions did their share to destroy Oaxaca’s economy as well. Bands of heavily armed, black-hooded marauders have assassinated more than a dozen teachers and other activists in late-night, drive-by shootings. At least 60 people have disappeared. The blatant daytime killing of American journalist Brad Will on October 27, allegedly by local PRI functionaries (although possibly by an APPO provocateur) created headlines worldwide, but was just one particularly visible episode in an ongoing campaign of terror.

Following Will’s death, the international media spotlight turned on Oaxaca and on Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox. He responded by sending in 4,000 members of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), who now control Oaxaca’s zocalo and the route to Mexico City, but still have not been able to re-open all of Oaxaca’s highways. The dramatic November 2 battle for the strategic crossroads of Cinco Señores, near Oaxaca’s APPO-occupied Benito Juarez Autonomous University, inaugurated a new level of violence between APPO and the federal police. Violence erupted again on November 25, when young activists armed with homemade bazookas and shopping carts full of rocks and nail-laced Molotov cocktails turned a nominally peaceful march into a day and night of street battles. The level of violence from federal and local police also escalated. Reports vary, but from three to six demonstrators may have been killed.

With tourism down to a trickle and transportation to and within Oaxaca unreliable, the entire economy is failing. Businesses and services that cater to tourists have closed, including hotels, restaurants, stores and galleries, depleting the savings of the owners and putting thousands of employees out of work. Many of the businesses unfortunate enough to be located in the immediate vicinity of APPO’s encampments likewise have closed. Many Oaxacans were unable to bring their products to market or get to their jobs because of the presence of barricades and the absence of buses. Produce sellers, car repair shops, and dozens of other small businesses closed and laid off their employees. Self-employed workers such as taxi drivers, beauty parlor operators, shoe shiners, vendors, and the artisans for which Oaxaca is famous are barely able to maintain themselves in the local economy since their customers no longer have cash available to purchase their goods and services. Caught in the crossfire between APPO and Ruiz, Oaxaca’s already fragile economy is crumbling.

“We’re like a slice of ham in a sandwich,” says a Oaxacan friend. “We have APPO on one side and Ruiz on the other. Nobody notices that we’re being eaten up.”

The invisibility of the majority of the people of Oaxaca is no accident. Although it’s unlikely that more than a third of the state’s residents support Ruiz, he and his party vociferously claim to represent el pueblo, the people of Oaxaca. APPO’s survival also depends on maintaining its image as the true voice of the people. Although APPO supporters may number in the tens of thousands, a much larger “silent majority” of ordinary Oaxacans simply want their jobs back, their children in school, the ability to get to or across town, and above all an end to this conflict. Yet, when ordinary Oaxacans try to speak out, their voices go unheard.

When reporters descended on Oaxaca in the wake of the arrival of the federal police, it was not unusual to see a crowd of APPO supporters around every journalist, clamoring to be heard. However, we saw people who tried to say that they were neither for Ruiz nor for APPO, but for peace, shouted down and shoved aside.

Representatives of human-rights organizations are in Oaxaca, documenting and publicizing abuses by right-wing groups or the PFP. According to friends, Oaxacans who approach them to report threats or damage by APPO have been turned away. “Apparently we don’t count,” they conclude.

What started as a teachers’ strike has mutated almost beyond recognition. First APPO absorbed the teachers. It now appears that the PRD, led by defeated presidential candidate Lopez Obrador, is bankrolling APPO and so has it dancing to its tune. Not to mention the bombers who struck in Mexico City on November 6, who also claim to be acting on behalf of the people of Oaxaca. Or the increasingly violent activists who now make up a significant part of APPO, to the point that the have become APPO’s new face.

The next time you read a news story about Oaxaca, take a minute before choosing sides. If your political instincts lead you side with Governor Ruiz, remember that he earned his unpopularity by gratuitously attacking 70,000 teachers, and that his PRI functionaries have the blood of many people on their hands. If your reflexes push you to rally with APPO in supposed solidarity with the people of Oaxaca, remember that five months under APPO’s control left Oaxaca trashed and impoverished, and that what may have started as an idealistic, non-violent movement can no longer pretend to be either.

Even more importantly, remember that this struggle doesn’t have just two sides. It also has an inside—el pueblo--the majority of the people of Oaxaca, who still have no voice, and no choice except to endure.

