Alllieblog

When Kerry was running for president in 2004 and I first saw his wife, Theresa Heinz, on TV, I had a failure of imagination. As I watched her and her children, radiating privilege, I couldn’t image her as first lady. Despite that I held my nose and voted for Kerry but I was not surprised when the election was stolen and he did nothing to try to fight that theft.

Watching Michelle Obama I have a similar failure. I find her to be a very cold and bitter person - like Hillary Clinton’s opponents say they find her. Now I think Hillary is fine, a nice enough person, nice enough for me to vote for anyway. Whatever her opponents see in her, I don’t see. But I do see it in Michelle. She seems a nasty person. She is supposed to be intelligent, though not that intelligent if she allowed herself to say in public, during an election campaign with cameras running, that until now she had never before been proud of America. (Does your husband have to be almost nominated for president for you to be proud? Nothing else does it? Just massive validation?) Then I think of Rev. Wright and wonder if the choice of church and minister was not Barack’s but Michelle’s. Rev Wright seems to be the same kind of person as she is.

When I see Michelle’s thin, pinched and bitter face, I have a failure of imagination. I cannot imagine her as first lady. Most professional politicians have something lovable about them. Generally their wives do too. Obama is clearly able to make a lot of people love him but I think the lovable gene skipped Michelle. If Barak is elected he will be well advised to try to keep her in the background, away from TV cameras and microphones. But I cannot imagine Michelle will allow that. I see a strain of Rev. Wright’s narcissism in her.

Michelle is also openly racist, thinking the black community is unique and special (the essence of racism), swearing her allegiance to them, first and foremost, and not to the American people. She is even troubled by integration. I think of all the people, black and white, who fought and suffered to unite our nation and end segregation. Michelle seems to reject it and them. She said, in her thesis:

Earlier in my college career, there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would use all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost.

Elements of Black culture which make it unique from White culture such as its music, its language, the struggles and a “consciousness” shared by its people may be attributed to the injustices and oppression suffered by this race of people which are not comparable to the experiences of any other race of people through this country’s history. However, with the increasing integration of Blacks into the mainstream society, many “integrated Blacks” have lost touch with the Black culture in their attempts to become adjusted and comfortable in their new culture–the White culture. Some of these Blacks are no longer able to enjoy the qualities which make Black culture so unique or are unable to share their culture openly with other Blacks because they have become so far removed from these experiences and, in some instances, ashamed of them because of their integration. http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=1057

The plutocracy has told us the primary is OVER. They have forced Obama down our throats leaving us two very bad choices. Let’s see which part of the plutocracy gets its way: The fossil fuel kings represented by McCain or the Trilateral Commission/Globalists represented by Obama. Too bad the American people don’t have a horse in this race.

© Alllie 2008

I just read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a great book and an emotionally touching one. It really made me cry. What made it more heart-rending was knowing it was real, real in the sense that the things described in the book also happened to real people, millions of real people. That made the book hard to read sometimes.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the story of two Kentucky slave families. Their owner has fallen into debt and is forced to sell two slaves or break up his entire farm and sell all his slaves. He chooses his farm manager, Tom, into whose arms he was put as a baby, and Henry, the handsome young child of his house servant, Eliza. He chooses them because they will bring the most money and satisfy his debt. Eliza, overhearing his plans, takes her child and flees. Tom chooses to stay and sacrifice himself rather than cause any other slaves to be sold. Those slaves would include his wife and children but he also stays because he loves his owner, a love the man does not deserve, and because he sees it as his Christian duty. The novel follows Eliza as she travels North to Canada and freedom and Tom as he is sold South, finally finding his own kind of freedom. It shows us how all, master and slave, are corrupted by this form of labor.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been parodied so often that I thought it would be a silly book, hard to take seriously, but it is a book like Tom Paine’s Common Sense, a book that brought on a revolution and changed the world, a book that showed slavery so clearly that only those with hard hearts or financial interest could continue to accept it.

As I read it I found myself holding my breath as Eliza escaped, crying when Tom and others were wrenched from their families, horrified when young girls were sold to rapists. It is also a very well written adventure story. You get involved with the people and knowing that these things really happened to real people, that Stowe isn’t exaggerating, made it something else, made it news, made it history.

When the escaping slave George declares that he will kill or die for his freedom you admire him. When he shoots a slave catcher to save his wife and child, you applaud. When Tom is taken from his family and then later sold to a cruel master who works his slaves to death and Tom still holds on to his religion, you don’t fee contemptuous of him, you admire his strength and steadfastness. He is not a fool but a good man caught in bad circumstances and still trying to live a good life.

Even the events that seem most unlikely, like Eliza’s flight across the moving ice flows in the Ohio River, were based on real incidences. In February, 1838, a young slave woman holding her child in her arms escaped in just such a way.

