climate change

The world would be much different had Al Gore become President of the United States

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

What now seems like ancient history, the 2000 United States Presidential election was far closer than most of us probably recall. The website 270 to win shares this succinct summary of what transpired in the wake of Bill Clinton’s two terms:

“The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Republican candidate George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), and Democratic candidate Al Gore, then-Vice President.

Bill Clinton, the incumbent President, was vacating the position after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Bush narrowly won the November 7 election, with 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266 (with one elector abstaining in the official tally).”

The election was skewed by several factors, including the distraction of Ralph Nader running for President. The nearly 3M votes he received undoubtedly stoles votes from Gore’s side of the ledger, potentially handing Gore the victory had Nader not stubbornly stuck to his efforts.

What most might recall is the long delay in vote-counting that came down to a Florida decision that handed the election to Bush and Cheney.

2000 Election Facts

  • Outcome of race unknown for several weeks due to dispute over close vote totals in Florida
  • Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2,882,728 votes, but no Electoral Votes
  • Gore won DC; however one elector did not cast a vote
  • One of only 5 elections (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016) where the popular vote winner was defeated
  • Popular vote totals from Federal Elections 2000.
  • Issues of the Day: Impeachment, Presidential ethics, Good economy

To make matters worse, the controversies over recounts and the narrow margin of 537 distinguishable votes was thrown first to the Florida Supreme Court and then the United States Supreme court, where five justices nominated by Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush and Nixon all voted to install Bush as President of the United States.

Then the Shit Show began.

First, Bush and Cheney triumphantly ignored credible warnings about the 9/11 attacks handed over from President Clinton and Richard Clarke. We all know what happened then. Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The world watched in horror and fear, but the first thing the Bush clan did was fly bin Laden family members out of the country. As reported on CBS News, “Two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

One of bin Laden’s brothers frantically called the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington looking for protection, Prince Bandar bin Sultan told The New York Times. The brother was sent to a room in the Watergate Hotel and was told not to open the door.

Most of bin Laden’s relatives were attending high school and college. The young members of the bin Laden family were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret place in Texas and then to Washington, The Times reported Sunday.”

Bush and Cheney did the big power play of attacking Afghanistan to get at the vigilante member of the bin Laden family. They failed. Then Bush admitted, “I am not that concerned about him” In fact, bin Laden escaped into Pakistan to hide out for another decade or more before being hunted down and killed during the Obama administration.

All the while, American forces rooted around in Afghanistan trying to quell the influence of the Taliban, who were essentially blamed for the 9/11 attacks when actually, it was just one rich hermit and a band of willing mercenaries that carried out the dirty work of killing thousands of Americans on a bright fall day in New York City on 9/11.

Lying all along

So the Bush-Cheney regime never had the story right or a plan in place to exit Afghanistan if nothing was being accomplished. The Taliban might have been chased into the hills, but did not disappear. When American killed one Taliban leader another one simply slipped into place. As all this warlike activity transpired, warlords sucked up skidloads of American dollars while our troops tried not to get killed. Thousands did. Tens of thousands more were wounded. And still we stayed.

That was not even the worst part of life after Gore lost to Bush. Because one of the pet projects of the illegitimate President was to attempt a Middle East takeover with an invasion of Iraq. The United States attacked that nation based on falsified information about weapons of mass destruction of which international inspection teams found no evidence. Even General Colin Powell got sucked into the Post-9/11 fray and lied to us all about what was really going on in Iraq.

Which was awful, but still no reason to invade that nation on claims that it had anything to do with 9/11 or that Iraq posed any terrorist threat to the United States. Yet still we attacked. Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and sentenced to death. But all that America could find to do in the wake of that murderer’s death was to round people up and torture them in the same prisons used by Hussein to persecute his own countrymen.

The Iraq War Crimes Adventure also welcomed mercenary forces from guns-for-hire companies such as Blackwater and Halliburton, both of which reportedly direspected American troops and committed war crimes of their own on occasion.

