Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 6

The Dirty Little Secret About Human Intelligence

We are rightly fascinated with dolphins. They have the good fortune of being cute, friendly, curious and comical, graceful, powerful and highly social. Dolphins seem familiar, like a close family friend, but alien, too, living in a world we hardly understand. We are drawn to them as they are to us, bound by a common curiosity and innate urge to explore.

Dolphins therefore naturally give us an ideal opportunity to discover the possibility of communicating with non-humans in ways not trivial. We are compelled to follow this path because doing so teaches us something deeply important about ourselves: how humans fit into the pantheon of life. Clearly if other animals exhibit impressive intelligence appropriate to their environment, perhaps we are not as special as we’ve been taught. A good conversation with a dolphin about the latest cetacean gossip would be convincing evidence that humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, only the temporary pinnacle of one small twig on the tree of life.

We know that Homo sapiens (wise hominid) primates are late arrivals in the history of life.  Through various fits, starts, and dead ends from Australopithecus to Paranthropus, through various Homo species like erectus and habilis, to modern sapiens, our lineage is short. Our most ancient direct-line ancestors only go back at most a few million years. Modern people, looking like us, have been around for only about 100,000 years. So what exactly is this experiment we call modern Homo sapiens?  Does our intelligence and ability to communicate make us special?  Dolphins put us to the test.

We are compelled to follow this path because doing so teaches us something deeply important about ourselves: how humans fit into the pantheon of life. — Jeff Schweitzer

We humans have always thought of ourselves as particularly bright, proudly noting our compassion, humor, altruism and impressive capacity to generate language, mathematics, tools, art, and music. In citing this self-serving list, filtered to our benefit, we assume that humans possess, and other animals lack, these honorable traits or capabilities. We ignore the inconvenient fact that we choose to define and measure intelligence in terms of our greatest strengths. We arbitrarily exclude from the definition of intelligence higher brain functions in other animals. Enter the compelling interest in communicating with dolphins. We would be low on the list of smart animals if we included in our basic definition of intelligence the ability to use self-generated sonar to explore the environment and to communicate.

Descartes was convinced that animals completely lacked minds, and his influence is felt even today. Even Stephen Jay Gould, no species-centric chauvinist, concluded that consciousness has been “vouchsafed only to our species in the history of life on earth.”  With all due respect to the late Professor Gould, perhaps one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of our time, the issue is not so simple. As with almost all aspects of comparative biology, intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness are elements of a continuum rather than phenomena with sharp boundaries between species. Intelligence and self-awareness do not belong exclusively in the domain of humankind. Dolphins are exhibit number one. Being smart seems to be a trait unique to human beings only when we artificially designate our particular suite of characteristics as the definition of intelligence, proving that circular logic is not too intelligent.

Let’s dig a little deeper. Intelligence can be thought of as the ability to learn from experience (acquire and retain new knowledge), and to subsequently apply that new knowledge with flexibility to manipulate or adapt to a changing environment. Or we can view intelligence as the ability to create abstract thought, beyond instinct or responses to sensory input. Originality and creativity are hallmarks of intelligence, and both are found in abundance in dolphins. Imagine if we could actually talk to them; here is a glimpse of the kinds of insights we might gain.  At the Makapuu Oceanic Center in Hawaii, trainers working with a female rough-toothed dolphin named Malia praised or fed her fish only for behaviors that had not been previously rewarded. Within a few days, Malia began performing novel aerial flips, corkscrews, new tail flaps, new twisted breaches, and other never-before-seen behaviors. Malia learned early on that the trainers were looking for new acts, not repetitions of previously demonstrated talents. As her repertoire expanded, she needed to create ever more unique combinations of movements to get a reward, which she did with aplomb, performing stunts so unusual that trainers could not have otherwise encouraged the behavior through standard training techniques. This propensity for originality and creativity was not a fluke unique to one individual.

So yes, let us strive to communicate meaningfully with dolphins. Perhaps dolphins will teach us enough about ourselves so that we can learn to adopt a more humble understanding of our position in the biosphere. Being humble about who and what we are will be easier when we recognize our kinship with our cousins in the animal kingdom.

Not Anywhere Close to Person of the Year: Why Time Magazine Is Wrong About Pope Francis

me Magazine has named Pope Francis as its Person of the Year. They should not have; he has no qualifications to be included even in the top 10 finalists. To understand this, we first need to understand how Time makes the selection. Remember that the title does not necessarily imply laudatory accomplishments, only those that have had significant impact for better or worse. The designation recognizes notoriety. The list of those honored in the past includes Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin twice (1939 and 1942), Nikita Khrushchev (1957), and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979).  In the opposite extreme honorees include Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Bill and Melinda Gates (for their charitable works). Prior to Francis, two other popes populated the list:  Pope John XXIII cited for his role in helping to mediate the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Pope John Paul II for his contributions in ending the Cold War, before the pedophilia epidemic became a public crises.

Pope Francis does not qualify in either category of good or evil; his impact has been in the realm of theater rather than substance. Outside of good photo ops, he has accomplished little in the little time he has been in office; if he is chosen based on such thin grue of accomplishment, then every Pope since the first would qualify as Person of the Year just by holding the title of Pope. Yet that would make little sense.

Throughout most of history, Popes have claimed to be connected to the divine, the successor of Peter, infallible as a representative of god on Earth and the right and ability to judge and excommunicate angels. Yet with this power Pope Francis, like all of his predecessors, continues to perpetrate poverty, misery, hunger and suffering throughout the world by preventing access to contraception; and denying women the ability to choose their own reproductive futures, which has been proven to perpetuate the cycle of poverty. He has abetted the spread of AIDS by preventing the distribution of condoms, the most effective and least expensive means of doing so. He has done nothing substantial to address the continuing problem of pedophilia among priests. Kissing the deformed is good drama, and nothing more. The media has been had, as has been the fawning public. Eschewing the regal trappings of the papacy for a modest apartment does not make one a saint when people are starving outside your gate.

Time Magazine and the gullible among us need to get over the man crush on this Pope. The explanation of why Francis was selected is almost creepy in its misplaced adulation:

Time called the Pope “a new voice of conscience.” The editors explain that, “In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time, about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power,” she said. “When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.”

No, really, the image does not resonate with anyone other than the already besotted. The images are just that: images.  Nothing has changed.  I have heard argued that the ship of state can only turn slowly; or that the Pope is doing all he can in the face of institutional inertia and conservative push back. Even if true, and the Pope were actually trying to make significant change, you don’t get an “E” for effort in real life. Time‘s award is meant to note significant impact, not good intent. But worse, the Pope has not actually shown good intent, only good media skill. Look at the particulars cited. How about the role of women? We are not discussing female priests or in fact any meaningful change of the role of women in or outside the church; and the Pope staunchly defends the Church’s position on contraception, giving women in impoverished nations no role at all other than to produce more offspring. On the subject of abortion, Pope Francis urged a group of gynecologists to refuse to perform abortions, one day after admonishing Catholics to stop obsessing about abortions. This is the Pope’s pattern: make a media friendly statement to catch attention and admiration, and then reverse that when it comes to policy and doctrine.

The nature of marriage?  After some supporting statement by the Pope on gay marriage, the Church reaffirms its unyielding opposition.  There has been no change in doctrine or policy. Fairness and justice?  This is almost obscene given that the Church under the new Pope continues to defend pedophile priests, does little to prevent future abuse, and continues to deny victims proper compensation.   Ask the tens of thousands of abuse victims about how fair and just the new Pope has been.  Like all before him, the Pope largely ignores the issue beyond bland promises to do better.  Here is Pope Francis on the pedophile crisis:  “The Church hierarchy doesn’t need new rules on abuse. It needs to follow long-established secular laws.”  That has not worked out so well, but there is no call for reform here; just more of the same.  No meaningful change in doctrine, and no change in policy.

The citation for transparency is nearly comical; where is the open and transparent discussion about condoms, homosexuality in the priesthood, female education and the right to choose one’s one reproductive fate?  What about transparency within the Vatican? Pope Francis oversaw a new law punishing any Vatican whistle-blower with eight years in prison, which includes anyone who leaks information concerning the “fundamental interests” of the Vatican. This is the opposite of transparency for which the Pope was lauded.

And really, all the adulation because the Pope kissed the face of a disfigured man?  As a representative of Christ, is that not in his job description?  That would be like fawning over a fireman because he battled a blaze.  A doctor does not get an award when he treats a sick patient.  The response to the Pope’s kiss is simply embarrassing.

Pope Francis may be a good man; I have no way of knowing either way. But he is not Person of the Year material. As Pope he is leading an institution that is perpetuating gross injustices in the world without tackling those head on and honestly. That is not fair, open, transparent or just.

Time got this wrong. Smoke and mirrors do not greatness make.

