It has been a long and laborious process, but the New York Times is finally beginning to wake up to the real story behind Climategate, Glaciergate, Africagate, and the various -gates du jour arising from the serial exaggerations and multiple instances of sloppy sourcing contained in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Walter Russell Mead, blogging at the web site affiliated with my day job, has been doing a fantastic job banging on the drum of why this story matters, and why the Gray Lady’s studied neglect of it has done the global warming cause substantially more harm than good.

This is why I approached Tom Friedman’s op-ed on climate change this morning with a sense of optimism. And despite its containing a host of gnomic prognostications (“some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.”), not to mention Friedman’s trademark “special sauce” rhetoric (“Avoid the term ‘global warming.’ I prefer the term ‘global weirding’…”), the op-ed did not disappoint:

climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions, some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This is an important admission, and a sign that the Pachauri-Gore strategy of sexing up the alarmists’ case has finally imploded on itself, and now even threatens to discredit legitimate science in the court of public opinion.

Friedman’s suggestions on how the scientific establishment should respond to its credibility crisis, on the other hand, are significantly less noteworthy. The first suggestion is that it should

convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

Brilliant idea! And they could even write a thingy called an “Assessment Report” every so often. And we’ll call them the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and…wait. What’s that you say? Already been done. Oh, nevermind.

The second suggested task for this putative IPCC Reloaded is also unwise:

they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense.

Wrong, and doubly wrong. This would embroil the scientific community directly in a polarizing political debate, and if Climategate has taught us anything, it’s that scientists should confine themselves to scientific questions and leave questions about policy, principles, and values for the public and their representatives to decide. (Climate scientist Mike Hulme’s op-ed saying this, more or less, remains the best lesson that anyone has derived from this ongoing debacle.)

And besides, if we were to really follow the money, as Friedman suggests, we would find, first, that the most effective climate skeptics or “lukewarmers” to date (namely, the McIntyres, McKitricks, and Pielkes of the world) receive absolutely no interest-group money, and, second, that the alarmist camp is not without its own members who have deep conflicts of interest.

Will the pro-AGW crowd internalize these lessons? It’s hard to say, but there are some signs they are. Friedman ends his column by explaining that there are plenty of common-sense, bipartisan policy options we could begin right now to address not only climate change but energy security. And President Obama recently announced plans to restart construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. Both are steps in the right direction. The real test, however, will be whether these steps are followed up by more sustained measures, like a comprehensive energy policy in the political realm, and more honesty about uncertainty in the scientific realm.

At the risk of music posts overwhelming this blog, I’m posting here four songs by The Oranges Band off their 2005 record The World and Everything In It. The reasons for posting are many, though most are not worth mentioning. Two, however, are:

1) It appears some reunion shows are in the offing. I’m excited, and you should be too. Check their band page on Facebook next week for details, or check back here.

2) It’s been impressively wintry here in DC, and this album is a bit of an antidote for that. It’s not a summer album in the sense that it’s about summer in any direct way, despite the beach photograph on the cover and surfish imagery and guitar work throughout. It’s more that it’s evocative of summers gone by, of looking back with a dose of sadness at being unable to recapture a past that may not have been as great as we remember it. That’s how I experience the album anyway.

Hope you enjoy:

“Ride the Nuclear Wave” - Look into the belly of sharks, past their teeth, to hear the wisdom of the fish inside. Wisdom can be found in unexpected places, after all.

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“The Mountain” - Defiance against all odds. Come on, you can’t possibly deny a pop song that samples Winston Churchill.¹

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“Drug City” - Nobody’s ever the same… after the long walk home.

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“Atmosphere” - Staring at clouds seemed like a good idea when we were younger. Made us think we could fly.

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It’s clean, the vodka hangover. Real clean.

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More.

I get the sense that Rahm Emanuel is a fun person to work with. Yes, it’s probably valid to lay a good part of the blame for Obama’s muddled congressional strategy on health care reform at his feet—as a reporter mentioned to me at a party the other night, it’s not a good idea to have a legislative guy as your chief of staff because you tend to lose sight of the big picture in favor of process. Effectiveness aside, he appears to be a man unconcerned with appearances who has a bit of a penchant for using his foul mouth. In a world of polished, uptight, priggish pols, his loose manner is always entertaining, if not downright invigorating.