The Brookings Institute reported: “But there were two problems: Despite its mission of guarding U.S. officials in Iraq, Blackwater had no license with the Iraqi government. Secondly, the murky legal status of the contractors meant they might be considered exempt from Iraqi law because of a mandate left over from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. governing authority in Iraq that was dissolved more than two years prior.”

The relative lawlessness that led to billions of dollars wasted in military expenditures, torture and war crimes in Iraq seemed not to bother the Bush regime. It was our soldiers that paid for this folly with their health and their lives. Men like Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld famously dismissed our military’s lack of preparation for the Iraq venture by stating, ““You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Unapologetic wastefulness

Such was the unapologetic approach of Bush and Cheney to everything they encountered. As America squandered trillions in its treasure on extended, fruitless wars, the world’s climate was busy heating up due to global warming. The Republican control of the Oval Office, Senate, Congress and the Supreme Court ensured that no legislation would pass to help counter the rolling effects of carbon dioxide polluting the atmosphere. Al Gore published a book warning that America had better look out for its true enemy, which was climate change, but conservatives mocked him as pedantic and hypocritical.

Now the government in Afghanistan has collapsed and the Taliban rushed across the nation taking over provincial capitols and finally, the national government in Kabul gave up and ran off. None of the Afghani troops “trained” by American forces over the last two decades put up any resistance. The entire Bush-Cheney debacle collapsed before the world’s eyes. Meanwhile, climate change is burning up the world with July 2021 registering as the hottest month in all recorded history.

It would have been so much different had Al Gore not been blocked from serving as President of the United States. He won the popular vote. In all likelihood, he even won the Electoral College vote if politics had not been played in the queasy state of Florida.

We could have avoided 9/11. Most certainly, the former VP is a prudent man who understood the threat of terrorism in real time, not as some abstract distraction to be avoided by the likes of Bush and Cheney. America might well have taken steps to ward off climate change as well. At least we’d have a start of some sort.

Lies and racism

Instead, we were forced to suffer through eight years of blatant lies and ractist attacks against President Obama, who also happened to rescue the nation from the collapsed economy wrought by the many abuses wrought upon it during the Bush years, when the price of health insurance alone climbed by 96%. When Obama pushed for the Affordable Health Care act, Republicans attacked the concept as unconstitutional and socialist. But much like Al Gore, Obama had American’s long-term interests in mind.

Sadly, the populist reaction to good governance was to install an openly racist demagogue in the person of Donald Trump, a TV personality that ignores science, denies climate change, and claimed to love our troops even while his apparent buddies the Russians were placing bounties on their heads. The facts about Republican corruption are plain to see. They should be much more broadly known.

Trump was nothing more than a feckless version of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, combined. He exhibits the same bumbling inability to communicate effectively, instead engaging in a “downtalking” approach soaked in the ideology of victimhood. He pats his supporters on the head with patriarchal cynicism and glee, also welcoming the adoring affections of hypocritical evangelical supporters eager to trade their religious ethics for access to power.

Trump devastated the country with hapless tariffs, greedy tax cuts and rampant golfing excursions that cost the country hundreds times more than the meager $360K (or whatever) salary comes with the office. Where Obama was serious, considerate and collaborative, Trump was specious, angry, and bullying.

That approach appealed to his deplorable political base, which included openly racist populists and whorishly sycophantic political operatives within his administration that to this day claim that a legitimate election was stolen through some outlandish method for which there is zero evidence. That led to a massive insurrection in which the core of governance in the United States of America was under attack by a fascist mob urged on (and gleefully witnessed) by Trump and his minions.

But then, there was zero real evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was zero evidence that Rush Limbaugh was ever honest or right about anything in his life. There was zero evidence that torture was necessary or desirable in Iraq. Zero evidence that Guantanamo was a good way to hold supposed terrorists when many were simply people caught up in the military horrors executed upon Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is zero evidence that anything the Republican Party has done the last twenty to forty years has benefited the United States of America in any way. There is less than zero evidence that the party proper has any intention of admitting to its incompetence, cruelty, or the many criminal indictments and convictions of its political representatives during the Reagan, Bush II or Trump administrations.