We’ve seen how much we spend each day on the war in Iraq, at almost three hundred million dollars, that is a lot of money. You can watch the dollars fly at this website. We spend that much for the country as a whole—you can look at what your state is spending. Or you could determine what we could be spending the money on if we weren’t spending it on the Iraq War. We are talking about costs at the present levels of expenditure, but the costs for the war just keep going up and up. The cost of the Iraq War is surpassing that of Korea or Vietnam to become the second most costly in our country’s history. Leading economists predict that the total costs to the United States economy could be between one and two trillion dollars, and pre-war estimates of $100-$200 billion dollars were laughed off by the Bush administration as being exorbitantly high. The estimated two trillion dollar cost is often mentioned in the foreign press, but doesn’t get much notice in the United States. The US has built the greatest economy (and military to guard it) the world has known. However, all empires get to the point where they spend so much money making war that they lose their power, influence and wealth and are no longer the leading country they once were. The Iraq War could do just that to the United States.

You can read these five earlier posts by REA on etalkinghead.com (http://www.etalkinghead.com/author/44/):

Bush's Big Lie (05/06/05)
Conservatives target America’s colleges and universities (04/14/05)
Hearts, Minds, and Bodies in Iraq (11/08/04)
Fearmongering: Bush and your vote (10/31/04)
An Iraq War cost breakdown (10/13/04)

Please Vote Republican

If you wept at Ken Lay’s funeral, please vote Republican.

If you still believe “Mission Accomplished" three and a half years later, please vote Republican.

If every time you pull up to the pump you wonder “can’t we give away a few billion more of my tax dollars in subsidies to the oil companies” and “how can I help the oil industry increase its record profits” and “those oil execs need a pay raise” and “shouldn’t George and Dick receive more credit for helping those energy companies out,” please vote Republican.

If you think Valerie Plame deserved to have been ‘outed’ because her husband Joe Wilson spoke out about the manipulation and fabrication of intelligence that lead us into the Iraq war, please vote Republican.

If you look forward to sharing a cell with Republicans Jack Abramhoff, Illinois ex-Governor Ryan, ex-Congressman Duke Cunningham, Jeff Skilling and his Enron buddies, the guys behind the jamming of the Democratic “Get Out The Vote” phone lines in New Hampshire, Thomas Ney, and many, many more, please vote Republican.

If you hate big government so much that you think that incompetence at the highest levels is the solution, please vote Republican.

If you think the numerous groups in the scientific community who have complained for years that the Bush White House has suppressed scientific findings and replaced them with their partisan political agendas are just crybabies or sore losers, please vote Republican.

If you consider ex-Republican House Whip Tom, “The Hammer” Delay to be a ‘friend’ of yours, please vote Republican.

If you define “Compassionate Conservatism” as giving the wealthiest 1% of the population even more tax cuts and look forward to the day when you or your children can pay for that loss in federal revenues through higher taxes or increased deficits, please vote Republican.

If you insist on ignoring the warnings of scientists at the
Jet Propulsion Lab at California Institute of Techology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
US Army Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory,
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
and virtually every other leading climatological science group, organization or institute
that human produced greenhouse gases are affecting our climate adversely and we don’t have much time to change the ways in which we produce and use energy —and you would rather be lulled into buying another SUV by the science “skeptics” on the payrolls of the big oil companies, please vote Republican.

If you forgot, or were never told, that the highest ranking British intelligence official, after talking with US administration officials before the war, reported back to his Prime Minister that the US was twisting the intelligence and facts to fit the Bush policy of invading Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you think our founding fathers would be proud of a political party that has admittedly dispatched operatives from WDC to uncover any and all information about Democratic opponents, spin it into “dirt,” and spend 90% of its advertising budget on negative ads, all because it is afraid to run on the issues, its record, and the President’s performance, please vote Republican.

If you love a President whose motto is “support our troops” but who didn’t provide them with sufficient body armor or protection for their vehicles from IEDs and who still won’t cough up the $17,000,000,000 the Army says it needs to repair all the equipment that has suffered the ravages of the sands of Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you don’t remember the time eight years ago when we had such swelling federal budget surpluses that we were pulling out our hair trying to figure out what to do when we paid off the federal debt, and you are glad--with our $300,000,000,000 annual deficits--that we won’t have those sore scalp problems any longer, please vote Republican.

If you believe a war with Iran will be more successful than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, please vote Republican.

If you think that turning over the safety net of Social Security that has been well managed for seventy years to a bunch of high-paid, smooth-talking Wall Street financers will make your retirement more secure, please vote Republican.

If you want the increase in hurricanes, floods, droughts, diseases, species extinctions, and human wars over scarce resources that global climate change will bring, please vote Republican.

