Obsidian Wings

The Disaster In Tennessee

by hilzoy

I'm late to this story, but: what's happening in Tennessee sounds horrific:

"A coal ash spill in eastern Tennessee that experts were already calling the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States is more than three times as large as initially estimated, according to an updated survey by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Officials at the authority initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville, gave way on Monday. But on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep.

The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.

A test of river water near the spill showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders, said John Moulton, a spokesman for the T.V.A., which owns the electrical generating plant, one of the authority’s largest.

Mr. Moulton said Friday that the levels exceeded safety limits for drinking water, but that both metals were filtered out by water treatment processes.

Mercury and arsenic, he said, were "barely detectable" in the samples."

This is much bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. You can see aerial video here. I find it disturbing that the amount of fly ash now thought to have been released is over twice as much as the TVA originally thought was in the entire pond.

Fly ash has a lot of bad stuff in it. Besides this Scientific American article with the comforting title "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste", there's this:

"A draft report last year by the federal Environmental Protection Agency found that fly ash, a byproduct of the burning of coal to produce electricity, does contain significant amounts of carcinogens and retains the heavy metal present in coal in far higher concentrations. The report found that the concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

Similarly, a 2006 study by the federally chartered National Research Council found that these coal-burning byproducts "often contain a mixture of metals and other constituents in sufficient quantities that they may pose public health and environmental concerns if improperly managed." The study said "risks to human health and ecosystems" might occur when these contaminants entered drinking water supplies or surface water bodies."

And guess what? It's headed into the Chatanooga water supply. Oh goody. There are reports of fish kills, though a TVA spokesman claims they are not the result of toxic substances, but of a surge of water beaching a lot of fish. However, I can't imagine a sudden influx of heavy metals and neurotoxins did the fish any good.

As David Roberts at Gristmill says, "There is no clean coal."

Listening To The Voice Of Creation

by hilzoy

I see that while I was away celebrating Christmas, Pope Benedict decided, as Time put it, to take "a subtle swipe at those who might undergo sex-change operations or otherwise attempt to alter their God-given gender." Here's what he said:

"What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term "gender", results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator. The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition. The great Scholastic theologians have characterised matrimony, the life-long bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator himself and which Christ -- without modifying the message of creation -- has incorporated into the history of his covenant with mankind. This forms part of the message that the Church must recover the witness in favour of the Spirit Creator present in nature in its entirety and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. Beginning from this perspective, it would be beneficial to read again the Encyclical Humanae Vitae: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sexuality as a consumer entity, the future as opposed to the exclusive pretext of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation."

The Pope might have based his remarks on revelation alone, presenting them as one of those things -- like baptism -- that aren't supposed to make sense to unbelievers. In that case, I would have found them distasteful, but I wouldn't have questioned his argument. However, he's presenting his claims as something he learns by "listening to the language of creation". And that's just wrong.

It is not true that the natural world teaches us that marriage is between a man and a woman -- it doesn't have teachings on the subject of either human or divine institutions, and it surely does not teach us that homosexuality is unknown in nature. (The Pope is reputedly very smart and intellectually curious; did he somehow miss the stories about gay penguins, fruit flies, bonobos, and even, topically enough, black swans?) Lots of fish change sex, as did this ex-hen. There are male animals who act like females, and vice versa.

More to the point: so what? Lots of things that we find immoral are widespread in nature. Spiders eat their mates, for instance, but that doesn't imply that it's OK for us. Lots of things we think are just fine are unknown in animals -- number theory, for instance, or blogging. If you want to argue about what we learn when we "listen to the language of creation", you need to explain how we distinguish it from, say, the language of prejudice. Does the fact that the purpose of eating seems to be nourishment imply that it is immoral to drink diet soda? Does the fact that we 'naturally' get around using our legs imply that we were wrong to invent the bicycle, or, for that matter, the wheelchair? Does the fact that we are born vulnerable to a whole host of diseases mean that we should not develop vaccines and cures?

Personally, I think that the idea of defining what's "natural" for human beings is generally confused. What's natural is often contrasted to what's cultural, but human beings are social animals. If anything is natural for human beings, it is being raised by other human beings, and learning things from them: if we tried to find out what's 'natural' for human beings by dropping an infant into an unpopulated wilderness, we'd have to conclude that what comes naturally to us is starvation.

Likewise, human beings are generally curious and ingenious. When we invent things that are not found in nature, are we doing something unnatural, or using our natural capacity for problem-solving? If we decided to abjure every attempt to innovate on the grounds that it was unnatural, would there be anything natural about that decision? I don't think so.

That said, I'm sure there must be some discussion in which there would be a point to making claims about what's natural to humans and what's not; and in which it would be interesting to try to listen to the voice of creation. But, as I said, one would need to be very careful not to confuse it with the voice of bigotry or prejudice.

One sign that someone is not so much as trying to listen to the voice of creation is getting obviously relevant facts about nature wrong, say by asserting that animals do not form homosexual relationships or change sex. Another is making claims about what's natural without any apparent awareness that someone might find his life unnatural -- say, if he had taken a vow of celibacy, and lectured other people about the unnaturalness of their sexual lives without any trace of irony.