God Created Gravity: Why the U.S. Can’t Keep Pace With Slovenia

Two recent headlines appearing within a few days of each other should have warranted greater attention: “School Science Lesson Claims Gravity Was Created by God” and “Best Education in the World: Finland, South Korea Top Country Rankings, U.S. Rated Average.” The explanation for the latter is fully explained by the former, yet not enough of us seem to make the obvious connection.

The far right can stick their collective heads in the sand and talk about American exceptionalism, but the rest of the world is getting educated in the meantime. America is indeed number one – in self-delusion. While flag wavers congratulate themselves on how awesome we are, the world looks on bemused: only six percent of American students achieved advanced levels on an international standard, behind 30 other countries. We rank 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading. We are behind Lithuania and Slovenia – two countries a majority of American students could not identify on a map.

Many factors have brought us to this sad state of affairs, but we can no longer ignore the 600 pound gorilla and trumpeting elephants in the room: religion is killing us. While our kids are being taught that god created gravity, children in Zaire are learning about Newton and Einstein. As children in Lichtenstein are being taught about the warping of space-time, American kids are learning that “people who do not believe in god” are incapable of understanding gravity.

American religiosity has become an existential threat, undermining the foundation of our future prosperity by contaminating our educational system with superstition, fable and myth. We see this with evolution, vaccines, climate change, energy policy and a host of critical issues that should be based in science but instead are hijacked by ignorance. We are 17th in the world in science, but instead of improving our education, we continue to fight battles more appropriate to the 16th century. Let’s look at a few specific and tragic examples in which religion has triumphed at the expense of our educational system and with great harm to society.

Evolution

Religion is the only explanation for why evolution creates such a fuss in our society. We do not see people getting exercised about Quantum Mechanics, String Theory or the Theory of Relativity. But mention evolution and you invoke an immediate and visceral reaction. Local school boards are elected, rejected and then re-elected solely on this issue. No other scientific discovery is so deeply embedded into the fabric of American politics.

Evolution is one of the most successful, thoroughly documented scientific discoveries in human history. We can see evolution in a Petri dish. Evolution has been validated across multiple fields of anthropology, geology, genetics, embryology, bacteriology, virology, and biogeography. Evolution is a fact, an undeniable, proven fact, as certain as the existence of atoms. Only some of the details of the mechanisms of evolution remain to be elucidated. Cancer is a fact, though not all the mechanisms leading to malignancy are understood. Theory does not imply uncertainty; instead, theory means a grand idea, such as General Relativity or Evolution; well-established principles that encompass and explain a broad range of phenomena.

However, more than 75 years after the trial of State of Tennessee v John Scopes and despite incredible advances in biology, many public school boards strive to eliminate the teaching of evolution from the curriculum.

The debate about intelligent design in public schools is a uniquely American phenomenon, a quirk of our history and culture. Beyond the theocracies of the Middle East, religion permeates American politics in a way not found anywhere else in the world. No other developed country, east or west, is host to a serious political movement dedicated to the destruction of secularism, with evolution exhibit number one.

We have to go all the way back to Italy in 1614 to find another example of a powerful political machine dedicated to the suppression of a broad scientific truth with deep implications for human understanding. That is the year in which Galileo’s observations of the earth orbiting the sun were first denounced as a threat to the established authority of the Catholic Church, which claimed Galileo’s doctrine to be false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture. We have regressed four centuries. Intelligent design is nothing but a transparent fig leaf for creationism, a child of that dark era in the 1600s. Comparing creationism or intelligent design to evolution is no different than insisting that we teach today that the sun actually orbits the earth as an alternative theory to modern astronomy. Only in the United States are such discredited views taken seriously by a large portion of the citizenry. We can and should do better. Intelligent design has no place in a science classroom – and it does not in any western country outside these United States.

Vaccines

Perhaps you believe that teaching that god created gravity is harmless, no big deal, nothing to be exercised about. But disdain for objective truth has real and tragic consequences… which brings us to measles and the issue of childhood immunization. Vaccines are one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, saving hundreds of millions of lives and improving the quality of life for countless others. But because of medical illiteracy and misplaced religious zeal, some parents are, in a display of dangerous ignorance, forcing school boards across the country to accept students with no vaccination history. Consequently we recently witnessed the biggest outbreak of measles in 15 years, double the number of cases seen typically. With the success of vaccines we forget, ironically, that measles is deadly; prior to vaccinations about 5000 people died annually in the United States from the disease. In 2008 measles killed about 170,000 worldwide. With the best intentions to protect their children, parents are in fact playing a deadly game of chicken based purely on ignorance – lack of knowledge of the benefits of vaccination compared to the inaccurate, overstated and simply wrong conclusions about the dangers.

The problem is not theoretical but real and deadly. Because of one paper published in 1998 in the medical journal Lancet, subsequently withdrawn for suspicions of scientific fraud, and fully discredited by later study, tens of thousands of parents risk their children’s health by withholding critical vaccinations against terrible diseases. Rates of childhood immunization for measles (rubeolla), mumps, and rubella (German measles) have yet to fully recover from the impact of this one discredited paper. And many parents still insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper. Myth has usurped fact. In many school districts, including wealthy ones like in San Diego County, the number of unvaccinated children has nearly tripled since 1990. This affects everybody, not just those who choose to avoid vaccinations. Case in point: a few years ago San Diego County experienced the worst outbreak of deadly Whooping Cough in local history as more parents eschewed vaccination against that disease. And let’s be brutally honest; we can lay the death of every child who dies of this preventable disease directly at the feet of all the parents who chose not to vaccinate their children. Unlike most diseases that require only 85% vaccination to create herd immunity, Whooping Cough, and measles, requires 94% immunization to protect the public. Ignorance, the willingness to dismiss hard evidence when inconvenient, or inversely the readiness to reach a conclusion in the complete absence of evidence are all symptoms of scientific illiteracy growing in the nutritive soup of religiosity.

Climate Change

Oddly, many accept the link between autism and vaccinations with no proof, but when it comes to climate change, the demand for proof is never satisfied no matter how convincing such proof may be. Many accept the existence of ghosts with no evidence, but deny the reality of a changing climate with proof before their eyes. This differential deference to evidence is clear indicator that much of the American public lacks the tools to evaluate issues rationally. Without science, reality becomes just an option to be rejected whenever the real world gives us inconvenient truths. In this frightening environment in which fiction becomes fact, the conclusions from years of careful research, scrutinized by competing scientists and published in peer reviewed journals now carry no more weight with the public than the random thoughts of a bloated pundit. Talking heads with no training now have the same authority as highly qualified experts. So global warming is dismissed as a liberal hoax in spite of a preponderance of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. Climate and weather are mistakenly thought to be the same. So with every cold snap in winter we hear, “See, it snowed – I told you climate change was a joke.” Articles noting the acceleration of climate change are ignored by the press, focused on an audience obsessed with the Kardashians; melting ice caps just can’t compete. When presented with solid evidence, skeptics selectively demand more “proof” without any sense of irony that they demand no proof for virgin birth, talking snakes, 900 year old men, Immaculate Conception and resurrection.

Wasteland

So let us come back to our low international rating in education. We debate climate change and evolution because society is still largely unable to embrace the scientific method, which is neglected in our classrooms, which perpetuates our downward spiral. Although understanding the basics of science is critical to everyday life in a technology-driven society, the subject is given only cursory treatment in most public schools. As a result, people are often poorly equipped to understand the complexities of an issue before forming an opinion about the costs and benefits of adopting or restricting a particular technology. And so we lag behind Lichtenstein.

Steeped in this wasteland of scientific illiteracy we march ever further toward a theocracy; a secular society cannot stand without deference to fact. We are in danger of becoming the Iran of the West, or a bad copy of the former Soviet Union. Under the communist dictatorship children were taught that Stalin was a hero and that capitalism was a great evil, or that Russia invented the telephone and airplane, with no regard to the truth. We are about to make the same mistake in twisting history to indoctrinate our children with stories about god and gravity.

As religiosity has ascended in American life, policy debates have become faith-based rather than being anchored in logic. Support for a policy position becomes unmoved by contradictory facts because proponents simply “believe” the position to be correct even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Just as there is no way to determine relative validity between religions, or to diminish faith with facts, as soon as logic is removed from policy debates, competing positions are no longer evaluated based on relative merit, but are supported as inherently right, immune to any reasonable counter arguments. This slide away from secular debate leads increasingly to polarization, greater animosity and a loss of civility because the only way to support a position is simply to assert supremacy as loudly as possible. We are reduced to childlike tantrums of “I’m right, you’re wrong, I win.” Without logic, there is no common basis for discussion, and no way to mediate disputes. The death of secularism is the death of civility, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the debate about teaching science in schools free from religion. Our international ranking suffers because we have not yet learned this lesson. Slovenia has.

The GOP Mines an Endless Vein of Hypocrisy: An Historic Bottomless Pit of Inconsistency

Oh how times have changed. When George Bush was in office, Senate Democrats approved nearly 200 nominees for district and circuit courts, without filibuster. When in July 2004 Democrats blocked three nominees were (bringing the grand total to ten), the GOP screamed bloody murder, with breathless accusations that Democrats broke Senate tradition.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was beside himself with indignation, claiming that “It is a sad commentary on the deterioration of the judicial confirmation process that we are now approaching double-digit filibusters.”