Yes, this country and the whole world could–and should–have been much different if Al Gore had become President. Instead, we’re left with a nation torn apart by domestic terrorists, gun proliferation, racism on the rise, and attacks on the Capitol by lawless vigilantes acting on the urges of a twice-impeached ex-President who lied so often in office that the entire world was gaslighted by his dangerously narcissistic psyche.

His toxic brand of rule led to more than 600,000 Americans dying from Covid-19 infection in a country where it was perfectly possible to prevent such tragic loss of life. But Trump lied to the nation about the threat, obscured its potential contagiousness, and mocked those wearing masks to prevent its spread. Even to this moment in time, his ardently deluded supporters refuse to wear masks and are contracting the Delta variant and dying in the hospital while begging to be vaccinated.

But it’s too late, in most of those case. It’s almost too late to recognize the pandemic that is Republican policy and the anti-government plague it has wrought on the country. As President Joe Biden noted, we have a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That symbolizes the delusional nature of gaslighting tactics dating all the way back to President Ronald Reagan and his anti-American claim that government must be shrunk down to nothing in order to serve the people better. He was a liar just like the Bushes and the Cheney’s and the Trumps. The McConnells and the McCarthys are just as bad, along with the Fox News and Tucker Carlson crowd. It’s sickening.

None of this would have happened if Al Gore had become President. None of it.

A lesson about dithering squirrels

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

squirrel-deadOn the way home from the art studio this Sunday morning, I slowed the car to allow a squirrel in the street to make a decision about which way to go. You know the story. The squirrel turned one way, then the other. Suddenly it scampered to the curve.

But you can’t always see the results of those frantic decisions until you’re another forty feet down the street. We all tend to glance back hoping the squirrel did not get crushed under a car tire. That’s when guilt grips us if we have a conscience. A life wasted, it seems, by random activities in the universe.

Except random activities are the rule of the day. They happen every second for all of eternity. As far as your mind can travel, there are squirrels of one kind or another making choices all the way from the subatomic level up the expanding travels of a galaxy through time itself.

That is evolution in progress. Squirrels are either getting run over or living to face yet another day. The squirrels left dead on the street often get run over again and again. Their bodies are either eaten by scavengers, consumed by worms and bacteria or simply crushed into the asphalt as a grease spot that no one notices.

Predestination

Now there used to be a theory or two in theology that said God controlled every one of these activities. Everything in the universe was made to order. God worked like a fast order chef or a control freak head waiter at a busy restaurant. That was predestination.

squirrel-on-the-roadBut that makes God out to be a pretty bad character, the dispenser of evil as well as goodness. Which makes for thorny questions when it comes to the personal fate of members of the human race, who are so preoccupied with their own destinies they can hardly comprehend their real place in the universe.

That’s also what makes it so difficult for some people to imagine that the human race emerged from the same soup as the rest of life on earth. Never mind that the soup runs through our veins is blood that mimics ocean water in its salinity, or that we share 3/4 of our genetic makeup with just about every other living thing on earth.

Never mind. That’s too much alignment for squirrels that prefer to dither over less relevant facts. Like whether Mary was a Virgin, or that John the Baptist was lefthanded. And so on.

Dither yonder

When it comes to certain types of decision-making, human beings are as dumb as squirrels and make just as many bad choices. Hundreds of thousands of people die each day due to the simple arithmetic involved in bad decisions at the wrong time. Add in the selective pressures of war and famine and natural disasters, all of which are largely avoidable with a little cooperation, and human beings don’t look so smart even in the context of predestination.

But when you look through all this dithering through the cool eye of evolution, it’s all entirely predictable. 99% of all living things that have ever existed in the earth’s history are now extinct. The age of dinosaurs lasted millions of years but ultimately most of them died off through unforgiving circumstances. God didn’t stop that from happening. Not at all. The birds that evolved from dinosaurs or actually are dinosaurs made out okay. But many of them are at risk these days as well, sucked into the Black Hole of the Anthropogenic Age where the gravity of human activity sucks things into non-existence never to be seen or heard again.