And despite the fact that I woke up one morning during the presidential campaign reeling from a dream in which I made out with her, I’ve always had a visceral dislike of Sarah Palin. She, the consummate politician, has applied so many coats of varnish to her personality that she can’t make a move without the veneer starting to crack and peel, revealing just how phony¹ she is underneath it all.

This is all prologue to today’s lovely nugget of political marginalia:

Palin, the mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome, called on President Barack Obama to end Emanuel’s tenure as chief of staff for having allegedly called participants in a strategy session “f—-ing retarded.”

I’m tempted to say that this entire debate is fucking retarded, but I’ll refrain—not in order to spare sensibilities, but rather because it’s not as droolingly inane and cretinous a debate as it first appears.

Attentive readers will recall that this dust-up began with the 2008 release of Tropic Thunder, a wonderfully subversive satire of Hollywood starring Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. The brilliant scene below did the yeoman’s work of offending:

Several groups representing mentally disabled people rose up and protested the film, some even urging a boycott. Most even seemed to understand that the movie’s target wasn’t the mentally disabled, but rather simply objected to the use of the word “retard’. Jerry McCarthy, the Executive Director of North Shore Arc, expressed this most explicitly:

Through the years, we have faced an uphill battle to move away from what we call the “R Word” because the word “retard” has such negative connotations from years of bullying, school yard taunting and general ignorance. I felt we were making great strides — state lawmakers recently distanced themselves from the “R word” by changing the name of the Department of Mental Retardation. As of next year, it will become the Department of Developmental Services. In a ceremony in the Oval Office in July 2003, President Bush signed an executive order changing the name of The President’s Committee on Mental Retardation to the President’s Committee on People with Intellectual Disabilities.

Fair enough, say you? The word’s offensive to many, so let’s stigmatize it out of polite usage just like we do the N-word and, say, the C-word.

Well, it’s right there that we run into trouble, and it’s telling that a thoughtless person like Palin walked right into it:

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

First and foremost, yes, both “nigger” and “retard” are terms of abuse, but only to a historical illiterate or moral degenerate can they ever be equated. Equating them as Palin does casually or as McCarthy does by implication only serves to muddy the waters by expanding the list of uniquely awful words to include merely offensive ones. An uncharitable take on Palin’s angle is that this is exactly what she is trying to do.

Secondly, as a political project for raising sensitivity towards the mentally disabled, tabooing the “R-word” is particularly ineffective. I’ve littered this essay with several synonymous (and presumably similarly offensive) constructions: “droolingly inane”, “cretinous”, even “thoughtless person”. Now I may be insensitive for doing so, but I’d wager that many readers wouldn’t even have noticed had I not just pointed them out. The category “stupid” is deeply ingrained in our language, and while we may want to be more sensitive about how we throw it about, banishing it wholesale is both impossible and undesirable.

Finally, capricious taboos have the unintended consequence of giving the taboo’d word more negative connotations than it may otherwise have had. I wrote about this almost three years ago with regards to “cunt” and feminism, and I largely stand by my musings. Do we really want to give “retard” more power than the juvenile schoolyard connotations it has today?

This is all to say that language is an immensely complicated, living system which both shapes and is defined by our politics. It’s too simplistic to say that we oughtn’t try to tamper with what we cannot fully comprehend. Thinking/writing/speaking is political, and politics is in large part a battle over language. The best we can hope to do is to always mean what we say and say what we mean. If something is so maddeningly stupid that only a schoolyard taunt will adequately express it, well then I’d argue it’s justifiably fucking retarded.²

I bought a Reatards 7” probably around 11 years ago now. Jay Reatard was an angry teenager then, releasing frenetic records which sound like they were recorded on boomboxes. I always assumed that he, like me, had been inspired by his hometown heroes The Oblivians to just go ahead and make music—ability to play instruments be damned. Unlike me, he had heavily imbibed the punk ethos at an earlier and more appropriate age. And unlike me, he kept at it.