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), then the Majority Whip, complained that Democrats were attempting to diminish executive power: “What we’re talking about, then, is senators wanting to adorn themselves with the power of co-nomination.” McConnell demanded that Democrats “move away from advise and obstruct and get back to advise and consent.” He demanded “a simple up-or-down vote” declaring that Democrats wanted to “take away the power to nominate from the president and grant it to a minority of 41 senators.” Assuming the mantle of the patriot, McConnell said in May 2005, “The majority in the Senate is prepared to restore the Senate’s traditions and precedence to ensure that regardless of party, any president’s judicial nominees, after full and fair debate, receive a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.”

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) went nearly ballistic in the face of Democratic opposition to Bush’s nominees, lamenting with great piety the Democrats’ “unprecedented, obstructive tactics.” He claimed it was “really wrong” that Democrats opposed Bush nominees “on a partisan filibuster.” He righteously demanded “an up-and-down vote.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned ominously that “if the filibuster becomes an institutional response where 40 senators driven by special interest groups declare war on nominees in the future, the consequence will be that the judiciary will be destroyed over time.”

Bill Frist (R-TN) in 2005 complained loudly that the Democrats were “attempting to change 225 years of constitutional history” by opposing George Bush’s nominees. He went on: “Appeals court judicial nominees should get a fair, open, and exhaustive debate, and then they should get an up-or-down vote. Whether on the floor or in committee, it is time for judicial obstruction to end no matter which party controls the White House or the Senate. Senate tradition is comprised of shared values based on civility and respect for the Constitution. I sincerely hope that Senate tradition can be restored. It is a matter of fairness. It is a matter of honor. It is our constitutional duty to give these nominees a vote.”

Apparently, having a black, Kenyan-born Communist who is both Muslim and a radical Christian in the Oval Office changes the rules. That is the only conclusion we can reach, because those same Republican senators have reversed their opinions 180 degrees now that Obama is forwarding his judicial nominees to the Senate. With no evident embarrassment about colossal inconsistency, all support the filibuster to block Obama from filling judicial vacancies. Where is the Republican outrage about breaking Senate tradition? Where is GOP indignation about taking power away from the president? Where is the conservative wail against obstructive tactics? Why no lament that Senators were adorning themselves with the power of co-nomination? What happened to the matter of fairness and respect for the Constitution so vigorously defended when Bush was president?

Look at McConnell’s extensive statements about the injustice of Democrats blocking Bush’s nominations to the courts. Compare what McConnell said then to what he says now about Obama’s picks for the D.C. circuit court just yesterday: “We are going to deal with those nominees as we have others.” Yes, filibuster to prevent their confirmation. Three times in three weeks the GOP blocked a vote to prevent confirmation of one of Obama’s nominees for the D.C. circuit court. Robert L. Wilkins, Cornelia Pillard and Patrica Millett all fell to the same filibuster fate; the one so decried by McConnell when Bush was president even when used with restraint by Democrats. Obama is now zero for three on the D.C. circuit court; compare that to Bush, who had four of his six nominations to the circuit court approved; that is 0% for Obama versus 67% for Bush. Are you getting a sense of the imbalance here?

While that immoral reversal would be bad enough on its own, the GOP simply cannot stop there. They oddly accuse Obama of trying to “pack” the D.C. appeals court any time he tries to fill a vacancy. The charge is an absurdly revisionist reference to FDR, who tried to increase the number of Supreme Court seats and then fill them with his nominees. Obama is not increasing the seats on the appeals court, only filling vacancies – his constitutional duty. And then going even further down the rabbit hole, the GOP is attempting “reverse packing” while falsely accusing Obama of doing the opposite; that is, the GOP wishes to eliminate seats on the appeals court to reduce the number of justices that Obama can nominate. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced a bill (with the Orwellian title of the “Court Efficiency Act”), co-sponsored by Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), to reduce the seats on the appeals court for that very purpose.

Orrin Hatch (“it is a sad commentary…”) also co-sponsored the bill. This is particularly rich in irony because in 2003 he gave a speech lamenting the number of vacancies on the DC Circuit court! With the count of filled seats down to eight judges at the time, Hatch called the vacancies “a crisis situation” due to the court’s high workload. Yet now he sponsors a bill to reduce the size of the court. The only difference: Bush was president then and Obama is now. Hatch does not exactly stand on principle.

In the House the equivalent bill (in competition for the most Orwellian name — the “Stop Court-Packing Act”) was introduced by Tom Cotton (R-AR). The solution here is to stop “packing” – that is filling vacancies – by reverse packing while decrying packing that is not happening. We could not make this stuff up; the GOP has exceeded our wildest imaginations of hypocrisy and inconsistency.

Lest you think that this is just all fair in the art of politics, and that the Democrats do the same thing when they control the Senate when a Republican is in the Oval Office, think again. Sure, every politician makes statements that they either retract later or ignore while doing the opposite. That is par for the course – and not what I’m talking about. In the important case of judicial nominations, you cannot paint a picture of the Democrats exercising the same levels of pure hypocrisy as the GOP. The raw statistics paint a clear picture of a gross imbalance of excessive partisanship owned by conservatives. When Clinton was president, Republicans confirmed on average only 79% of his nominees to various courts (82% to the district court; 68% to the circuit court). With Obama to date Republicans have approved on average an outrageous 76% of the president’s nominees (77% to the district court; 71% to the circuit court). Now compare those numbers to the nominees approved by Democrats when Bush was president: an average of 91% approval (with 94% for the district court and 94% for the circuit court). The pattern is clear: it is perfectly acceptable to block a judicial nominee if the president is a Democrat; but an affront to everything American to block a nominee if the president is a Republican.

In fact, GOP obstruction of Obama’s judicial nominees is “the highest that’s ever been recorded” as measured by the metric of the Index of Obstruction and Delay, a scale developed by a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Sheldon Goldman. Dr. Goldman concludes that the obstruction facing Obama is truly unprecedented in our history. For comparison: the index for Obama’s circuit court nominations is 0.9524; the index for Bush nominations to that court is 0.6176 – in the 108th Congress when Democrats controlled the Senate. So while both Republicans and Democrats naturally engage in partisanship, the scales are not remotely close to even.

Why is there not more outrage about this? I propose that the rational world is suffering from a form of PTSD in the face of the relentless Republican attack on reason and fact. We are collectively shell shocked by the absurd claims of the Tea Party, the deep hypocrisy of the right wing, and the GOP’s never-ending assault on the truth. We are numbed by the ceaseless bombardment of right wing crazy.

We have become adapted to the noise of false claims by suppressing our outrage; so we hear little about GOP inconsistency with nearly all things Obama, blaming him for all of our ills and giving him credit for no advances or successes. I recently wrote about the specific case of gas prices; but we see it too with the killing of bin Laden. Cheney wants credit, seriously, while falsely claiming Obama sought to took sole credit. Here is Cheney bizarrely accusing the president: “If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.” Here is what Obama actually said in announcing the bin Laden’s death:

Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice. We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country. And they are part of a generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day.

From these words, Cheney’s sick mind, reflecting the GOP’s general inability to credit Obama with anything, got the idea of Obama taking sole credit. It makes one’s head pound with pain.

We see this horrible imbalance with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and North Korea, with DADT, with the rescue of the auto industry, saving the world from a deep global depression, saving Wall Street and the U.S. banking system. In each case any advance is dismissed or ignored and any setback is proof of Obama’s incompetence or worse. Does anyone have any doubt, even the slightest, about what would be the GOP’s reaction if the DOW were tanking instead of setting new record highs? If the DOW were low now, we know absolutely that the GOP would be screaming that Obama is anti-business; that his regulatory policies were a drag on the economy; and that his Communist tendencies made him hate Capitalism. If you still harbor doubts, allow me to remind you of a few headlines just five weeks after Obama assumed office:

• Bloomberg.com (March 6): “Obama Bear Market Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps.” In this article the claim is further advanced with, “President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bear market.”

• Wall Street Journal (March 6): “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow.” Author Michael Boskin prognosticates that, “It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.”

• Perhaps most astonishing of all, on November 25, 2008, John Tanny of Real Clear Markets, wrote an article entitled, “This Is Obama’s Market, Good and Bad.” Obama was not yet president!

We hear from none of these folks as the DOW closes close to 16,000. Where is the headline, “President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bull market”? Where? Nowhere to be seen.

We have become inured to the GOP’s onslaught of prevarication, blatant falsehoods, and outright deceit. The GOP’s malleable doctrines, flexible morality, and chameleon-like ethos create a bizarre world of fantasy untethered to reality, unbalanced by principle, and unconnected to most Americans. The GOP has attacked our sense of decency; politics are no longer fought on the grounds of principled differences but instead on the battlefield of right-wing extremism. We can do better. We deserve better. We can only hope the current turmoil within the GOP will ultimately yield a political party better than the abomination it has become.