Endangered species 

These days, hundreds of species of animals, plants, insects and other life forms are threatened by a new wave of extinctions. This is indeed the Anthropogenic age, when extinctions and climate change and other earthly devastations once-credited to God are now exacted with the same casual precision as a squirrel burying a nut in the wasted Garden of Eden.

Just in the last 100 years, species of birds such as the Passenger Pigeon that once numbered in the billions have been erased from history. Extinct. No more exist. All dead. Nuts buried by squirrels too busy market hunting to care about the eventual outcome. No one stopped to tell them they were nut for shooting so many birds.

The same thing almost happened to the American bison, which now exists mostly in carefully tended herds that number a fraction of populations that once roamed the Great Plains. Just as painful are the losses of flora and fauna we can’t see.

The once great tallgrass prairie is reduced to 1/10th of one percent of its former range.

These were all actions caused by human beings. Thus they represent an engagement in the process of evolution. People who deny this fact typically rely on their own Origin of Species based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. The only explanation they can offer about the extinction of species is a reputed Great Flood that covered the entire earth. Ostensibly the fellow named Noah gathered enough living and breeding sets of life forms on the Ark to repopulation the entire world.

tx-blind-salamander-picture-1To accomplish this feat would have required, of course, a blind salamander from the caves of Texas to crawl across the entire western European continent, swim thousands of miles across a saltwater ocean, climb onto the dry land of the Eastern Seaboard and swim all the way to what is now the State of Texas, crawl across hundreds of miles of parched landscape to where a small population of said blind salamanders still lives and breeds to this day.

The absurdity is not assuaged by the claim that “all things are possible with God.” The examples of impossible migrations are so vast and so daunting that the tale of Noah’s Ark quickly falls into the category of metaphor.

The part of the story that does apply is that human beings do apparently bear some responsibility for the welfare and stewardship of animals, plants and other species on this earth. The entire earth is an ark, if you will. And human beings are doing a really crappy job of playing Noah, wiping out hundreds of species of life forms every year.

The Flood story strongly suggests that God is not afraid of extinction. That fact is borne out by what we know about patterns of extinction through the sciences of paleontology, biology and the theory of evolution.

To explain God’s relationship to these harsh events, one merely has to acknowledge the presence of free will in the universe. The squirrel on the road makes a choice when a car approaches. It runs back and forth and either gets nailed by a tire or escapes. There is nothing sentimental about this process. It is free will at work.

IMG_0492Human beings thus are subject to choices made by free will as well. These choices fuel or place in the process of evolution. We make good choices, we live. When we make bad choices, sometimes we die. This is true on both an individual and collective basis. Evolution takes place largely in incremental fashion, but it can also roll out in wholesale destruction if human beings fearfully agree to respond to life’s circumstances like a herd of squirrels.

We don’t see squirrel migrations every day, but it happens now and then when population or environmental pressures drive squirrels to migratory madness. Let us consider a documented tale from the early 19th century: “Here is how, In 1811, Charles Joseph Labrobe wrote in The Rambler in North America of a vast squirrel migration that autumn in Ohio: “A countless multitude of squirrels, obeying some great and universal impulse, which none can know but the Spirit that gave them being, left their reckless and gambolling life, and their ancient places of retreat in the north, and were seen pressing forward by tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx to the South …”

At times human beings are subject to the same sort of social madness. Then the human race behaves like a huge pack of squirrels or lemmings rushing off a cliff. Normally, squirrels in their home environment are typically cautious and predictable. They use the same paths to get from tree to tree.

But when forced out in the open, or faced with confusing situations such as an oncoming car, squirrels equivocate, turning back and forth in desperate reaction to a world outside their evolutionary understanding.