If anything Stowe minimized the misery many individuals suffered. Her villains seem very true to life, so true to life that if you think back on people you have known, you will recall some who, if slavery were legal, would act just as Stowe’s villains do.

While I didn’t find Stowe’s villains implausible I did find her heroes a bit unbelievable. Truth be told I have known very few people who would act so nobly, but there must be people who would or the civil war would never have been fought. The Beecher family probably would. All of Harriet’s siblings were reformers in addition to being writers, preachers, educators and all fervent abolitionists. They didn’t just talk the talk, they walked the walk.

The novel is soaked with Christianity and, despite that, my pagan soul did not rebel. If anything I embraced the version of Christianity that Stowe shows us, a Christianity based in action, not just blind superstition, a Christianity that works to better the lives of those who are unfortunate instead of just accepting things as they are, a Christianity that could fight against slavery rather than just teach slaves blind faith.

If Eva’s death lays it on a bit thick you must remember that Stowe had lost a child of her own and when the book was published in 1852 the mortality rate for children was much higher than today. There were no antibiotics and even the germ theory was unknown so many families, even most, experienced the loss of a child. Stowe had seven children herself but was survived by only three. Life was much more tenuous then and people found Christianity a solace. Given that Stowe was from a family of famous preachers and reformers and believed deeply herself it is only natural that her work would show Christianity as a positive force in life. Despite this I think anyone would enjoy this book regardless of their religion or lack of it.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is another great book. It shows how the pre-civil war south was remembered by those who lived affluent lives. It is also a very women’s lib book. Scarlet is a strong, capable person who survives and helps her family survive despite living a time when women were supposed to be weak and helpless. Scarlett is a rock. A vain, selfish, not too smart rock, but a rock nonetheless. The blacks in Gone with the Wind are all shown as strong people with independence and dignity. Well, except for Prissy, who was an idiot. On the white side Aunt Pittypat was an idiot as well but Aunt Pittypat had a defacto guardian, the negro butler/driver Uncle Peter. When the parents of Melanie and Charles died and they were sent to live with their Aunt Pittypat, it was Uncle Peter who practically raised them and who made most of the decisions in the family. Peter is the one who went to get the housekeeping money from Pitty’s brother. He was the one who decided when Melanie could put up her hair and start attending parties, when Charles should have a larger allowance and what college he would attend. It was Uncle Peter who decided when it was too cold or wet for Miss Pittypat to go visiting or when she needed a shawl. Indeed, Miss Pittypat would get upset and “swoon” if Peter was gone for long. At one point he is referred to as “the grizzled old despot of Aunt Pittypat’s house.” When Peter goes through the dangerous area where Sherman marched to the sea, burning almost everything in the army’s path, goes through it on a horse he “acquired” in order to deliver a letter to Melanie, his main concern is that the girls return with him to live with Miss Pittypat so his Miss will look more respectable.

Despite this, Uncle Peter’s position was no more secure than Tom’s in Stowe’s work. The death or bankruptcy of his owner could have put him on the auction block just as easily as it did Tom.

The thing about Margaret Mitchell’s work and even Stowe’s is that to white people the lives of slaves were like icebergs, 90% was hidden.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind are both great books. Add in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, mix all three together and you get a picture of life in the slavery South. But Stowe’s book is the most important. It sparked a revolution that freed four million people. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also translated into every major language and became the second best selling book in the world after the Bible. You don’t sell that many books just on morality. You also have to have a good read and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that.

By the end if the book Tom seemed to me to be, not just a poor slave, tortured and exploited, but a veritable Spartacus. Except that the character Tom didn’t really exist. He was created by Harriet Stowe. She was the Spartacus, leading people to freedom but better than Spartacus. In the end Spartacus and his followers ended up nailed to crosses along the Appian Way. Those that followed Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe ended slavery in the United States. That is how you change things. Not with some superhero, and Spartacus was a superhero, one of the greatest men who ever lived, a slave that led a slave revolt that almost brought down Rome, but superheroes don’t change the world and Spartacus didn’t. To change the world you have to change the human heart, one heart at a time. It was what Tom Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe were able to do. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe he said “”So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”, the war the ended American slavery.

I recently watched a program on propaganda on C-Span. Propaganda is about fooling people, about governments, organized religion, or political groups getting people to blindly support one thing or another by using symbols and myths rather than by using the truth. That is not what Tom Paine and Harriet Stowe did. They got people to believe something by telling them the truth and by reaching their hearts.

© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

I’m not quite old enough to remember radio back when it held stories, news, and live music, when it was TV without pictures. I mostly remember how radio turned me on to rock and roll, from the Beatles to NIN. Most of that is over. Now radio has little new music and is mostly oldies, rightie talk and religious rants.