His 2006 breakthrough record, Blood Visions, is unmistakably the product of the Reatard I was familiar with from years ago. But it’s something more. Something desperate and sad, not just angsty and frenetic. I’m downloading his much-lauded followup, Watch Me Fall, as I write this.

His passing has struck me beyond expectation. RIP Jay Reatard.

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I’m what you might call unnecessarily cynical, to be most charitable about it. But even my seemingly endless layers of moral callousness have limits. Today’s Big Picture, from Haiti, is beyond horrifying.

There’s a link in the sidebar for those of you that can give some money to Médecins Sans Frontières. I’ve been partial to their work ever since the testimony of some of their workers helped elucidate the shameful events that transpired in Srebrenica in Bosnia.

I’m rendered mute. A donation is all I could do.

I’ve migrated New Contrarian once more, this time off of GoDaddy’s cheap (though decent) servers to a dedicated box over at MediaTemple. I’ve also set it up on a WordPress MU install, which should allow me to start putting together a community of sorts if time and circumstances allow.

Look for usability enhancements to the main NC blog in the coming days, as well as a Pynchon-focused reading group early in 2010.

I’m off traveling in Canada (Niagara Falls, the Las Vegas for Ugly People, right now—Toronto tomorrow), making fixes and updates as best I can due to spotty internet access. Bear with me.

If you have not already done so, I recommend that you take a minute to read and reflect on the speech President Obama gave in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a serious speech, and in parts as moving as William Faulkner’s famous speech for literature in 1950.

Unfortunately, one of the emerging memes on the Left is the supposed irony of using the platform of the Nobel Peace Prize to sing the praises of war—a fatuous point Glenn Greenwald didn’t hesitate to trot out mere hours after the event. The European Left is even less likely to be conflicted in their disappointment at the speech—or at least so I have predicted.

An equally unfortunate meme emerging about the speech is that “this is what Bush has been saying all these years”—see especially Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol. They must feel delighted not just that Obama has confessed that war, while always tragic and evidence of human folly at one level, is sometimes just, but also that Obama has repudiated his left-wing base, as well as his erstwhile admirers in Europe. But Palin and Kristol shouldn’t feel too pleased with themselves; for Barack Obama has just managed to sell some of the same arguments that they, along with George W. Bush and John McCain, have failed to sell convincingly for more than a decade.

On his blog at The American Interest online Walter Russell Mead has said that Obama’s salesmanship has gone beyond “putting lipstick on a pig”—that is, beyond the conventional meaning of dressing up some absurdity or untruth with clever speech. In fact, as Mead says,

The pig has been bathed and scrubbed and is taking a steady diet of prescription-strength breath mints.  The new administration quickly and correctly identified certain features of American policy that had become so offensive that change was urgently needed.  Guantanamo is being closed.  The rhetoric has changed.  But these represent more nips and tucks than radical surgery — botox for the pig, not a face transplant. …

[This] is a real accomplishment and one that Americans should both be grateful for and take pride in.

Quite right. I think Obama has presented here a much more convincing presentation of Niebuhrian Christian realism than Bush ever managed to do, despite the fact that Bush and his advisors were the ones name-dropping Niebuhr every chance they got.

That said, there was one part of the speech that I had difficulty with:

…no Holy War can ever be a just war.  For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint — no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one’s own faith.

I think this was a poor formulation that concedes far too much to the jihadist way of looking at things. How so?

Well, recall Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech (as I’m evidently fond of doing). The point Benedict was trying to make was that there are two distinct ideas about the divine will: One says that God is himself bound by reason, and thus spreading the faith by the sword is an irrational act abhorrent to God. The other says that God is bound by nothing; reason and morality are concepts entirely subordinate to God’s will and can change according to his whim.

