Mark J. Heinicke – Page 7 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

How Bad a Joke Are “Alternative Facts?”

What you see is often not what you get.

The now infamous video of a confrontation between a Catholic high school student and a Native American elder near the Lincoln Memorial on January 18th shook the cable news landscape like the launch of a Saturn Five rocket. Much of what was left after the first 48 hours of media conflagration was a lot of hot dust and scorched earth. Many were outraged, some were burned, many were confused, and no one was happy.

(I’ve embedded the initially-released video at the very end of this post.)

After a cool-down of a few days, some perceptive commentators noted that what went most terribly wrong in the immediate aftermath of the incident was the dependence on one three -and-a-half minute video, shot from one angle with the camera held almost perfectly still throughout, to convey truth. It was that video— and one intense image in particular pulled from it—that triggered a righteous media blast from the Left. A tweetstorm erupted, blown initially from the Left and soon answered by gusts from the Right, while more, and increasingly ambiguous, information flowed in.

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Trump Gets Pushback from the Senate; Mitch McConnell Calls Dysfunction Dysfunctional; Reagan Anti-Government Crusade Marches On

McConnell implies Trump may have gone a step too far

While Senate Republicans cast about for some legislative hodgepodge to satisfy both President Trump and House Democrats in order to prevent another government shutdown, Mitch McConnell was saying, publicly, that he was “for whatever works that prevents the level of dysfunction we’ve seen on full display here the last month.” This not only addressed the narrow matter of the border wall standoff, but also spoke to calls from Democrats and some Republicans to create a legislative mechanism to prevent both the President and the legislature from using government shutdowns as a bargaining tool on any legislation. McConnell, with the weight of 35 years in the Senate and at least six government shutdowns behind him, commented, firmly “I don’t like shutdowns. I don’t think they work for anybody.”

If such a mechanism could be put in place, that would take away what Trump feels is his strongest bargaining chip. His other chip, the declaration of a national emergency, is proving so far to be too hot for even Trump to handle.

This would be the closest thing to a public rebuke of Donald Trump that Mitch McConnell has delivered since the Republican primary season in 2016 when McConnell supported Rand Paul and made evident his disdain for the eventual winner. He is now, obliquely, standing up to Trump’s cavalier use of the federal government as a hostage in his all-or-nothing campaign to get $5.7 billion for an expansion of the magnificent border wall.

By framing the shutdown dilemma as a matter of process rather than substance, McConnell may dodge a counterattack by the President. He may think Trump owes him something for his month-long refusal to bring to the Senate floor a veto-proof bill to re-open the government. He may think that Trump himself believes he owes McConnell something. Enough to keep his trap shut for a few hours.

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Geoengineering: Not If, But When

Reality: We are losing the fight against climate change

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves. Global carbon emissions are going up, not down. No surprise there. Even if they stayed flat, we’d be in a world of hurt. Even if they were halted immediately, with CO2 at 405 parts per million, planetary greenhouse warming will continue for many decades, perhaps hundreds of years.

Well, you already know that.

Of course if fossil fuel burning were stopped immediately, we’d have a world-wide depression that would make the recent Great Recession look like a garden party.

The climate change conference in early December in Katowice, Poland, accomplished the usual: not much. Politico carried a succinct summary of a largely disappointing affair, written by Kalna Oroschakoff and Paola Tamma: Climate disappointments in Katowice

The leading solution is geoengineering. Like it or not.

Is geoengineering inevitable? Just do a web search on “geoengineering inevitable” and you’ll find all sorts of smart people, realistic smart people, coming to the conclusion that without geoengineering, we’re sunk (as many coastal cities will literally become).

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Whose Hoax? The Carbon Cycle & Climate Change Denial

If anyone is perpetrating a climate “hoax,” it’s the Deniers. For why, read on.

Countering one of the deniers’ favorite trick questions.

It’s not necessarily a “trick” question in all cases. Maybe sometimes it’s an “honest” error, if being honest entails burying one’s head in the sand. But in case of willful tricksters, it’s another one of those niggling questions with which they like to trip up the unsuspecting. Another piece of their hoax to confuse us.

Here’s how the question goes: A carbon dioxide molecule stays in the atmosphere for only five years. So what’s all this doom and gloom forecasting that CO2 will hang around for hundreds of years in the air even if we stop fossil fuel burning?

Yes it’s doom and gloom. But it’s based on facts (the inconvenient kind).