And one sign that someone might be motivated by something other than his Christian duty would be if he preached about the unnaturalness and sinfulness of a group of people who have suffered a great deal of persecution without taking care to warn his followers that whatever Christ thought about being transgender, He surely frowned on cruelty and injustice, and that violence against people who are gay, bisexual, or transgender is flatly wrong.

Idiocy Comes Home To Roost

by hilzoy

Bloomberg (h/t Paul Krugman):

"Just $5 million of work is needed to complete a new California Court of Appeals building in Santa Ana. The state may not have the money, and come July judges may be writing opinions in their living rooms.

"I've been on the bench for 23 years, and I've never seen anything like this," said David G. Sills, the presiding justice for the Fourth District Court of Appeals, Division Three, in a telephone interview.

California's worst budget crisis has held up $3.8 billion in spending on public works, possibly including the courthouse adjacent to Santa Ana City Hall. Sills and his seven fellow jurists had planned to move in before the lease on their temporary offices expires June 30.

"Everyone will have to work from home," said Sills, 70, "and we'll have to rent a place for when we hear arguments.""

As Krugman says, this is exactly the opposite of what's needed right now. But the problem isn't just the economy, and California's need to balance its budget. It's Proposition 13. Proposition 13 was cleverly designed to make it virtually impossible for California to raise taxes. Any tax increase requires a supermajority. Property taxes are fixed at 1% of assessed value, and assessments themselves are fixed at the time of purchase, and can rise only very slowly thereafter.

This leads to all sorts of idiotic consequences. Back when I lived in California, one of the few ways of raising taxes available to cities and towns was to increase the sales tax by some fraction of a percent. Result? Cities and towns did this, and then tried desperately to induce people to set up car dealerships and other places where people sell big, expensive things. Did it make sense to have so many car dealerships? Who cares! It's revenue!

Likewise, people in California don't always sell their houses when it would normally make sense to do so, because as long as they stay in their existing house, the assessment will not rise much and their taxes will stay low, whereas if they buy a new house, it will be assessed at its purchase price, and their taxes will go up.

"Free markets", indeed.

My favorite Prop 13 anecdote: while she was alive, my grandmother lived in a wonderful house that she had (I believe) designed herself in the 50s or thereabouts, and built on what was then an undeveloped hillside. As time passed, however, that property became much, much more valuable, which makes sense since it was on the border between LA and Beverly Hills, on a delightful secluded street that ran up the hillside and dead-ended at the top. Phil Spector lived next door, and Eartha Kitt lived up the street.

Meanwhile, I had a good friend who lived in a house in a terrible neighborhood (as in: there were shootings nearby on a fairly regular basis.) The only famous person who lived near her was Rodney King. Her house itself was great, but it was also in a state of considerable decay when she bought it, and needed a whole lot of work.

Guess who paid the least in property taxes, by a considerable margin? My grandmother, of course. Having a cap on property assessments in place for decades will do that.

The result, of course, is that California has been deferring maintenance for a very long time. Now their judges will be working from home, their schools will fall further into decay, and their bridges will continue to crumble. With any luck, Obama's stimulus plan will help out with the worst of it; my only regret about that is that it will postpone the day when Californians have to confront the idiotic tax policies they put in place.

Merry Christmas

by publius

Hope Santa treats you well.

Pardons - Mend 'Em, Don't End 'Em

by publius

I'm not a huge fan of the presidential pardon power. If I had my druthers, we'd amend the Constitution and get rid of it entirely (Eric -- echoing warnings from the Anti-Federalists -- provides a few examples of how the process can be abused).**

But there are of course legitimate reasons to keep it. For instance, I have a fairly dim view of our state criminal justice systems, and the executive has more structural freedom to correct gross injustices at this level. [UPDATE -- I'm an idiot. As Ugh notes in comments, the President can only pardon for federal offenses. My bad -- I still don't like the power though.] But the power to correct these gross injustices necessarily provides the president with a way to use the pardon power to help cronies or (even worse) to cover up his administration's criminal behavior.

So here's my proposal -- I think we should amend the Constitution to limit the pardon power. Mend it, don't end it. Specifically, the president should be forbidden from granting a pardon throughout the lame duck period. From Day 1 to Year 4, Election Eve, the president would have the power to grant pardons. After that, he or she would be prohibited from doing so until the next inauguration. The idea is provide some sort of political check on the process. If Clinton wanted to pardon Rich, or if Bush wanted to preemptively pardon Cheney, they would have to do so before the voters went to the polls.

It would be even better if we followed Professor Levinson's advice and got rid of the lame duck period altogether. But until that day, limiting the pardon power might help.

[**UPDATE 2: I don't do this very often, but I deleted a link and reference to a post which I (in my haste) thought responded to the merits of Eric's post, but really didn't. I shouldn't have included it, and I know that I'm outside the window for deleting this. But it was driving me crazy, so I've deleted it. I apologize, but I also think it's tangential to the substance of the post.]