When the Blame Game Goes Bad

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

Sir Francis Bacon

In modern times, Francis Bacon would say that “the root of all GOP hatred and vitriol is that conservatives observe when a thing hits, or simply when they claim a thing hits, but not when it misses.”

In the rather twisted mind of a modern conservative, President Obama is to blame for all our ills, but he gains no credit for all that goes well. This is no exaggeration; it is quite literally true.

One glaring case in point is the price of gasoline. Surely, you remember that when pump prices were skyrocketing, the GOP immediately and vocally blamed Obama, not only for pursuing a bad energy policy but for actively seeking higher prices. Here are just a few examples:

Mitt Romney: Obama to Blame for High Gas Prices

Romney said on Fox News (where else?) that he believes “absolutely” that Obama is responsible for high gas prices. To bolster his point, Romney noted that Obama does not allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR), and his refusal to build the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas. Romney said of Obama, “His policies are responsible for not having America using the energy that we have in this country.”

Paul Ryan: Obama Gone to Great Lengths to Keep Gas Prices High

Romney’s vice presidential candidate said that… “what’s frustrating about the Obama administration’s policies are they’ve gone to great lengths to make oil and gas more expensive.” He does on to say, “Let’s not forget the fact that the regulations coming out of the EPA are making it harder for us to harness home grown American energy.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)

“The president holds the key to addressing the pain Ohioans are feeling at the gas pump and moving our nation away from its reliance on foreign energy. My question for the president is: what are you waiting for?” Getting more specific, Boehner claimed that, “The president’s own policies to date have made matters worse and driven up gas prices.”

Senator John Barrasso: Obama Fully Responsible for High Gas Prices

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) claimed “The president has been a complete obstructionist on that, and his energy policy, if you want to even call it a policy, has in my opinion actually contributed if not caused the pain at the pump, and he should be held fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline.”

Representative Cory Gardner (R-CO): Obama Policies to Blame for High Gas Prices

Cory Gardner jumped on the bandwagon, complaining that, “The longer we let politicians like President Obama continue to block responsible American energy production, the longer our nation will continue to suffer with high gas prices and limited energy security.”

National Review: Report Finds Obama Policies to Blame for High Energy Prices

“What President Obama failed to accomplish through the so-called ‘cap and trade’ program, his administration is attempting to accomplish through regulatory roadblocks, energy tax increases, and other targeted efforts to prohibit development of domestic energy resources.”

Rush Limbaugh: Obama Wants Higher Gas Prices

Oddly, in his rant against Obama, Rush asks, “Will the media ignoring the rise in gas prices be able to keep that from becoming a major factor in people’s minds over the economy and Obama’s role in it?” Funny given the torrent of news coverage on higher gas prices, and the GOP’s consistent drum beat blaming Obama.

High Gas Prices are President Obama’s Fault

In this article, the author claims that “The Obama administration’s energy plan all along was based upon the rise in energy costs in order to force Americans to be ‘greener.’” The piece goes on to say that “President Obama wants Americans to believe that he is powerless to stop the high rise of gasoline prices yet it is his (in)actions that have created the crisis… What the president fails to realize is that there is no one to blame for rising energy costs other than himself.”

Billboard Blames Obama for High Gas Prices

In this case, a conservative businessman by the name of Bret Eulberg posted for all to see the message: “Gas $1.85. Obama took office. Tight drilling regulations. No Pipeline. Obama- Higher Gas.

This message is actually a mirror of that proposed by Eric Hovde, who was then a candidate vying for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, who also added that Obama was to blame because his policies let to a devaluation of the dollar.

Need I go on? Can any reader, of any political persuasion, even those who only watch Fox News, claim that the GOP did not openly, blatantly, consistently blame Obama for high gas prices? Conservatives blamed Obama for high gas prices. Can we be any clearer about that?

So what happened when the price of gas fell? Silence. Total, complete, deafening, maddening, huge, gaping, mind-bending silence. Where was Obama’s commitment to making prices higher? Where were the impacts of Obama’s failed energy policies? Where were the disastrous consequences of delaying the Keystone pipeline? Where were the catastrophic energy shortages due to overzealous EPA regulations? Yet not a single word from the right praising Obama for lower energy prices. He was responsible for them going up, but not coming down.

What happened when Obama cracked down on oil speculation (an activity much supported by free-market zealots in the GOP), driving down the price of gas by 12 cents at the pump? Not a peep from the right. What happened when gas prices fell to a two-year low, with expectations that the price will continue to decline? Nothing on Fox News about that.

Everything that the GOP claimed caused high gas prices are still in place, as we watch prices decline. There is no Keystone pipeline, drilling levels are virtually the same as when prices were increasing, and EPA regulations are still in place. Those “causes” of high prices are now simply ignored by the right in the face of declining prices at the pump, no longer offered as proof of Obama’s incompetence.

And then the Republicans finally broke their silence, with the claim that “Obama deserves no credit for fall in gas prices.” Read this logic and weep for our country: Representative Allen West (R-FL) said, “If you’re the chief executive officer of the United States of America, you should take responsibility for anything that’s occurring in this country, and you should not want to seek to get praise. This is what the military taught me: Leaders don’t take credit, leaders take responsibility.” Um, OK. So, you blame Obama for rising gas prices; but then give him no credit for falling prices because it is unseemly for a leader to accept credit for effective policies – the very policies you were blaming for failure earlier. My head hurts. My heart aches for this great land.

We can do the same analysis for past GOP claims about unemployment, the war in Iraq, saving the auto industry, bailing out Wall Street and the banks… just about anything that happened over the past 6 or 7 years: Everything bad is Obama’s fault; everything good is in spite of Obama. This outlook has as much credibility as the claim about gas prices. The GOP has lost all remaining credibility by blaming Obama for all our ills and giving him no credit for any successes. This is a childish, bogus outlook, yet remains central to everything conservative. This lopsided, one-sided, one-dimensional world view is the clearest sign yet that the GOP and the conservative movement are morally and intellectually bankrupt. This lack of depth and nuance, and the absence of the art of compromise (actually praising Obama for something), is precisely what led to the extremism of shutting down our government and threatening default on our debt. Hating Obama is not an effective political organizing strategy. Hoping for failure is not a political platform.

I hope I live long enough to see the day when once again we reject the bizarre extremism of the far right and realize the fruits of effective governance through dialogue and compromise. We will know we are on our way when we can give our political opponents credit where credit is due- and that includes praise for policies we earlier opposed when those policies prove well founded. Extremism and absolutism have no place in America; we can only hope that what we are witnessing today is an aberration much like McCarthyism. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years we’ll shake our heads at this folly and wonder how the likes of Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin ever made it to national politics. We can always hope.

The Paralyzing Premise of Public Prayer

Sporadically over the past six years I have written that an obscure lawsuit, in a town nobody has heard of, was the most important legal battle being waged in our country. Now the case has come before the Supreme Court, validating my earlier view of the trial’s importance, while horrifying sound-minded citizens that the highest court in the land would agree to take the case.

The Supreme Court will shortly hear arguments that may well undermine our most cherished founding principle, the separation of church and state. As you absorb the folly to come, forget not that early settlers made the arduous journey to our shores in part to escape the stifling oppression of a dominant religion. The urgent need to rid the government from the influence of a single religion was Thomas Jefferson’s unifying and guiding light. But Jeffersonian principles have been set aside for the convenience of promoting Christianity over all other religions. Welcome to the United States of Iran.

The epicenter of our shift to a theocracy can be found in Greece, N.Y., where something seemingly innocent enough in fact threatens to undermine the foundational ideals of our country. In Greece, N.Y., the town supervisor each month invites a local Christian minister to open the council’s meeting with a Christian prayer. Just this week the Reverend Lou Sirianni began with this:

“Be thou present, O God of wisdom, and direct the councils of this honorable assembly.” He ended with, “All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Savior.”

The obvious problem of course is that not all citizens believe Christ is our savior. No big deal, you say? What is the problem you ask? Would any Christian or Jew tolerate a town meeting opened exclusively with an Islamic prayer from the Quran? How would our Christian citizens feel if the meeting were opened with pleas to Allah? Or if the opening prayer was done in Hebrew? The answer is obvious and self-evident: it would be offensive, and clearly counter to the ideal of freedom of religion. That reality simply cannot be denied. Still not convinced? Then imagine an imam, bearded and turbaned, in traditional dress, standing before our United States Congress, invoking the Quran to open every session of the House and Senate. Not comfortable with that? Then imagine how every Jew, Muslim and Atheist feels with each opening of a government meeting with a Christian prayer.

For this rather obvious reason the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court ruled that such public government-sponsored prayer violated the separation of church and state. If a town council cannot impose Islam on its residents, then the council cannot impose Christianity. Any effort to do so is unambiguously a violation of the Establishment Clause. Such an imposition is precisely what Jefferson and our other founder’s feared most. The Circuit Court ruled reasonably; and the Supreme Court had no business taking this case.