When faced with the unknown, human beings act no differently than squirrels on a high way. This is true among individuals and group populations. Human culture is squirrelly, and fear can turn otherwise rational people into fearful sheep.

And while squirrels are supposedly a much lower species than apes, there are people who consider the idea that human beings descended from earlier forms of primates a real insult. But when it comes to the sometimes squirrelly thinking and behavior of entire nations, to be considered on par with an ape would be a good thing.

squirrel-on-road.jpgThe human race is experiencing a “squirrel on the highway” moment when it comes to dealing with climate change. The back and forth between those who accept the evidence and those who deny its verity is causing the human race to dither and change direction on the subject. Meanwhile, the Big Wheels are Turning and heading our way. If the human race does not figure out how to slow down the rate of climate change, we really will get run over. Coastlines will flood. Hurricanes will increase their destruction. The human race will be forced to evolve in a hurry to deal with climactic extremes that will produce highly unpredictable weather.

Some people consider that bunk. They cover their heads with their squirrel tales or insist that the Great Squirrel in the Sky is the only Keeper of Climate Change. But that only amounts to ignoring the roar of the engine around the curve and the threat of the fat tires about to crush the collectives spines of a million squirrels dithering back and forth on the highway.

And some squirrels don’t even care. Safely ensconced in their Wealthy Squirrel Hideaways with plenty of nuts to gnaw, they could not give a rat’s ass if a few millions other squirrels get turned into Global Road Kill. It’s none of their concern. There are the I’ve Got Mine Squirrels that actually take pride in the act of driving the trucks that run over other squirrels. And for some, that is considered a great sport.

But it’s true. When global warming kicks in an temperatures rise across great expanses of continents such as Africa and South America and North America, mass migrations of people will take place in regions where intense heat and desertification takes over.

And still there will be dithering by the rich and powerful, and fearful meandering by those trapped in the horrific cycle of heat and drought and flooding. The Bible fails

Even The Holy Bible fails misterably in providing hope or solutions to this apparent dilemma of a worldwide threat to human existence. After all, God ostensibly enabled the Great Flood that called Noah into action. If we can believe the text, then it was true that all the people of the earth, other than a select few, were wiped out.

God also brought Hail and Brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah in rash treatment for the excesses of those cities and their inhospitality to strangers, especially angels.

angelsAnd let us not forget that God even allowed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. That scattered his ostensibly Chosen People like a band of squirrels, out into an inhospitable world where they got run over and enslaved in many cases. But a few eventually banded together and returned to their home turf, where they reside to this day in a form a bit evolved from the original. Because that’s how evolution works, you see.

The entire process of survival is always a bit squirrelly for all involved. Squirrels able to anticipate and adjust their behavior while crossing the Road of Existence most often survive. But among human beings, there is also a moral responsibility to share those instincts for survival, and even hold paws with those more likely to dither or get crushed. That’s the role of government and of scripture, to enact the decisive course of humanity.

Because whether you view it through the eyes of scripture or the cold lens of an evolutionary viewpoint, it never pays to be a dithering squirrel.

 

 

Drought, God and Human Enterprise

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Emerald beetle on dry ground

Drought over much of America has parched the soil

The problem Christians face in consideration of natural disasters such as drought, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes and fires is that Christianity itself seems conflicted about so-called “acts of God.”

Even insurance companies bent on actuarial accuracy have been known to use the phrase “act of God” to describe weather and other natural phenomena gone out of control.

The current challenge over much of North America is drought. It appears that among all dangerous results of climactic conditions, drought may be the most pernicious of all when it comes to the ability of the human race to address its impact on agriculture and other enterprise.

We take for granted that it will rain sooner or later. But in an economy teetering from the effects of human foul play and political stupidity, a natural disaster such as drought can prove to be a tipping point. The Depression of the 1930s and the Dust Bowl proved that point. We apparently have not learned much from the experience. Industrialized farming, while something of a miraculous invention, still cannot make up for the fact of no rain. Crops still need water, and irrigation cannot currently compensate for millions of acres of parched corn and beans.