Religious radio is right wing political propaganda. Tax-free rightie propaganda. The preachers even encourage listeners to call Congress and give the H. R. numbers of bills they tell their listeners to say they support or oppose. Would that the left could afford that kind of propaganda.

Locally we had Air America Radio for a while but they took that off despite this being a city that votes about 90% Democratic. Radio isn’t about listeners, it’s about who buys ads and even if Memphis is heavily Democratic the businesses who buy ads aren’t. So we lost Air America.

We used to have the talk part of NPR. Now that has been replaced with content-free classical music… YAWN. There is nothing for a leftie like me to listen to. Or even for a moderate. I think it’s all a plot.

Anyway, I used to listen to radio while I cooked or cleaned or ate a meal. Now unless I’m cleaning the room where my computer room lives so I can stream Air America, I can’t be doing anything and still listen to radio.

I’ve always been a big reader, a book freak. I planned to be reading on my deathbed but that no longer seems possible. As I get older I am losing my vision and the book I used to be able to read in a day now takes me a month. It frustrates the hell out of me. I have been trying to find substitutes.

First I started listening to the local library channel, WYPL. They read the local paper in the morning and books in the afternoon. The main problem with that is having no control. If I am not interested in the book or article they are reading, I can’t go on to something else. If I am interested but have to do something else, then I miss it and can’t go back and listen to the part I missed.

The local library has some books on CD but either I’ve read them or I am not interested in reading (listening) to them. The local library seems mostly aimed at children or people of limited education.

Then I discovered podcasting. I got the cheapest mp3 player I could get on Amazon. It was $27 but has now gone up to $44!! (Due to the falling dollar?) It’s fine. Well, except for the ear buds that wouldn’t stay in my ears but I had old headphones I used instead. I am finding more and more things to listen to on podcast, shows that mimic the old radio shows I’ve heard about.

Aside from books in general I am a big fan of science fiction. This began in high school when the table where I used to sit in the library had a bookcase of science fiction behind it, mostly anthologies of short stories . If my homework was done or I wanted to put it off, I would turn around and pick up a random book and start reading. This got me started with scifi and, while other genres have lost their interest over the years, it never has.

My fading vision locked me out of the scifi worlds. With my mp3 player I found a new door into them. There is a website called escapepod.org. It has over a hundred hours of scifi short stories that you can listen to online or download. They are not read the bland way they are on WYPL. They are like old radio shows with people of talent doing the reading. I am hungry for the printed word and these stories satisfy that hunger.

So here’s to Steve Ely’s Escape Pod!! Long may she stream!!

I especially want to recommend the story Connie, Maybe. If you are southern you know people like this and if you are starting to get old you are people like this. Very funny and well read/performed.

I also recommended the podcasts at:
The Naked Scientist
Nature
Science Magazine

© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

How do you get a real estate bubble? A real estate bubble is a type of inflation that is largely limited to real estate. Why would just real estate prices inflate more than other products and equities?

Residential real estate is sensitive to interest rates as very few things are. When most people buy a house the primary factor that determines how much they are willing to pay is not the price of the house but the size of the monthly house payment. If they think they can only afford to pay $1000 a month, that will limit how much the house they buy can cost. Their monthly note will include escrow payments for city and county property taxes as well as their homeowner’s insurance but even those are determined by the value of the house.

In 2000 the mortgage interest rate was about 8%. If you bought a $100,000 house that year, the monthly payment on the loan would have been $733/month. Even with property taxes and insurance your monthly house note would probably have been under $1000. The lender expected that you would be able to pay that $1000 a month and pay it for 30 years. They made the loan based on that expectation. They made it after checking your income, loans and credit score.

After 9/11 the prime interest rate was cut and cut again, 5.6% to 1.75%. This was meant to keep the stock market up, another kind of bubble, and it did. The lower the interest rate, the less investors make on bonds and the more they are forced to go into the stock market to get a higher rate of return. To keep the market up the interest rate was cut so much that it was less than the inflation rate, so that it was effectively zero.

What does this do to house prices? After 9/11 the mortgage rate fell, first to 7% in 2002, then in 2003, to support the economy during Bush’s invasion of Iraq, to 5%. At 5% your house note, including escrow, on a $100,000 house would have been about $750/month, a reduction of about 25% from 2000.

Since you thought you could afford a larger house note, what would you do? Most people would buy a more expensive house. The developers and realtors knew this as well so they began to build and sell more expensive houses or just sell existing houses for a higher price. After all, you wouldn’t be paying any more a month. That is how this bubble grew. The price of houses begins to inflate (up to whatever the market would bear) with the price being limited not by what the house was really worth but by the interest rate the buyer had to pay. The more the fed drove down interest rates, the more the prices of houses inflated. A bubble was produced.