Season's Greetings!

by Eric Martin

"Happy Hollidays" is all well and good for the foot soldiers in the War on Christmas - the canon fodder if you will.  But the Special Forces types, us Atheist Seals, we opt for "Season's Greetings."  "Why?" asks you, the expendable grunt wasting away in the trenches on the front line.  Because, private, while Happy Holidays may in fact serve to sap the resources and manpower of Christmas, it does so by encouraging respect for other faiths and through a spirit of inclusiveness in terms of other religious holidays.

Hence the victory is incomplete.  Season's Greetings, on the other hand, is pure as snow in its secular simplicity.  Like saying "Stupendous Summer" or "Fanciful Fall."  In short, it can effectively be drained of any and all religious connotation.

So it is my friends that while Bill O'Reilly and his Christmas Counterinsurgents are taking aim at the Happy Holidays Horde pushing against them in a frontal assault, we truly perfidious liberals will sneak behind enemy lines with a secret weapon so insidious, so potent as to ensure the final and total victory of...oh, who am I kidding.

Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings and Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

New EFCA Site

by publius

One more public service announcement before Santa departs -- the AFL-CIO just launched a new EFCA website for those interested. It has lots of good resources for people seeking either to get more involved or simply to get better educated. Here, for instance, is a video I found on the site featuring a worker who was fired for union activity. Frankly, he looks like a threatening and coercive violator of constitutional rights to me.

Computer Gods Are We

by publius

Only about, oh, years too late -- the technical wizards at ObWi are pleased to announced the "sharethis" widget at the bottom of our posts. 99% of you probably know this, but (as I keep trying to explain to Vint Cerf) the widget allows you to email the link to others or share the post on various social networking sites. (Note that Twitter is under the "Post" tab, not the "Social Web" tab.)

Cheney and the Chain Gang

by Eric Martin

There have been early indications that the GOP intends to make Eric Holder's role in pardoning Marc Rich fodder for his confirmation hearings - with some of the usual suspects eager to jump on the bandwagon.  Granted the Rich pardon was an unseemly use of that presidential prerogative, and Clinton deserves robust criticism for that decision, it is by no means the most egregious episode in Presidential pardoning.

It wasn't, after all, used to cover up the un-Constitutional expansion of executive power or other political abuses by the President and his coterie.  That form of pardon is far more pernicious than one-off pardons of criminal acts unrelated to the Presidency. Pardons in defense of un-Constitutional abuses/political crimes have a greater potential to negatively impact, long term, the integrity of the Constitution and our system of government.  They set a corrosive precedent and eviscerate Constitutional protections through the post hoc removal of penalties for violating same.  Why would future administration officials shy away from breaking the law or violating the Consitution when they know that the President will eventually pardon them?

Speaking of which, speculation is also swirling that President Bush may pardon Vice President Cheney for his role in everything from implementing programs of torture to warrantless eavesdropping.  But if Bush truly wants to shield Cheney from the legal repercussions of his actions while Vice President, Bush might want to consider pre-emptively exonerating Cheney for his role in outing covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.  Along those lines, Murray Waas has uncovered evidence of Cheney's conversations with FBI investigators, the substance of which further advances (though by no means settles) the case against Cheney: 

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.

Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger.

Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity.

That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter.

Waas has more.  I wonder if the media will point out the comparative significance of the use (and abuse) of the power of the pardon in the context of Holder's hearings and the pardons that Bush will inevitably hand down to his inner circle.  Actually, I don't have any doubt how the story will play out.

The Road to Copyright Reform

by publius

I'm almost finished with Remix -- and like all Lessig books, it's very good. One interesting part is that his rhetoric has subtly changed to attract more Republicans. That's not a bad idea, but I think it's ultimately a futile effort.

Lessig was apparently influenced by a reviewer of his earlier book Free Culture who claimed that Lessig was only talking to people who already agree with him rather than to conservatives. In this book then, he adopts a more deregulatory and anti-government narrative, presumably to help persuade Republicans.

Who knows -- it might prove to be an effective rhetorical strategy, but Lessig has more faith in modern Republicans than I do (particularly institutional Republicans such as legislators). Like many other liberals (particularly those who came of age in the late Clinton era), my view of the institutional GOP has darkened considerably over the years. I just don't see any potential universe in which the GOP abandons its slavish devotion to corporate interests and wealth concentration to support major copyright reform. It's just not going to happen. Maybe if the Ruffini Revolutionaries take control, but I'm not holding my breath.

Lessig also, I think, apparently believes that the institutional GOP actually believes in deregulation, and thus could be persuaded by this kind of rhetoric. Maybe things were different back in the golden era, but today's institutional Republicans put business first. If they can accomplish that goal thru deregulation, great. If not, they'll support regulation. There's really not much principle to it, it's whatever is good for corporate America (again, I'm talking about the institutional GOP).

Instead, Lessig should just keep talking to liberals. I think the only realistic way to enact copyright reform is to win the battle internally within the Democratic Party, which will then hopefully pass something one day while they're in power. That's not going to happen soon, because Democrats are still slavishly devoted to Hollywood on IP matters. But hopefully the Obama fundraising model could help break that stranglehold on the party as a whole.