Perhaps you think that Sirianni’s prayer was an anomaly, and that opening prayer is generally non-denominational. Well, no. Here is another sample, from Pastor Robert Campbell’s town hall opening:

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.” … Father, we thank You for these blessings that You’ve given us and bestowed on us, and Lord, blessing us with these men and women that have governed us, we pray that You’d continue Your blessing on them. … It’s all because of what You’ve done and Your son Jesus in sending Him to be the Prince of Peace. And we pray for that peace upon our community. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

The last sentence should remove any lingering doubt about this being a Christian prayer. Just substitute “Allah” for “Jesus” and we’re living in Tehran instead of New York.

Lest you think the Rev. Sirianni’s invocation or that from Pastor Sirianni were random samplings from a broad range of what god to summon, until 2008 only Christians were allowed to lead the prayer as official policy. This exclusivity is important because the Supreme Court has previously ruled, under the so-called “O’Connor’s endorsement standard” that the government violates the First Amendment whenever it appears to “endorse” religion. Specifically, a government action is invalid if it creates a perception in the mind of a reasonable observer that the government is either endorsing or disapproving of religion. Well, c’mon: excluding all religions but one is by any standard an endorsement of that one remaining religion.

Yes, prior to this standard, the Court’s record was a bit muddled. In 1971 in Lemon v. Kurtzman, another case involving religion in legislation, the court came up with what later became known as the “Lemon test.” Government action “should have a secular purpose, cannot advance or inhibit religion and must avoid too much government entanglement with religion.”

In 1983, one year before O’Conner’s contribution, the Warren court ruled in Marsh v. Chambers that public funds could be used to pay a minister to offer opening prayers because prayer was “part of the fabric of our society” — thereby excluding all parts of our society where prayer is not part of daily life. Prayer is certainly not a part of my social fabric; am I go be excluded because I am not Christian?

So, let us return to Greece, NY. A Jewish resident, along with a resident atheist, sued the Greece town council arguing that “a reasonable observer” would conclude that Christian prayer “must be viewed as an endorsement of a… Christian viewpoint” and therefore is in violation of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court agreed, ruling against the town, concluding that the town’s actions “virtually ensured a Christian viewpoint” that featured a “steady drumbeat of often specifically sectarian Christian prayers.” Ya think? This ruling is self-evidently correct based on the very words from town representatives, who make their motives clear. Pastor Vince DiPaola asked, “Do I want everybody to be a Christian? Of course I do.” Complaining residents should “grow some thicker skin.” Really? Would he grow a thicker skin if an Imam opened the meeting with a prayer to Mohammad?

Rather than refute that rather obvious conclusion and explicit statements that the local government is promoting religion, in clear violation of the Establishment Clause, town supporters argue that the Court should “relax” constitutional limits on religious invocations. The reasoning implicitly accepts that the town is in fact violating our constitution – but that we should excuse Christianity from its limitations. Oh? Should we “relax” our right to bear arms? How about our privacy protections under the constitution? How about the right to assembly? The right to free speech? Should we “relax” those protections? Maybe we should just scrap the entire Bill of Rights because the protections given therein might inconvenience a subset of our society who wish to promote one religion to the detriment of all others.

As a demonstration of where things will go once we become a Christian nation where everyone not a Christian has to grow a thick skin, one woman participant in the lawsuit arose one morning to find that her mailbox, once firmly in the ground near her driveway, was sitting on top of her car; part of a fire hydrant was thrown in her pool. All this was wrapped in the tolerant Christian message that the woman should “be careful… lawsuits can be detrimental.”

The hearing before the Supreme Court is an embarrassing charade made possible by the radicalism of Scalia and his cohorts. The explicitly stated attempt to promote Christianity in a government meeting so obviously violates our Constitution that the case should have never even come close to the halls of our highest court. Our judicial branch of government has been hijacked by zealots who are no different than the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Even in agreeing to hear this case our Supreme Court has shed any pretense of fulfilling their constitutional duties.

We are not now nor have we ever been a Christian nation. Let’s hear from John Adams, one of our most influential founders, who addressed the question straight on in 1797:

“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

As I’ve written before, we do not need a Church of America; what the founding fathers knew in 1776 holds true in 2013. In spite of right-wing Christian rhetoric to the contrary, that we are a secular nation cannot be denied. The facts supporting that conclusion are unambiguous, overwhelming, and indisputable. The Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1777, the U.S. Constitution (1787), and the Federalist Papers (1787-1788) are purely secular documents (I have reviewed these in detail elsewhere).

The time has come for us to fight the arrogant certainty among Christians that they hold a truth more valid than Jews, Muslims and those who eschew all religion. What is happening in Greece, N.Y. must end before that virus of intolerance infects the entire nation. How ridiculous, how absurd is this fight; how blatantly obvious that promoting Christian prayers promotes Christianity. Enough already.

He’s Just Not That Into You: Why Humans Need to Get Over Themselves

Religions across the world provide us with an astonishing array of customs, rituals, rites, ornaments, icons, vestments, symbols, sacred texts, relics, and even architecture, each belief system explaining in a unique way life’s origin and faith in an afterlife. Yet all religions, with all this diversity, all share one important central theme across all deities (with rare but important exceptions for a few eastern beliefs): humans are special. With few deviations, religions declare that humans are separate from other animals, higher and better than other critters, unique in their relationship with the creator.

In the Judeo-Christian realm, early biblical passages give humans the unique special status of being made in god’s image, unlike any other creature on earth, and clearly conveys upon humans dominance over all other living things. Humans are told to “subdue” the earth and “rule over” the air, land and sea.

These religious teachings not only condone but actively encourage humans to view the earth and its resources as separate from them, put here for their pleasure.

God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, over all the creatures that move along the ground.”So God created man in his own image, in the image of god he created him; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

These teachings are so pervasive, so fully embedded into western thought, that the premise is unquestioned even in much of the secular world. We see this in newspapers and popular press each time scientists publish another example of how animals are more like humans “than we thought.” The media and their readers and viewers, react with awe and surprise when we learn that “young apes show empathy and comfort each other” much like human children; and that elephants have the human-like ability to understand the meaning behind pointing.

Listen to Your Gut

The religious idea of human uniqueness pervades deeply, but biology teaches a different lesson. Human beings are no more special than a butterfly, a gazelle or a paramecium. Our species is nothing but a normal consequence of natural selection, and certainly not the pinnacle of evolution. We are nothing special. God is just not that into us. First we must understand we are not even as human as we thought. The vast majority of our cells are not human at all, but instead, are comprised of microorganisms located in our eyes, mouth, nose, ears, skin and gut, representing about 1000 different species and as many as 8000 subspecies. Bacterial life dominates not only the earth’s biosphere, but the ecosystem of our own bodies. Microorganisms outnumber our human cells by ten to one. Your intestine alone is home to one hundred trillion microbes. Most of the genetic information found in our bodies is non-human. The organisms that we host are not invaders or parasites, but an integral part of our internal ecosystem, helping us digest food, produce vitamins and fight against disease. They are us and we are them, and it is mostly them.

But OK, let’s just look at the part of us that is truly human. Even that offers little solace. The genetic material found in chimps differs from human DNA by only 1.23%. A more familiar figure you may have encountered is 3% or 4%; the difference just reflects the method of comparison. In any case, we are 97-98 percent ape. But even these small differences of a few percent exaggerate the disparity between the two genomes. Most genes that differ between chimps and humans are considered “neutral” in that they code for proteins that do not confer any obvious difference between the two species. That leaves even fewer genes available that can be responsible for us writing this book, and the chimp not. From the perspective of composition, therefore, we are more bacterial than human and not much different from chimps genetically.

Bach and Buildings

Bolstered by religious conviction, we humans have always thought of ourselves as special, proudly noting our compassion, humor, altruism and impressive capacity to generate language, mathematics, tools, art, and music. In citing this self-serving list, filtered to our benefit, we assume that humans possess, and other animals lack, these honorable traits or capabilities. We ignore the inconvenient fact that we choose to define and measure intelligence in terms of our greatest strengths. We arbitrarily exclude from the definition of intelligence higher brain functions in other animals. We would be low on the list of smart animals if we included in our basic definition of intelligence the ability to use self-generated sonar to explore the environment and to communicate, as dolphins do so well.

We are using a bizarre circular logic here, working backward from a desired result. We look at all of our capabilities as humans, and then declare that those very sets of capabilities are what make us better than other animals, if not the image of god himself. That approach to defining ourselves as superior is a bit outrageous. In defining superiority we are just arbitrarily choosing characteristics that we know will put us on top. But even when we give ourselves a big handicap by creating self-serving definitions that we know beforehand will prove advantageous, the categories of “uniquely human” talents are shrinking rapidly as we learn more about other animals and their adaptive behaviors.