When the fed began to increase the interest rate again, largely because people would no longer buy US debt at such low rates, house notes went up as well, especially on variable rate mortgages that people had been tricked into getting. People found they couldn’t afford to buy because the higher interest rates and inflated house prices produced a house note too high to pay. So the real estate market tanked.

But there was something else going on. Something caused by predatory lenders.

With the passing years most houses increase in value but with the real estate bubble they REALLY increased in value. A house that was purchased for $50,000 30 years ago, might be worth $200,000 or more now. A house in a modest (read poor) neighborhood that was purchased for $30,000 might be worth $100,000-150,000. This provided an opportunity for predatory lenders.

The person who bought that $30,000 house might still have a modest income and not be able to pay the note on $150,000 loan but he/she still was sitting on the equity in that house, equity that the predators thought they could get. Lenders made a push to get people to refinance that equity, to get some of the money without realizing they might lose their house. Say that house they paid $50,000 for, or were still paying $50,000 for for, was technically worth $150,000. Say the owner is paying a $500 a month house note. If he is lured into refinancing that house, and borrowing say, $100,000, that is still less than the $150,000 his house was worth. The owner gets $100,000 cash and thinks he is doing good. But he has to pay various fees to the lender and also has a much larger house note.

Time goes by and the borrower can’t pay that note so the lender gets to take the house and sell it. With each transaction, with the loan, with the default, with selling the house out from under the borrower, with each transaction the lender gets a bunch of fees and, as long as they can sell the house to some new dupe, will not lose a dime. In a few states, such as Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont that have “strict foreclosure” the lender gets outright ownership of the house with no obligation to sell it and return any excess to the original owner. So it’s all profit for them.

Then the predatory lenders figured out a new way to make a killing. They bundled their risky loans (called subprime loans) together and sold them in Europe. Then it didn’t matter if people could pay because they already gotten full value and more out of their risky loans.

Also predatory credit card companies, especially out of Delaware (Delaware has made corporate corruption the primary state business. Delaware: The Black Hole of Corporate Reform This is why I don’t trust Biden.), are pushing the holders of their credit cards to borrow cash, to max out the credit cards with cash advances, cash advances that can end up charging as much as 32% (Chase) interest plus a 3% or more initial transaction fee.

One of the credit card solicitations I got in the mail revealed, in tiny print on the back, that if the borrower was late or missed a payment twice in a year that the interest rate on the balance could be increased up to 72%. (No usury laws in Delaware since the people gulled by Delaware businesses are not even citizens of Delware so they can’t exert pressure on Delaware’s elected representatives to change the laws. Delaware is like a judicial “Hole-in-the-wall,” a safe refuge for thieves. Or like a “Black-Hole-of-Corporate-Reform-in-the-Wall. ) These credit card companies try to ensure this happens by varying the due date from month to month. Think you have to have your payment in by the 30th? Then the next moth you don’t look and it turns out it was due on the 25th. ”Many credit card agreements are now written so the company can raise your rate if you are late on any of your bills, not just their credit card.” !!! Such credit cards often result in people ruining their credit or going into bankruptcy. You would almost expect Vinnie to show up with a baseball bat and threaten your knees.

Under the old bankruptcy laws the lender couldn’t take a person’s house. Under the new Republican passed bankruptcy laws, now they can. The credit card companies seem to be deliberately driving people into bankruptcy. On purpose. So they can charge ridiculous interest rates. So they can charge more fees for stealing their homes.

This kind of predatory lending went on for a while. Some people tried to get laws passed to stop it but the Republicans and the wealthy prevented that. People were lured into refinancing their houses, were persuaded to take the equity out of them, and were lent more money than they could ever pay back. Some lenders did not even ask what income the person had, only if they owned their house. They wanted the borrower to default so they could take the house and sell it and take huge fees out of the price. Every time they do anything, they get additional fees. Often ridiculously large fees.

But then the bubble burst. They finally killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Houses had gone up so much that when interests rates began to rise as well fewer people could buy the stolen houses when they were put on the market. This produced the subprime mortgage crisis. Some European banks that had bought the bundled subprime loans went bust. Others declared hundred of millions in losses. God knows how many people have lost or will lose their homes.

Bush and the fed are doing everything they can to protect these predatory lenders, spending our tax money, inflating our money till it is worth less and less, doing everything they can to prop up the stock market but nothing to help people who have lost their homes.

Maybe bankers are as evil as the commies used to claim. Maybe usury should still be a crime.

© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

The Republicans are skilled at framing debates, at defining the terms even Democrats use. Rove is a genius at it. He used to send out daily talking points for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. When he resigned from the White House I expected him to stop. Maybe he has. Maybe someone else has taken over that task but I think I he’s still doing it - but from another address.