So where is God in all this? Surely there are plenty of farmers and perhaps a few corn and bean speculators praying for rain so that some sort of crop emerges from the summer of 2012. Yet there may be just as many commodity speculators praying against rain so that their margins or profits or product estimates will prove true so that they can somehow corner the market and get rich as royal thieves.

Does God listen to their prayers as well? Does God answer prayers for wealth, especially ill-begotten wealth that would be the result of human suffering?

If we take the world at face value we might surmise that God does answer the prayers of the evil as well as the good. With wealth rising to the top of American society at previously unseen rates, one thinks of Bible passages such as these: “Will not all of them taunt him with ridicule and scorn, saying, “‘Woe to him who piles up stolen goods and makes himself wealthy by extortion! How long must this go on?” Habakkuk 2:5-7.

Well, woe is relative, and the rich sometimes don’t seem to feel it, or much of anything with regards to other human beings. They even suppose to feel favored by God.

While much of middle-class America has been struggling along since the economy ratcheted up to a crash under the watch of George W. Bush, the wealthy largely rebounded from stock market losses and are doing just fine, thank you. So where is God’s justice in these circumstances?

It has always been that way. And it will always be that way. Achieving justice in this world often requires much effort and human enterprise, for evil in this world is industrious, greedy and pathologically uncaring. That certainly does not mean that all wealthy people are evil. But it does mean that those who are can do great harm.

But nature can be just as capricious. The world is designed, if you want to call it that, to operate on random forces that include natural disasters and even evolutionary twists of fate. So the drought of 2012 is neither unimaginable to God, or unexpected. Some people automatically throw stones at the nation for its supposed sins, accusing America of “tolerating” a list of ostensibly evil activities ranging from abortion to homosexuality, promiscuity to lack of church attendance. Yet it’s funny how seldom those same prophets seem to admonish America for its inequality in wealth, its obsession with violence and its disenfranchisement of the needy and poor. Those themes are much more prevalent in the Bible, yet the crowd that likes to say that God is punishing America for its sins almost always ignores the sins of power. The reason? Too often the supposed prophets are in political alliance with the rich and powerful, thus compromising their ability to speak for God.

It seems that same bible-thumping crowd likes to deny the random fact of evolution, preferring to insist that God is in control of every moment and event in time, like some OCD control freak of a deity. But that worldview does not square with the reality of free will in the world, or the fact that human beings are free to choose in belief in God and Christ. God may indeed be “in control,” but we make our own choices about what elements of God’s universe we seek to embrace, evil or good.

So we persist in a dysfunctional relationship with the influence of God in the world, throwing faith at the idea that it will someday rain while denying that it might be our own, human activities that could be contributing to the current drought.

Indeed, global climate change is the product of human beings burning fossil fuels at alarming rates. Yet the people who favor a nation bowing down to the interests of the very wealthy, and industrialists to boot, insist that holding polluters accountable will harm our economy. How ironic. It’s almost like they can’t see the forest for the trees. Hence the organic symbolism is doubly lost.

That is so narrow-minded as to deny the very existence of God, who the Bible says favors the actions of the just and prudent among us.

So these are the lessons of Drought, God and Human Enterprise. Without recognizing the consequences of our own behavior, God cannot (and will not) help us solve any of the problems we face, be they natural or manmade disasters. Our preparedness and humility in the face of such circumstances may help us attain the collaboration and response necessary to prevent the inevitable natural disaster from becoming fatal to ourselves. If you read the Bible carefully, that is most of what God has done for the human race through great leaders.

God despises however, those who act in His name for gain in personal wealth and power, especially through extortion, calculated speculation and manipulation of people through deceptive words. One cannot help but realize that an evil game is being played by people who deny the massive evidence from science that global warming is real, and that natural disasters, including drought, may be worsened by our own aggressive folly. That is true also of pollution by pesticides, heavy metals, atmospheric degradation and even genetically modified crops and animals. Simply put: We’re messing around for profit and in the process may be losing our grip, and our souls.