Almost every trait once thought to be unique to humans has been found, at least in some degree, in other animals. This is true for even for intelligence, at least once we stop defining smarts in a way that pre-determines that humans come out on top. It is rather arbitrary to declare the ability to solve a differential equation a higher level of intelligence than a matriarch elephant’s capacity to lead her charges to a water hole she remembered from 20 years earlier in the last drought. But let’s say you remain unconvinced, so let’s leave intelligence behind for the moment. We know (see Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World) that other animals are self-conscious and self-aware. We know that other animals show real empathy; tool manufacturing and use; the use of language, perhaps even with syntax; culture; math; music; laughter; farming; and complex social organization involving millions of individuals. God is partial to bacteria, which have been around for 4 billion years, but he is just not that into us: we are nothing but yet another evolutionary experiment with too little time on earth to know if having a big brain is adaptive to long-term survival.

Wait, wait, wait you say. No other animals have built cities, gone to the moon, created symphonies, erected cathedrals or carved La Pieta. So true. Yet all of these amazing accomplishments are all the consequence of just a single evolutionary trait — a big brain. But that big brain has also enabled us to create weapons of mass destruction and given us the technology to create pollution on a global scale. It has also given us religion. So if our big brain in fact leads to our extinction, would having a big brain be such an advantage? Since we don’t know the answer yet, it is the height of arrogance to assume that our evolutionary distinction (big heads) is any better or more unique or closer to some god than the amazing evolutionary pinnacles we find in other animals: a cheetah’s ability to run 70 mph or a whale’s adaptation to dive to 6000 feet or the amazing cooperation in a colony of bees. Our large brains do not confer upon us any special status among our living cousins, and it is the height of folly to claim that evolution was driven toward humans as the pinnacle of achievement. One could claim with equal validity that evolution advances toward a pinnacle of speed, or that bacteria are the perfect creation because only they can occupy extreme conditions of temperature, salinity, pressure and acidity. The evolution of large brains confers no exalted status on the human race; large brains are just another consequence of evolution. We only think we are special because we define being special as having those traits we have; that circular logic is not too intelligent.

Being Smart Might Be Dumb

This discussion is not put forward simply to argue how many angels fit on the head of a pin or to debate theology. Religion’s grip on humanity’s skewed perception of itself has real consequences. Biblical bias about our place in earth’s history is one reason why the religious right resists the idea of anthropogenic climate change; we could not alter something god put here for our benefit. But that is just one example of something much more dangerous that has infected our society: facts have lost their status and meaning. With no common acknowledgment of an objective truth, we have lost the essential common ground essential for dialogue. The government shutdown and threat of default is just the latest example.

We have entered an age in which science offers the public nothing but another opinion, no more valid than the views expressed by any random radio host with a microphone and transmitter. Forget that virtually every economist in the world concluded that a default on U.S. debt would be globally catastrophic: I don’t believe it, therefore it is not true. In this brave new economics is just another branch of faith; and the world climate change becomes just another liberal agenda item on par with discussions about gun laws.

Honest people with good intentions can legitimately disagree about the role of government and how to fund the public sector. We can argue whether drilling for oil in the Arctic is good policy. But there is no room for opinion when discussing facts. Facts and opinions differ fundamentally. The late Stephen J. Gould said eloquently that in the world of science, “fact” means “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.”

Yes, of course “facts” change with advances in scientific knowledge; that is the very essence of scientific inquiry. But that does not mean that facts as currently established can be willfully disregarded as simply another opinion. Facts carry more weight than opinion; to modify or overturn something previously accepted as fact requires deep proof with convincing evidence that is widely accepted by the majority of experts in that field. Opinions can vary with every individual; facts are a broadly accepted body of evidence. Everybody can have a different opinion; not everybody can have a different fact. The two are fundamentally different.

Atoms are the building block of nature. That is a fact, not an opinion. Atoms are not a liberal agenda item. You can’t see, hear or feel an atom, but we accept their existence – because scientists have proven that atoms exist beyond any doubt even if using methods that we do not really understand. The average person cannot know from casual observation if the earth orbits the sun or the sun orbits the earth; but we accept as absolutely true that the sun is the center of our solar system. A heliocentric world view is not a liberal plot. Bacteria and viruses cause disease. DNA is life’s genetic code. We accept all of this and more without demanding proof because we accept that the conclusions are widely adopted in the scientific community. Certainly we are not capable of proving or disproving that DNA is our genetic code; but we accept that as fact. We don’t wait for more evidence because we’ve never actually seen DNA.

And now we circle back to religion, which contributes to the blurring of this clear distinction between fact and opinion. In the case of religion, faith is alone sufficient to substantiate a claim: “I believe in god therefore god exists.” I need no proof, no evidence, no established fact to support my conclusion: I simply need to believe. Bringing this perspective to opinions outside the realm of religion is a tiny step. As with faith, my opinion becomes fact simply because I believe it to be true. In this worldview, the distinction between fact and opinion becomes meaningless. But just as with opinion, every person can have different faith, but not every person can have different facts. An atom is the building block of nature whether you believe that true or not. Your opinion does not matter here. Your faith does not matter here – because a fact is not equivalent to opinion or faith. Facts do not change on the whim of every individual.

This confounding of fact and opinion has had real and sometimes tragic consequences. The odd “birther” movement can only exist on the fuel of confusion between opinion and fact. President Obama’s birth in the United States is a fact when “fact” means “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.” And so too is climate change. Thousands of climatologists from 166 countries agree without reservation that our climate is changing and that humankind is contributing to that change by emitting greenhouse gases.

Skepticism about climate change comes with a particularly rich irony. Many doubters cite the earth’s past cycles of glaciation and warming to discount what we are seeing today as nothing but natural variation. How do the skeptics know of that climate history? From the very scientists whose conclusions they now doubt! As if the scientists themselves are unaware of their own conclusions about the earth’s past, or if they are aware, did not take that history into account. Doubters preferentially believe one set of facts from those scientists but dismiss other facts as liberal nonsense. Doubters can do this because they confuse opinion and fact.

Really, on what basis do doubters base their views? Have they evaluated the evidence and decided based on their expertise that thousands of scientists are wrong? No, they listen to radio or talk show hosts with no background in climatology and simply adopt the opinion that climate change is a hoax. What if the same show host claimed atoms were a hoax? Would doubters be any more or less qualified to accept that opinion as fact? The opinion that climate change is a hoax does not carry the same weight as the fact of climate change established by experts around the world. Expert conclusions about our changing climate are not different than the results about subatomic particles that we see coming from the world’s particle accelerators. Where are the doubters that stand up and say, “No, neutrinos really do not have mass – that is nothing but liberal propaganda.” Why not? Doubters have no more expertise in particle physics than they do in climatology, so why doubt one conclusion from expert but reject the next? Because doubters confuse opinion and fact. And that is because religion has permeated the secular world with the dangerous idea that unsubstantiated belief and faith equate to reality. The idea that “I believe therefore it is real” is what might cause our ultimate demise, which might demonstrate that having a big brain is not so smart after all.

The GOP and the Whigs: Political Parties Are Not Forever

Reverberations in the Echo Chamber

We have with good reason heard much recently of the “echo chamber” in which conservatives whip each other into an anti-Obama frenzy in a destructive paranoid loop of crazy, immune to outside influence and unhindered by the constraints of reality. McConnell and Boehner are like Maxwell Smart and the Chief conspiring incompetently under the Cone of Silence, deaf to any external sounds of reason. But they are not alone; instead of a contraption for two, other conservative leaders have strapped into the device for the worst kind of insulated group think.

In an open-microphone exchange between Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul concerning the government shutdown, we overhear the two feeding each other’s fantasy of victory. After a cynical exchange in which the two discussed manipulating their media message about compromise, Paul said, “… but we’re gonna win this, I think.” He could only draw such an unlikely conclusion by living in that echo chamber because all outside evidence at the time, and later, pointed to anything but a victory for GOP intransigence.

Conservative insularity has become like a hardened shell around a soft gooey middle. Just as conservatives did prior to the last presidential election, they continue to only talk among themselves about the consequences of the shutdown and debt default, convincing each other of their desired truth, each encouraging the other in a resonance of extremism. That inward circular opaqueness is how we arrived at this nadir of popular disgust: a recent NBC/WSJ poll shows how damaging to the GOP this shutdown has been, even as the echo chamber reverberates with empty claims of impending victory. A clear majority of Americans by a margin of 22 points (53 percent to 31 percent) rightly blame the GOP for the current mess. Reaching a new historic low, only 24 percent view the GOP favorably, and the numbers are worse (21 percent) for the Tea Party. This decline comes from living in the Cone of Silence where all protests of reason are filtered out.