The new Republican word is “honor.” It seems a strange choice since lies and perversions are the hallmark of the Republican Party. Still, the Republican candidates and the right wing echo chambers on Fox and talk radio are using the word a lot, trying to catapult the propaganda. On September 10 Stephen Colbert showed a video montage of Republican candidates repeating the word like a mantra. Like it meant something to them.

But what is “honor” to a Republican?

Honor can refer to many things. When I think of honor I think “virtue, integrity and a keen sense of ethical conduct: integrity or one’s word given as a guarantee of performance ”. This cannot be what Republicans are talking about. They have no integrity and their word means nothing. They are all forsworn. Forsworn means “to make a liar of oneself under or as if under oath”. If you break your oath you are forsworn. If you never meant to keep it in the first place, you are forsworn. The Republicans have all sworn to defend and protect the constitution, even Bush. (“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”) Despite this he calls the constitution “just a goddamn piece of paper.” He has undermined the constitution with almost every action. He is forsworn. By their actions most Republicans have shown themselves foresworn as well. They have made no effort to defend the constitution. Their oaths mean nothing to them. They are without honor.

Honor can also refer to the respect and admiration we feel toward those with integrity and strict ethical conduct. Again this could not be what the Republicans are talking about since they seem only to admire individuals with money and power. They show contempt for individuals of integrity. Again and again Bush has appointed corrupt cronies to public office, not honorable men and women. Bush and the Republicans show contempt for anyone too stupid to sell out.

Now they talk about honor. Well, they don’t really talk about it as much as they just utter the word repeately. It’s their new catchword.

When Republicans speak of “honor” they don’t mean integrity, they don’t mean any character trait. Since they don’t mean living up to their oaths either, what do they mean by “honor”?

They mean something external. They mean recognition and privilege. When Bush gave former CIA director George Tenent the Medal of Freedom after firing him, he was giving him an honor in the sense of an evidence or symbol of distinction, as an exalted title or rank, a badge or decoration or a ceremonial rite or observance. Tenent got a medal and the ceremonial rite in the White House, but not for his integrity and ethics. But for his lack of them.

The Bush Administration’s actions in Iraq, from kidnapping and torture to funding death squads, have been without honor. Yet now they claim we cannot leave Iraq with honor. They are right. If you don’t bring honor with you, you cannot take it with you when you leave. They have dishonored our nation, our soldiers and our constitution. They have brought only shame to them all. For them honor is just a word they use to obscure the fact that they have none. Honor is in their mouths but not their actions.

© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

Could global warming be good? Well, not for us, but for the world as a whole?

The sun is getting hotter(The sun gets about 10% hotter every billion years.) but the world is getting colder.

The earth is thought to be about 4.6 billion years old so that would mean (alllie figures) the sun has gotten about 70% hotter since the earth formed. The earth was hotter when life originated. That is probably why there are heat-loving (or at least heat tolerant) bacteria (thermophiles) that can live above the boiling point of water. Maybe it was that hot when they evolved. But why, you ask, if the sun has gotten hotter, has the earth gotten colder? And the earth has gotten colder. For instance, the earth is generally free of snow and ice even at high altitudes except during ice ages so we have been in an ice age for about 40 million years. During an ice age there are cycles of advancing and retreating glaciers. Just as we see now. The realization that we are in an ice age once made scientist think that the earth was in danger of turning into a “snowball earth.”

So why has the earth gotten colder?

There are lots of theories but the main one has to do with the atmosphere. With what we call greenhouse gases.

When the early earth coalesced out of the protoplanetary disk and stabilized, it is thought to have had an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. That got blasted away by the solar wind. This early earth was bombarded by asteroids and comets. It grew. The bombardments brought gases from space or released them from under the earth’s surface. The new atmosphere was thought to be mostly hydrogen(H2), water(H20), methane(CH4) and ammonia(NH3). The sun’s radiation (no ozone to block it out back then) broke water into oxygen(O2) and hydrogen(H2). The oxygen reacted with methane to form carbon dioxide(CO2) and water and with the ammonia to form water and free nitrogen(N2). This produced high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which would have given the ancient sky a reddish cast. Methane and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases. As is water vapor. It is thought they kept the earth from turning into a snowball. Kept it warm. But not so warm as Venus with its almost pure carbon dioxide atmosphere holding in its heat and turning it into a hot, dark burning hell.