With the former understanding of God, “if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will”, just war doctrine still applies to you. With the latter understanding of God, “there is no need for restraint.” Needless to say, the President should be seen to encourage the former understanding of the divine and to reject the latter. If he needs a model of how to do this, he can do no better than Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

I guess you had to be there. That’s where I always end up when trying to explain the Baltimore music scene from around 1998 to 2001 to my post-Baltimore friends. These were years of reckless abandon and excess, and perhaps my memories of them have taken on this particular warm, glowing sheen due to me having seen the sun come up one too many times with a drink in my hand. These were the years of my early 20s, where some of my strongest friendships were forged. They were not necessarily the closest friendships, but it’s remarkable how easy it is for me to go back to Baltimore and instantly and warmly reconnect with people I haven’t seen for years. We shared in a great long rollicking mess of a party: fighting, fornicating, loving, playing, drinking, (some) dying. You can’t really explain that adequately.

But there was something objectively important about that period that I tend to lose in the clouds of my sentiment: the music was very good. The upcoming reunion of the Slow Jets—one of the best pop bands to come out of Charm City—got me feeling archeological. I’ve spent the past two weeks listening to almost nothing but my old friends from that period. It all holds up pretty well—and I daresay that the Slow Jets have aged best of all.

I remember at some point in early-to-mid 1999, my bandmate Hank Baker and I were driving across downtown with this new pal of ours Greg Preston, having just left Mum’s, where we had probably attempted to cure what ailed us from the night before. Greg reached into his pocket and produced a tape he had recently recorded with some of his friends.

Greg had studied music in college and had transplanted to Baltimore a few years before us. He had been in an early version of Roads to Space Travel, the band that for the first part of my Baltimore experience always seemed to be on the verge of breaking bigger. Roads, lamentably, was in the process of folding, and Greg had started playing with two of the remaining members: Roman and Tim, and a third friend of theirs from years ago, Rick.

Hank was immediately enthusiastic. I, always a little slow on the uptake, was intrigued but not necessarily floored. It sounded like jangly, angular pop—catchy enough, I thought to myself. But within a week, I literally couldn’t stop listening.

Consider “Treetops”:

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Listen to the winding guitar intro which simultaneously evolves and explodes into a completely different melody; the amazing fractured guitar “solo” at around second 58; the absurdist yet nevertheless affectingly melancholy lyrics; the way the song seems to barely hang together, yet actually fits together beautifully.

Or “New Sour”:

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For a track that clocks in under 3 minutes, it has more abrupt changes than would seem tolerable for a catchy pop song—yet they pull it off! Take note of Tim Baier’s dramatic, plaintive bass lead in and the subsequent staccato breakdown; the way that the different parts of the song seem to almost step on each other; how Roman Kuebler’s drum rolls start at strange times yet end up exactly where you expect them to, in effect outsmarting you.

Or “Run The Company”, Rick Ivy’s lyrically-driven plea for authenticity:

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Or “Swan’s Way”, Greg’s shower ruminations on love and longing:

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I remember seeing an early Slow Jets show one afternoon at Greg’s house in Hampden. The band set up in the living room, and we all stood around among the busted couches, eating grilled meat and drinking beer cans as this incredibly competent group of musicians ripped through their strange, off-kilter record as the sun went down. It felt like some kind of high-water mark.

A few months later, Roman had left the band to front the Oranges Band, and the Jets brought on one of the several world-class drum talents that seemed to be hanging around Baltimore at the time: the oft-bearded pummeller Marc Berrong. The resulting two albums’ worth of songs were more mature, somewhat longer, more polished and layered, perhaps a bit more straightforward, but no less compelling.

For your pleasure and approval, the anthemic “Margaret Square”:

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Or the harried “Heartbreak for Socialites”:

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Or the envelope-filtered yet hard-charging “Make it Sound”:

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It’s remarkable how relevant and fresh these songs still sound today.

Baltimore as a music scene has blown wide open since I’ve left it. I’m pleased to see that it’s finally getting the national attention it’s deserved since at least the mid-1990s. However, the bits and pieces of the music I’ve heard which have brought my erstwhile city this level of national attention have nothing to do with what I found compelling while I was there. Dan Deacon’s collective and its various offshoots seem much more concerned with innovating for the sake of innovating than writing catchy music for the listener to enjoy.

I’m so very pleased that my friends have decided to give it another go.