If this claim of extreme GOP insularity seems unjustified, or just specific to this particular case of the shutdown, let us not forget the projections in the last presidential election from that Romney was a sure winner, even up to and including the night of the vote. Karl Rove said: “Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president. Let’s call it 51-48 percent, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.” George Will predicted a landslide of 321-217 Electoral College votes, which included a Romney victory in every swing state (Romney lost all but one). Dick Morris also predicted a landslide win for Mitt, even while returns were coming in. Glenn Beck confidently said that Romney would win with 321-217 Electoral College votes — note these are exactly the number from George Will. The list goes on. These supposedly connected folks were so wrong not because they misinterpreted data, but because they wantonly ignored any information that did not support their desired conclusion. They only processed numbers that fit into their world view and rejected everything else as liberal media bias. This could only happen in the isolation of the echo chamber. Fortunately, politics is not like religion in one important aspect: facts ultimately matter. Just wishing something to be true does not make it so. Ask Romney and all those who so confidently predicted his time in the Oval Office. They were all talking to each other under the Cone of Silence and could not hear the sound of truth.

Real Consequences

A real consequence of this positive loop of amplified lunacy might well be that Republicans cease to be a national political force. Political parties are not inevitable. The voice of the GOP is now the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz. Their extremism positions the Republican Party more as a fringe group like the LaRouche movement rather than as a major player on the national scene. This is by no means the first time in our history that a minority has hijacked the Congress to pursue a radical agenda; take heart in the fact that the ship of state eventually rights itself. Consider the ugly few years of McCarthyism. A trouble-causing minority eventually either ceases to exist or becomes politically irrelevant — no matter how much noise they make while in the spotlight.

In the throes of death, Republicans may experience an intermediate stage of irrelevance on their slide to extinction as a consequence of inner-party splits as extremists pull ever harder to the right. The rise and fall of the short-lived Bull Moose Party might be informative as an historic comparison. During the presidential election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt formed the new party (formally called the Progressive Party) after losing the nomination to William Howard Taft. The new party, named popularly from Roosevelt’s assertion that he was “as strong as a bull moose,” won 27 percent of the vote compared to Taft’s 23 percent during the election. The resulting split allowed Wilson to win with 42 percent of the vote. The Bull Moose Party was on scene only briefly, and is little remembered today, but had a significant impact on American politics.

We might also witness a trajectory in which the Republicans simply cease to exist at all. We of course have precedent for the demise of important political parties. The Federalist Party comes to mind. But the most telling historic parallel would be the rise and fall of the Whig Party, established in 1834 as a reaction to the growing executive clout of Andrew Jackson. States’ rights were a major party platform.

While now nothing but a distant memory, Whigs at one time were a powerful force in national politics, boasting three presidents to its credit. William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor were elected president as Whig candidates. Millard Fillmore, also a Whig, became president after Taylor’s death. During the height of Whig power nobody would have predicted that the party would cease to exist.

Ironically, the Whigs died in the face of the new Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln when the issue of slavery divided the nation, and Lincoln’s Party attracted more Whigs than anti-slavery Democrats. The Republicans might soon experience the same fate as Lincoln inflicted on the Whigs. Major parties can die.

The death of the Republican Party, at least in its more traditional form, would be no cause for celebration. Excess on the left is as dangerous as right-wing craziness. The only way to weave a path to the middle is through reasonable opposition that prevents the extremes of either group from gaining too much influence. Moderate Republicans have much to offer that would be sorely missed if the GOP declines to the point of irrelevancy. The ideals of smaller government and reduced taxation are laudable, if tempered by realism. But Republicans have truly lost their bearings as even moderate winds of change drive conservatives to ever greater extremes, responding with growing amplitude to that resonant frequency of crazy. Threatening default on our nation’s debt because of an unhealthy obsession with Obamacare is not crazy like a fox, but the brand of crazy that comes with a helmet and straightjacket. The kind of crazy that might drive the GOP to permanent irrelevance. Beware the Bull Moose.

When Radicalism Becomes Treasonous

Given the blanket press coverage of the government shutdown and impending default, what more can be said that has not already been?  For that reason I have restrained from writing on the topic, but also because right wing proclamations have been absurd enough to discredit themselves as the words are uttered.  But then George Will, an ostensibly less extreme conservative, pipes in with his own inane conclusions; and now we know that radicalism has gone mainstream. This is Will’s insight: “I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’ as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.”

Well, sure, laws can be changed. But what conservatives miss, or ignore, is the obvious fact that laws change through a democratic process; this does not include shutting down the government and defaulting on U.S. debt obligations. My blood boils and I want to scream every time McConnell or Paul or Cruz or Boehner cavalierly and willingly sacrifice the reputation of the United States while wrapped in the mantle of patriotism.  Never has there been a grander case of hypocrisy.

So first to Will’s silly point:  yes, of course there are some obvious and notable exceptions in which contemporary political views led the us astray, resulting in bad laws inappropriately upheld by the Supreme Court.  We have Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857; Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896; and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004, to name just a few.  But those are the exceptions that prove Will’s comments ridiculous: over time the Court itself has self-corrected (Brown v. Board of Education in 1954); or Congress has passed new legislation correcting the flaws in laws previously upheld by the Court (the various civil rights acts). Nowhere in that equation is government shutdown and default.

The Affordable Care Act was passed by both the House and Senate, enacted into law, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court. A presidential election was won with health care prominent in the national discussion. Nevertheless, if conservatives think the law is flawed as in past cases, fine: then work to change the law using established legislative processes as has been done for the past 250 years. But if that fails accept the result as we have for our entire history; do not hold the country hostage because you do not get what you want. We have children throwing tantrums because they got two scoops of ice cream instead of three. The GOP lost and they just can’t stand it; and this has led to extraordinary behavior.  The party of personal responsibility takes none for the shutdown; the party of overt and excessive patriotism is throwing our country under the bus; the party of no just can’t take yes for an answer.

Let us not forget that Reid and Boehner had a deal in July of this year, in which the Democrats yielded completely to Republicans in order to forge a budget deal. Democrats accepted the GOP numbers, giving up $70 billion to meet GOP demands; in return, Boehner promised to pass a clean Continuing Resolution with no riders about Obamacare.  But then Boehner reneged, claiming that the GOP had second thoughts and needed to take a stand on the Affordable Care Act. Then Boehner, McConnell and friends have the audacity to claim that Democrats are not willing to negotiate. No, no, no. The Democrats negotiated in good faith, compromised, gave up much with little in return, only to be double crossed. With each “yes” the GOP demands more, and then claims Democratic intransigence when they get no more concessions. The far right has come to the point where negotiations are nothing but a means to get 100 percent of what they want.

Conservative opposition to Obamacare has transitioned from obsessive to treasonous.  Here is the simple definition of treason: the betrayal of allegiance to the United States.  One caveat:  treason applies only to acts committed during times of war.  Well, we are in the middle of the war on terrorism, no?  So that qualifies.  The GOP could point to a fuller definition of treason to argue their actions are not treasonous: “the betrayal of one’s county by waging war against it or by consciously or purposely acting to aid its enemies.”

Well. How could anyone argue that willingly damaging the good faith and credit of the United States is not purposely acting to aid our enemies?  The shutdown and impending default already caused Obama to miss a critical meeting in Asia, allowing China to dominate; an outcome clearly aiding our enemy. How could our enemies not benefit from a weakened and insolvent United States?

Here is the critical point that nobody can argue with: if the situation were reversed, and Democrats were threatening default, the GOP would be screaming bloody murder, yelling at the top of their collective lungs that Democrats hate the United States, and that liberals are traitors to the country. Doubt that? Remember then that whenever anybody criticized George Bush about the Iraq war, the GOP stood up and harrumphed that it was treasonous to criticize the Commander in Chief during times of war. Here are some examples, courtesy of blogger Brendan Nyhan:

December 2001: In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration’s anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. “To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.”June 2002: Republican Senate candidate Saxby Chambliss issued a press release accusing Senator Max Cleland (D-GA) of “breaking his oath to protect and defend the Constitution” because he voted for a successful 1997 amendment to the chemical weapons treaty that removed language barring inspectors from certain countries from being part of United Nations inspection teams in Iraq.

September 2004: As John Kerry steps up his criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and the war on terror, Republicans repeatedly suggest that he is emboldening the enemy. Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) says that “while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.” President Bush says, “You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message… You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages.” And Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that terrorists “are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry,” adding that Democrats are “consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there.”

January 2007:  Appearing on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that “I think that’s a dangerous position to take, to oppose a sitting commander in chief while we’ve got people being shot at on the ground. I think it’s one thing to have a debate and a discussion about this strategy, but to openly oppose, in essence, the strategy, I think that can be a very risky thing for our troops.” Senator John Cornyn said, “To offer nonbinding resolutions which encourage our enemies and undermine our allies and deflate the morale of our troops is, to me, the worst of all possible worlds.” And Senator Jon Kyl added that “[t]he worst thing would be for the Senate by 60 votes to express disapproval of a mission we are sending people to lay down their lives for.”

September 2009: During a town hall meeting, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) calls Nancy Pelosi one of the “domestic enemies of the Constitution” shortly after saying that “[Second Amendment] gun rights are actually critical to prevent treason in America.”