Life evolved. It metabolized. It reproduced. Then life developed a neater trick. Through mutation it learned to turn light energy into chemical energy using carbon dioxide and water. This was the most popular trick of all, the trick on which almost all life on earth came to depend. Photosynthesis. But photosynthesis does two things, that, in the long run, proved disastrous. One, it produces a poisonous pollutant, a pollutant that, as it grew in concentration in the atmosphere and water, killed almost all life. The poison? Oxygen. That was a big change. Almost everything died. Except for a few organisms that hid away from the poison. And a very few that evolved to tolerate it. Or use it. That path leads to us.

The second thing photosynthesis did was use up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to bind it in a thousand different compounds that, when an organism died, ended up in the rocks and ocean bottoms of earth. As carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere, heat radiated back into space and the world began to cool. Then earth suffered its first ice age (as far as we know) and one of its most severe. It lasted 300 million years.

Then carbon dioxide slowly weathered out of the rocks, by erosion, by volcanoes dissolving calcium carbonate rock laid down in previous eons and spitting out carbon dioxide. The earth warmed. As it did the oceans were able to hold less carbon dioxide and released more of it to the atmosphere. The glaciers retreated. The ice melted. The plants grew and multiplied in the oceans (and later on the land), burying the carbon in the ground (say as coal and oil) until there was so little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the world again cooled and the poles froze and the glaciers marched south.

This has happened many times in earth’s history. All of the carbon in the oil and coal and most carbonate rocks was once in the atmosphere. Much of it while there was life on earth. There is no reason that higher levels of carbon dioxide would kill everything. It didn’t before. It was the ice ages that killed, sometimes killed most forms of life. As time has passed more and more of the earth’s carbon as ended up underground until now there is only about 0.04% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Maybe that is why we are here!! To help the carbon get out of the ground, to forestall snowball earth!! Some carbon deposits would never weather out. They are too deeply buried. Maybe we are doing a good thing digging up the carbon compounds and burning them. Maybe we are SAVING the earth, helping in a cycle that will make life on earth possible long into the future! Maybe we are Gaia’s trick to save the world!

We have already increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about a third in the last 150 years. There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than any time in the last 20 million years. But that isn’t much when you consider that there was ten times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 200 million years ago and 20 times as much 400 million years ago. William Ruddiman claims we have already disrupted the cycle of glaciation as far back as 8000 years ago due to our intense farming.

But wait. The sun is getting hotter. If we put all that carbon back into the atmosphere, will the earth get hotter and hotter too? We will end up like Venus? Well, the scientists say yes. Perhaps within the next billion years. Hmmm, hard to worry about that. But if we are here to save the world, it matters.

Should we care if it gets hotter?

We evolved in a narrow range of temperature. We are adapted to the way it is NOW. We did not evolve in a hotter earth, an earth so hot that most reptiles did not need to generate their own heat. The action of the sun and the atmosphere on them was sufficient to keep them warm enough to keep their temperatures in an optimum range for the activity of their enzymes. But WE evolved during an ice age. We made our great leap forward to civilization during an ice age!! The hotter climate may not suit us. The ice will all melt. The oceans will rise. And all the coastal cities will flood. Even far inland the earth will subside under the weight of water and there will be less and less land. Many forests will become deserts. Much farm land will be lost. Millions, maybe billions will die!! And it will be… hot.

I hate hot.

So what should we do!! If we were as smart as we think we are we would figure out what temperature is best for us and keep atmospheric carbon dioxide in the range that is most likely to maintain that temperature. Instead we blindly go on our greedy way, spilling carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like that bunch of mindless cyanobacteria excreted oxygen that once destroyed the world.

Haven’t we learned anything in 3 billion years?

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I have thrown in the towel where wikipedia is concerned. I used to think it was lame and I could find better information on my own but more and more I find if I look at a hundred pages I rarely find anything as good as wikipedia. At least for science.

The new study helps explain how Earth may have avoided becoming frozen solid early in its history, when astrophysicists believe the sun was 25 percent fainter than today. http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2232

In the very long term, astrophysicists believe that the sun’s output increases by about 10% per billion (109) years. In about one billion years the additional 10% will be enough to cause a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth - rising temperatures produce more water vapour, water vapour is a greenhouse gas (much stronger than CO2), the temperature rises, more water vapour is produced, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_ages#Major_ice_ages

On long timescales, atmospheric CO2 content is determined by the balance among geochemical processes including organic carbon burial in sediments, silicate rock weathering, and vulcanism. The net effect of slight imbalances in the carbon cycle over tens to hundreds of millions of years has been to reduce atmospheric CO2. The rates of these processes are extremely slow; hence they are of limited relevance to the atmospheric CO2 response to emissions over the next hundred years. In more recent times, atmospheric CO2 concentration continued to fall after about 60 myr BP, and there is geochemical evidence that volume concentrations were less than 300 ppm by about 20 myr BP. Low CO2 concentrations may have been the stimulus that favored the evolution of C4 plants, which increased greatly in abundance between 7 and 5 myr BP. Present carbon dioxide levels are likely higher now than at any time during the past 20 myr[17] and certainly higher than in the last few hundred thousand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s_atmosphere