If you look forward to going quail hunting with Vice President Cheney, please vote Republican.

If you consider whistleblowers who stand up against this administration’s incompetence, cronyism, disregard for science, international law and our own Constitution to be mere nuisances who need to be smeared or fired to discourage others from following in their footsteps, please vote Republican.

If you favor Nixonian “dirty tricks” like jamming the Democrat’s ‘Get Out the Vote’ telephones in New Hampshire on election day and your only regret is that you can’t give Get Out of Jail Free cards to those who went to prison for doing this, please vote Republican.

If you condone the torture and other inhumane interrogation of prisoners in Iraq, well over 90% of which were neither terrorists nor criminals, and believe this helps us win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Muslim world, gains us stature around the globe, conforms with the Geneva Conventions, and will not set a precedent for similar treatment of our servicemen and women when they are captured, please vote Republican.

If you think we are ‘winning’ the war in Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you think it’s fair that someone earning the federal minimum wage would have to work for about 20,000 years to earn what Exxon’s CEO was given as a golden parachute, please vote Republican.

If you can make sense of your Medicare Drug Benefits package, please vote Republican.

If you think that ‘Brownie’ and FEMA did a ‘heck of a job’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, please vote Republican.

If you contributed to the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, please vote Republican.

If you love your children but still think we should be spending over $200,000,000 a day on the war in Iraq, while not providing the promised federal funding for the No Child Left Behind Act, please vote Republican.

If you believe capturing Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’ is no longer important, so it's fine to disband the working group charged with that task, please vote Republican.

If you think Presidential ‘signing statements’ should replace the Constitutional power the President has to veto legislation, please vote Republican.

If you’d be glad that your wife, son, husband, daughter or other relative was called back for a third, forth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you believe that President served every month of his six years of Air National Guard duty according to the terms he signed upon entering the military, please vote Republican.

If you don’t care that the White House Council on Environmental Quality overruled the EPA and declared the air at Ground Zero ‘safe’ after 9/11, condemning thousands of the heroic first responders and clean up crew members to respiratory problems and lives of medical hell, please vote Republican.

If you agree with the threat Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made while planning for the Iraq war that the next high ranking military officer who suggests that we need to have a plan for stabilizing a post-war Iraq would be fired, please vote Republican.

If you favored the US withdrawal from the International Court of Criminal Justice, please vote Republican.

If you just love throwing away your hard earned tax dollars on those no bid military contracts being given to Halliburton and the other corporate cronies of the Bush Administration, please vote Republican.

If you supported the administration’s adamant stance against forming a 9/11 Commission and then when forced by public opinion to create such a commission, fought the commission’s attempts to get information from the administration every step of the way, please vote Republican.

If you think it’s fair that the incomes of the very, very rich should increase dramatically while those of middle class America stagnate, please vote Republican.

If you want the war in Iraq to continue on endlessly, please vote Republican.

If you realize that the touch-screen electronic voting machine you use on election day
1) hasn’t been regulated even to the extent slot machines in Las Vegas are,
2) has software that can easily be hacked to “flip” votes,
3) probably has no reliable paper trail to assure you that the machine correctly recorded your vote,
4) is owned and operated by a company owned and operated by Republicans,
well, then you’re free to vote any way you damn well please, because it won’t make a difference anyway.

ACE for the institute

Greetings. You’ve just been drafted into the War on Terror.

I don’t know what you heard in President Bush’s “non-political” speech from the oval office on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. What I heard is that The Decider has drafted us all into his apocalyptic, make-it-or-break it view of the world. From now until that great and distant day when Victory over Terror is declared, we are all soldiers in his war. It’s us versus them, good versus evil, the threatened versus the threateners, the advocates of freedom versus the haters of freedom, resolve and sacrifice versus unspeakable violence, Civilization versus Islamofascism.

It’s “our generation’s calling,” the President told us, nothing less than “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21^st Century.” And, he warns us, we’re just “in the early hours of this struggle.” We or our children or perhaps their children can expect battles "like Iwo Jima and D-Day," with “thousands lost in one day.”

Needless to say, the outcome will depend on great “sacrifice and determination,” marked by “passion for service,” nobly watched over by mothers who are “worried but proud” as they send their children off to the crusade. “We will need them,” the President says, and for once I believe him.

But those great sacrifices, those dark and dreadful days, those bereaved mothers will be worth it, because “we will lead the 21^st Century into a shining age of human liberty, the finest the world has ever known.”

It’s ironic that the path to that shining age of liberty leads through abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but no matter.