 

But when a Democrat sits in the Oval Office, everything just said above gets thrown out the window, the earth shifts on it axis, and nothing could be more patriotic than to attack the Commander in Chief.  This world view is so obviously hypocritical, so absurd, so untenable that one can only hold such a views by untethering all beliefs from any connection to reality.  Compare the comments above to GOP attacks on Obama, our Commander in Chief. Again via Nyhan:

January 2010: The New York Post publishes an editorial asking “Whose side is the Justice Department on: America’s or the terrorists’? … [T]he president and his administration also owe the American people an answer: Is the government’s prosecutorial deck stacked in favor of the terrorists?” Former senator Fred Thompson also jokes that the US could win the war in Afghanistan if we “[j]ust send Obama over there to campaign for the Taliban.”February 2010: During a conference call with conservative bloggers, Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) accuses the Obama administration of having a “a terrorist protection policy” and conducting a “jihad to close Guantanamo.” In addition, based on a superficial resemblance between two logos, Frank Gaffney suggests that President Obama’s missile defense policies “seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.”

April 2010: Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) writes an article for The Daily Caller alleging that Obama is “disadvantaging the United States one step at a time and undermining this country’s national defense on purpose.”

July 2010: Writing in the Washington Times, former GOP Rep. and third party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo calls Obama “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda” and “a dedicated enemy of the Constitution,” while columnist Jeffrey Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute describes Obama as an “usurper” who is creating “a socialist dictatorship” and has engaged in “treasonous” behavior by suing Arizona over its immigration law.

September 2012: Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus alleged in a tweet that “Obama sympathizes with attackers [of the U.S. embassy] in Egypt.”

May 2013: When asked whether Obama “actually switched sides in the War on Terror,” former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered, “You know, I just don’t feel competent to answer. I can’t tell.

 

Conservatives are quick to label Democrats traitors, and readily attack the Commander in Chief in the most vile ways; but then like Superman whip out the cape of patriotism whenever a Republican president is criticized or a conservative politician questioned.  Here is a summary of the Republican worldview: it is treasonous to attack the Commander in Chief when the president is a Republican; and is treasonous not to attack the Commander in Chief when the president is a Democrat. But this rhetoric and absurd world view does not come close to the actual act of treason in shutting down our government or defaulting on our debts.

Conservatives have gone over the deep end; history will judge them harshly.  We can only hope the damage they have done and continue to do will be diminished with the passage of time long after this eruption of lunacy has passed us by.

Nuclear Energy Survives Only on the Basis of Faulty Risk Assessment

Nuclear power survives on empty promises and false hopes fed by our inability to effectively evaluate risk.  We are lulled by long periods of stability and safe operation, and then seem shocked in the face of catastrophe that could have and should have been anticipated.  If the costs of just one major disaster were embedded in the price of electricity, the industry would not be even close to economically viable; only massive taxpayer subsidies keep nuclear power alive. The costs of sustaining nuclear power are too great for society to bear; so why is it still with us?  Beyond the obvious, such as effective lobbying, nuclear plants are still online today because society is extraordinarily weak in its ability to assess and manage risks that have a low probability of happening (or that may occur in the distant future), but have catastrophic impact when they do.

The human brain is a marvel of nature, giving us astonishing capabilities while consuming the energy equivalent of nothing more than a 100 watt bulb.  This incredible efficiency in computing power is achieved in part because the brain excels at taking shortcuts.  We assume certain aspects of our environment to avoid wasting metabolic energy or time on unnecessary calculations or attention.  For example we are very good at perceiving motion, but tend to ignore things at rest. Our assumptions about the physical world are generally a good approximation of nature and serve us well (better in the short-term than out further in time), but they are not perfect; optical illusions exploit our perceptual flaws.

With our innate assumptions about how nature works, we excel at assigning cause to effect as we interact with our environment.  We learn quickly that putting our hand in a flame hurts or that eating rotten fruit makes us sick.   So too is the human brain extraordinarily adept at posing questions about the natural world; our curiosity leads to innovation and enhanced chances for survival.  The flipside is that we abhor the concept of leaving any questions unanswered.  We are unable to turn off this instinct to see patterns and to discern effect from cause when confronted with the unknown.  We demand that there be a pattern, that there be cause and effect, and that there be an answer, even when none exist.  Generally, this is harmless, like seeing animal shapes in clouds or concluding that your thoughts of grandma caused her to call you.

Unfortunately, our perceptual shortcuts and flawed perception are not always so benign.  As amazing as our gray matter may be, we are simply not wired well to evaluate anything but the most immediate risks from the most obvious threats.  With our hard-wired assumptions about our physical world, humans are particularly bad at assessing and managing low-chance-high-consequence risks.  The most obvious example is an asteroid hit, but this small-chance-big-impact can come too in less dramatic form:  pandemic flu, 100-year flood, the emergence of bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics, or a chemical weapons terrorist attack in a big city. We tend to ignore or dismiss these “outliers” in our short- and long-term planning; and that can and has led to catastrophes.

Nowhere is our poor ability to address low-probability-high-impact events more evident than in society’s approach to nuclear power.  Operators of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, initially received a $12.8 billion bailout from the government to help contain the disaster.  Japan announced this week an additional $500 million to further stabilize the continuing contamination.  We are witnessing acts of desperation:  building a “frozen wall” underground to prevent a flood of groundwater from contacting the contaminated buildings.  This has never been tried on such a vast scale or for the decades needed here, and the scheme requires electricity to work; a problem given the number of blackouts suffered by the power plant.  We just learned that 300 tons of water contaminated with radioactive strontium drained into the sea from a faulty tank.  There are now 430,000 tons of contaminated water being held at the site, increasing at rate of 400 tons per day.

None of these infrastructure problems cover the tremendous human and economic costs of forced evacuations of more than 160,000 people; the equivalent of a small city evacuated, never to be occupied again, with land permanently lost to high levels of radiation.  Imagine abandoning forever Madison, WI, or Akron, OH, because of radiation contamination.  Then too are the exorbitant costs of remediation where that is even possible, and long-term health costs of radioactive releases to the air.   Experts estimate that the total cost of the accident will be nearly $300 billion.

Just one such event calls into question the economic viability of the nuclear industry.  Here we see a deep irony.  Those who wholeheartedly support nuclear energy are often the same folks who want a small government to get out of the way of business, allowing the magic of the market to work its glory.  And yet the moment we have a Chernobyl or Fukushima, these very people expect the government, and taxpayers, to bail out the industry.

And this is why nuclear energy is not viable and never will be; low probability high consequence risk.  While bad events are rare, when they happen, the political, economic and human costs are much too high for society to absorb, even amortized over long periods of stability.  And this does not include the problem of disposing of nuclear waste or the life cycle costs of decommissioning a spent plant.  Nuclear energy sounds good, but only if most of the true costs are externalized.  Trapping the true cost of nuclear energy in the price of electricity would render the industry useless.

Yes, nuclear energy offers, at least in theory, powerful benefits.  The greatest incentive to revive the industry is climate change; nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.  About one-fifth of our total electrical output in the United States is from 104 nuclear plants (which put out about 800 billion kWh in 2008).  The painful and costly lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have yielded a good safety record since… up to Fukushima.  Other benefits include potentially unlimited energy, energy independence, and the positive geopolitical implications of weaning ourselves from foreign oil.

The allure of nuclear power is strong, but based on false premise.  Insurmountable technical and economic problems ensure the industry will never be viable, even beyond the already sufficiently catastrophic issue of core melt or another Fukushima disaster.  We currently have no good way to treat and dispose of highly toxic and dangerous nuclear waste.  Other problems beyond those already cited include the high cost of plant construction (independent of regulatory demands), the potential of creating raw materials from which nuclear bombs could be made, risks of transporting nuclear waste from power plants to storage facilities, and the low but not zero probability of radioactive releases and contamination (not caused by meltdown).  We also need to consider that a good portion of the emissions benefits of nuclear power compared to fossil fuel use could be realized by investments in renewable green technologies like wind, solar and geothermal, all of which avoid the problems of nuclear waste.

Note too that in the United States no nuclear power plants have been ordered (and not subsequently cancelled) since 1978, and the last one to go online was in 1995.  Proponents of nuclear energy will blame this dearth of construction on regulatory constraints and hostile politicians.  The reality is that nuclear energy is not economically viable without government support.

The bottom line is that nuclear power has great potential in theory, but not in reality.  Japan reminds us that while we generally now view nuclear energy as relatively safe, the occasional outlier kills the industry.  The inherent costs of an accident are too high to absorb.  Imagine the cost of electricity if Japanese consumers paid the price of Fukushima in their utility bill. Unfortunately, the industry survives because we fail to evaluate properly low-probably high-consequence events.  Nuclear power is with us only because we have inherent flaws in our ability to evaluate risk.  That inherent imperfection is blinding us to the simple reality that nuclear power is dead; we just don’t see it yet.