William Ruddiman has proposed the early anthropocene hypothesis according to which the anthropocene era, as some people call the most recent period in the Earth’s history when the activities of the human race first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems, did not begin in the eighteenth century with advent of the industrial era, but dates back to 8000 years ago, due to intense farming activities of our early agrarian ancestors. It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of the Milankovitch cycles. In his overdue-glaciation hypothesis Ruddiman claims that an incipient ice age would probably have begun several thousand years ago, but the arrival of that scheduled ice age was forestalled by the activities of early farmers. Other important aspects which contributed to ancient climate regimes are the ocean currents, which are modified by continent position as well as other factors. They have the ability to cool (i.e. aiding the creation of Antarctica) and the ability to warm (i.e giving the British Isles a temperate as opposed to a boreal climate). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_ages#Changes_in_Earth.27s_atmosphere

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To comment email comments to alllie at alllie@newsgarden.org

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© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

They raised him on a farm with others of his kind, all of them doomed, but he was special. With the food and the care he grew over twice the size of a normal male. His size only made him slow and clumsy, like a morbidly obese person who can barely carry his own weight. They fed him more and more and gave him growth hormone and steroids till he was a giant of his kind, an ill and clumsy giant.

Then one day they ran him out of the barn, away from food, they struck him with sticks and electric prods till he screamed in pain and tried to get away. They ran him toward the trees, with dogs chasing him. Now it was time for him to pay for the food and care he had received and he would pay in pain. There was someone willing to pay to hurt him, to make him suffer, because this was a commercial game farm and pain and death was their stock in trade.

Sometimes the prey was just quail, birds raised in a cage, given food, kept from learning about survival, until one day they were released in a field. The first time they took to wing, they would be shot out of the air. It’s called a canned hunt. In the fun of causing their suffering and death, once the evil old man who ruled the country had the pleasure, not just of shooting them, but of shooting another evil old man. Sort of a human hunt. Little consolation to the quail.

But this animal wasn’t a quail. He was a pig. The drugs and the food and the captivity had made him a leviathan, a helpless one. So he ran to the forest, fleeing from pain, followed by two farm workers with high powered rifles (called guides), a paying customer and his 11-year-old son. They tracked him through the trees but how hard is it to track a tame animal that weighs over a thousand pounds, a hormone swollen freak who can barely walk.

The boy was given a pistol and told to shoot the animal. He did and the poor creature suffered and ran and was followed and shot again. They didn’t use a rifle, just a pussy handgun, so it would take longer for the animal to die and the customer would get his money’s worth. Finally, with the fifth shot, and the animal died. The boy’s picture and the picture of his tame victim was put on the news, as though killing a frightened and ill animal was a feat worth taking notice of when all that was noteworthy was how big the hormones had made the poor animal grow. The head was taken for a trophy and the rest of the flesh to be made into hormone sausage. The father celebrated the suffering and death as proof of his family’s Christian values.

Here’s hoping the game farm owner, the man and his son all get what they deserve.

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© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

On the local library channel I have been listening to a reading of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips. Born in 1915, Alice Bradley Sheldon was the daughter of wealth, privilege and intellectual accomplishment. Her father was a lawyer and naturalist and her mother a prolific writer. She was a graphic artist, an art critic, worked in air intelligence for the US Army in WWII and was later recruited into the CIA which she left in 1955 to get a doctorate in Experimental Psychology at George Washington University. She was an attractive, bisexual tomboy. She also had an open marriage despite being deeply in love with her husband.

Alice Sheldon wrote mostly science fiction and did most of her writing under the name James Tiptree, Jr. Many women writers have written under male pseudonyms. Mary Anne Evans wrote under the name of George Elliot, Charolette Bronte wrote as Currer Bell, Emily Bronte as Ellis Bell, and feminist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin as George Sand. But all that was long ago. Despite the bias of the science fiction community against female scifi writers there seems limited reason for Sheldon to have assumed a male persona and to have clung to it for so long. It wasn’t just that she used a male pen name for her published work, it was that she corresponded volumously with many other science fiction writers and fans and even in these personal letters maintained the Tiptree persona and repeatedly denied she was a woman.
Of course eventually she was discovered.

But that is not what struck me as I listened to her book. It was this:

In February 1975 he[Tiptree/Alice Sheldon] wrote Russ that women were “a little–a little–like a beautiful deer in a game park where they have temporarily suspended hunting season. There are few such parks and god knows how long this will last.” In a subsequent letter he said he meant that women should consolidate their power base, watch their backs, and try to make their freedom last.