On 9/11, after we watched in shock as the towers collapsed and thousands died, a friend turned to me and asked, “Do you think this could destroy America?”

“Absolutely not,” I answered, envisioning how vast and rich and great America is, how strong and balanced and resilient we three hundred million Americans truly are. "Absolutely not."

I was horrified by the tragedy of that day, but not afraid. I was sure that the darkest imaginings and most horrible acts of terrorists could hurt us, as they had, but could never destroy us.

But now a little man who would be great has drafted us all into an endless war against Evil itself. That’s another matter entirely.

Now I am afraid.

REA for the institute

I’m angry.

Carl Rove and the right-wing radicals he’s put in office are not afraid of strong feelings. Anyone who has watched them spin their dark, distorted version of reality for the past six years knows that fear is the meat on which they feed. It’s terror for breakfast, lunch and dinner, terror trotted out whenever another news story reveals them as the liars, misguided ideologues, and arrogant incompetents that they are, terror to drive flocks of the fearful to the voting booths.

The liberals who speak out at all, try as usual to be the voice of reason and realism, even though they know that their fact-based, nuanced views will be derided as cowardly flip-flopping or, now that a key election is closing in, labeled as flat-out treason.

I’m sick of it.

I’m angry that the Bush administration turned the tragedy of 9/11 into the travesty of Iraq.

I’m angry that our country was hoodwinked into a needless, divisive, and costly war.

I’m angry for the years of lies about Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs and links to al-Qaeda.

I’m angry that Bush and his bullies bamboozled us with a classic bait and switch—promising to protect us against terrorism, but giving us instead a war that’s creating more hatred towards the US around the world, and breeding a new generation of terrorists.

I’m angry that our “visionary” leaders could envision a Middle East remade in our image, but in their arrogance refused to plan for postwar Iraq or provide enough troops for a successful occupation and transition.

I’m angry that Rove’s cynical contempt for the American people, his unlimited permission to hammer on our most primitive emotional buttons, and his attack-dog eagerness to Swift Boat anyone who dares oppose his gang, has debased our political discourse to the level of a fight in the sewers.

I’m angry that many of the rights shining forth from the Constitution, rights that generations of patriots fought and died for, have been gutted while a supine Congress cowers in the corner.

I’m angry that our intelligence community shrugged off its obligation to “tell truth to power,” and instead provided the powerful with the propaganda they needed to bully us into war.

I’m angry that the press followed blindly, avidly swallowing the war-party line.

I’m angry that new laws have let the bloated rich grow even richer, while millions of American children have no health insurance and attend crumbling schools.

And I’m angry that America’s gleaming cloak, our vital ability to lead the world through example, has been tossed aside like old rag and replaced by secret prisons, torture called by other names, and naked power.

Damn right I’m angry. Aren’t you?

This November we have the opportunity to plough our anger into electing a new Congress. These elections are crucial, as Carl Rove and his cronies know all too well. If at least the House of Representatives regains a Democratic majority, the checks and balances that have been derailed since 9/11 can start to work again. There will be at least the beginning of a power base that can oppose the rampant, rabid right.

If, however, Bush’s minions eke out yet another win through their unlimited media budget, by waving the bloody terror card again and again, by hammering away at symbolic wedge issues, shamelessly sliming their opponents, and managing to discourage enough voters and discount enough votes, the rest of us—the huge majority of Americans who would never have gone to war to realize Wolfowitz’s dream of an American empire—will be in deep, long-term trouble.

We need to win big if we’re going to win at all. We need so many ordinary people who register to vote despite all the red tape, who vote despite the roadblocks, long lines and broken machines, and whose votes get counted despite Diebold and friends, that no amount of manipulation, machination, chicanery or fraud can keep us from being heard.

Let’s turn our anger into votes, votes that count.

REA for the institute

As we battle with short-term problems, such as the crucial November elections, it's easy to lose sight of longer-term issues. Human-caused climate change has to head the list. Read this call to action by John Ashton, the UK's special representative for climate change. Hmmm, I wonder why the US doesn't have a high-level climate-change office?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/5323512.stm

REA for the institute

THE MEANING OF TIME:

"Consider the 6 days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been 4 billion years; on this scale, a day equals something like 660 million years. All day Monday, creation was busy getting the earth going. Life began Tuesday noon and the beautiful, organic wholeness of it developed over the next 4 days. At 4 p.m. Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At 1/3 of a second before midnight on the last day, Christ arrived. At 1/40th of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded by people who think that what we've been doing for that 1/40th of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad." David Brower.

LA for the institute