For an explanation, we have the carbon cycle to thank.

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Hands across the Divide: a Softer Approach to Politics

Liberals, listen up! Not all that’s Right is Wrong

In the last two days my left wing partisanship has been mollified by news that undercut my picture of the political right wing as a monolithic tribe.

Of course I’ve been aware that my bias (and possibly yours?) has been simplistic and irrational, but when I hear leaders on the hard Right speak, all my objectivity flies out the window.

Time for a correction through hearing from regular people.

“Hands across the Hills” attempt to bridge a painful divide

On November 29, on NPR’s Here and Now,* came a report on “Hands across the Hills,” a gathering of Trump-voting West Virginians and Massachusetts liberals face-to-face.

A link to the Here and Now story follows. I recommend, if you have the time, to listen to the podcast, which has the greater emotional force. The transcript is quicker, but loses some of the human touch.

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Beethoven again: thunder and more

An antidote to the frenzies of our time –

Now that the thunder of the 2018 election has subsided into rumbles, let’s give the timeless thunder of great piano music a listen, in particular Ludwig van Beethoven’s third movement of the “Appassionata” sonata.

Those familiar with this sonata may argue that the first movement is the more distinctive, and is also more structurally coherent—despite its swings between ominous shadows and brilliant arcs, still a stable edifice. The third is—well, the “structure” is a vehicle racing along a precipice in an earthquake, jolted and swayed and flown and flung and repeatedly braked and accelerated under a sky of swirling rainbows sucked from an alien planet.

The sonata itself to come in a minute, but first an aside on Beethoven’s most devoted fan, the “Peanuts” character Schroeder, and Schroeder’s creator, Charles Schulz. Unbeknownst to me until I read the piece on Schulz and Schroeder by April Dembrosky in the New York Times, Schulz also had “a weakness for country western.”* I was also unaware that Beethoven’s food of choice was macaroni and cheese.** ( Read about it here.

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Low Crimes and Misdemeanors: Crushing Democracy One Shovelful at a Time

Scales of justice teetering all one way

Thunk, thunk, thunk, is the sound of Donald Trump throwing shovelfuls of partisan excrement on one side of the sagging scales of justice within a crumbling system of governance. In one week he has named a blatantly partisan operative of the political right wing to the position of Acting Attorney General—without even bothering to give lip service to the obligation to get Senate confirmation—and gone on to deny the legitimacy of elections in places where the sole source of grievance is that the President’s allies may lose to Democrats.

Talk of impeachment is now much in the air, with pundits parsing the meaning of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be invoked in the case of impeaching a U.S. President. Here’s the wording of the impeachment clause in the U.S. Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

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Hollowing out of the Middle Class: a Second Look

Middle class hollowed out? Kind of. Unhappy? It depends . . .

Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore are fond of excoriating the rich and powerful for the “hollowing-out of the middle class.” What they fail to mention—either for lack of information or for political expediency—is that, money-wise, more families are leaving the middle class on the upside rather than the downside. There’s plenty of evidence for this. Check out the following, which is similar to other reports, but I especially like it because it is based on Pew research findings:

https://qz.com/1005068/the-upper-middle-class-is-the-new-middle-class/

A larger segment of the middle class, it seems, is rising into the highest and upper-middle class than is falling into the lowest class (the lower middle has remained unchanged), and the net effect, dollar-wise, of “hollowing out” appears to be a positive. Is this a Good Thing? After all, can’t money buy happiness?

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Settled Law, Settled Liar: Mistrust Rising

When an evasion is really, dangerously, a lie

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s dance around the question of whether he would overrule Roe v. Wade makes one wonder, on what other matter has one of his evasions, stripped of legalistic nuances, amounted to a lie.

Certainly Kavanaugh’s dodge around the Roe issue, that Roe is “settled law,” thus implying it was immune to being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is a lie. This was the the lie told to Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a staunch supporter of Roe v. Wade, in what she characterized as a lengthy one-on-one discussion. She reported that Kavanaugh said he regarded Roe as “settled law.”

As one commentator on MSNBC or CNN (sorry I forget which, and who) quipped: “Well, settled law is settled until it isn’t.”

Now, thanks to the recent release of an email heretofore kept under Republican Senate Judiciary Committee wraps as “committee confidential,” we find Kavanaugh, back in 2003, saying “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since [the Supreme] Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

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