That is the gist of it for me. Freedom for women is such a new thing in the world. Women have been enslaved everywhere, never free, never in history. We have always been property. Always slaves, first to men, then to our bodies popping out babies that we are genetically programmed to love and care for. Our freedom seems fragile, fragile and very precious, fragile and easily snatched away. In much of the world, especially the Moslem world, that freedom still does not exist and as long as women are enslaved anywhere, my freedom is not secure. As long as some women are not free, I cannot be free. At any moment my freedom might be snatched from me. I and the women around me might be put back into chains. Just as in Nazi Germany qualified women were fired from their jobs because “motherhood” was the only permitted role for women. Just as in the US after World War II women were forced from their jobs and back into the role of maids, sex slaves, brood males and parasites, aka wives. Just as in Russia and the Soviet Republics after the end of communism women were the first to lose the jobs and rights till, for many of them, the only choice was starvation or prostitution. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_02/uk/ethique/txt1.htm

On every side there are attacks on women’s freedom. The Supreme Court only recently ruled that women can be prevented from certain forms of abortion without considering any health consequences to the woman. After all, once a male’s DNA carrier is present in a woman’s body that body is no longer hers. Her health no longer matters. That is the implication. Russell Shaw in the Catholic Herald proclaimed that this was “only the first step” as the 5 Catholic men on the Supreme Court worked to overturn the right of women to determine what happens to their own bodies. This, the religious right declared, is only the beginning!

In Germany a Moroccan woman who was frequently beaten by her husband was told she could not get a quick divorce because the Koran gives a husband the right to beat his wife. A Lebanese-German man strangled and beat his daughter for refusing to marry the man he had chosen for her and was given mere probation because his cultural conditioning was a mitigating factor. A Turkish-German who killed his wife for violating his “honor” was given the least possible sentence because she had offended his moral precepts. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife while beating her was given only probation. Across Europe Moslem Imans give their flocks advise on how to beat their wives (so the infidels will not see the bruises).
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2496657.ece

In Canada Sharia courts are set up to deal with “family” matters. All this is nothing compared to how women are treated in Moslem countries. When women in countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia try to protest for rights they are beaten by mobs of men. Or arrested. Or killed.

As capitalists lure more Moslem men to western countries for cheap labor they explicitly promise them they will still be able to keep women subjugated. Then the capitalists claim this subjugation must be tolerated in the name of “multiculturism.”

Have we women in the west been living in a sanctuary where the males did not prey on us, like a deer park with a suspended hunting season, a sanctuary that is ending. We have been living in a dream if we think our rights are secure. All women MUST “consolidate their power base, watch their backs, and try to make their freedom last.” We must fight for the freedom of all women and against the loss of our own freedom with all we have.

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© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

There’s more than one way to be a mass murderer.

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© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .

Back to the green. That is what some breeders call it when they cross purebred animals with wild individuals in an attempt to bring health and vitality back into a degenerate strain of animals. Hybrid vigor and all that.

Many people believe Harry, Lady Diana’s second child, to be the son of her lover James Hewitt. He does look like Hewitt, though Hewitt denies that he could be Harry’s father. But the doubt still remains.

Prince Harry	James Hewitt

If he is, this seems like a good thing to me. The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, which, in 1917, changed its name to Windsor to distract the British people from the royal family’s German origins, needs to cross with some sturdier stock to overcome its upper-class twit genes. Hewitt, though not perfect, seems to have more merit than anyone in the royal family. Without their money and position I can’t image any of them being anything more than a cashier in a shop or someone’s mum. The cross between Elizabeth and Phillip produced a homely couple of kids, typical interbred idiots. One would think with their money they could at least marry good-looking people. But like the Saudi Royals, who appear to be devils in drag, the English royals are an ugly, undistinguished group.

It must have been exciting for Diana to make love to a man who she loved and who loved her, unlike with the degenerate twit Charles, using her as a brood mare while he cavorted with his aging mistresses and expected even his masseuse to give him a hand job at the end of a massage. If Hewitt is indeed Harry’s father Harry should be glad, glad that he was sired by a man who loved his mother instead of by the aging pervert Charles who cared nothing for her.

So a cross with James Hewitt seems to be a good thing. A child of love and back to the green. Some nice British genes to overcome the royal family’s superboob ones. Since the British Royal family is mostly German with a sprinkling of Dutch, for a long time Britain has had Kings and Queens that were, genetically, foreign invaders. If Harry is Hewitt’s son that would make him more British/English than any royal offspring in centuries. He would seem to have more right to the throne than his brother William, who is mostly German.

It seems to me that the British people should favor him more, he being their own kin, than they do the more foreign Prince William.

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© Alllie 2007

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this link is attached, http://newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/alllieblog/ .