The Race to Be the Top Nut in the Nuthouse

According to the Republicans campaigning to be their party’s nominee to be the President of the United States (not to mention many others in their party), the chief problems facing the United States include things like illegal immigration, attacks on religious liberty, Planned Parenthood, attacks on cops incited by Black Lives Matter activists, Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and of course Iran and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Given the excessive attention being paid to this circus – and particularly to the loud guy with the goofy hair who is currently leading the pack – by the national media in the US, at least some of the public may also be starting to believe that these are the things that matter, rather than issues like climate change, severe economic inequality, racial injustice, or the way money has come to dominate US politics. If the US president wasn’t such an influential figure, not only in the US itself but globally as well, most of the candidates’ rhetoric would simply be hilarious in its inanity, and if some of their fellow Republicans weren’t in a position to make laws and fund (or rather not fund) the government, their disconnection from reality would just be amusing.

According to Mr. Hair, the US is in grave danger of being overrun by rapists and murderers that Mexico is deliberately sending north and therefore it is imperative that a huge wall be built to keep out the riffraff. Most of his fellow candidates are only slightly less extreme in their views on immigration. Never mind that the number of people actually coming over the border illegally is at its lowest level in years, or that immigrants in fact commit crimes at far lower levels than native-born Americans, or that undocumented immigrants pay more into the system than they get in benefits. How extreme some in the Republican party have gotten on the issue of illegal immigration is shown by their response to the murder of a woman in San Francisco by a undocumented immigrant who had come back into the country despite being deported. A number of Republicans have gone so far as to propose a mandatory five year prison sentence for anyone caught coming back into the US after being deported. American prisons may be already overflowing, mandatory sentences in general may have long ago been shown to be unjust and ineffective at ending crime, and the idea of judging millions of undocumented people for the actions of one despicable individual may make about as much sense as condemning all white people for the actions of the racist Charleston mass murderer: Republicans still want to stuff prisons full of people whose “crime” is trying to join their families or just make a better life for themselves, treating them as they’ve committed an act as bad or worse than armed robbery or assault.

Then there’s the issue of “religious liberty”. Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee rallied to the cause of a county clerk who went to jail rather than obeying a judge’s order to do her job, acting like she was some sort of martyr for her beliefs when she could have simply resigned if she really found letting same sex couples register their marriages at her office too much for her “conscience” – even though she seems to have no problem with divorced people (including herself) getting married. Only Lindsey Graham and Carly Fiorina offered some mild criticism of this petulant display of defiance against the rule of law. Huckabee and most of his fellow candidates also want Christians who oppose same sex marriage to be able to deny other services to gay couples, though they are silent on whether such people should also be able to deny services to people on second marriages or interracial couples. The Republicans seem to think that because conservative Christians are no longer able to freely impose their views in the public sphere, their “liberty” is at stake. On the other hand, they don’t seem so interested in protecting the religious liberty of Muslims, with Ben Carson even saying that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to be president and the orange haired guy implying that one already is (and that there are training camps for Islamic terrorists in the US, despite there being not a shred of evidence to support that claim).

As for Planned Parenthood, the Republican candidates are almost unanimous in condemning the organizations on the basis of doctored videos that do not actually prove anything like what they have been saying, and Carly Fiorina make even more wild and blatantly false claims based on a video that doesn’t even exist. Amazingly enough, it is the Donald who has been the voice of reason on this issue (relatively speaking, of course), acknowledging that Planned Parenthood provides many useful services. But the rest seem to just foam at the mouth at the mere mention of Planned Parenthood. But despite their supposedly “pro-life” hostility to abortion, none of these candidates seems interested in supporting measures that would actually reduce abortion, such as comprehensive (not abstinence-only) sex education and ready availability of contraceptives, nor are they interested in ensuring a decent life or even sufficient food, health care and education for the children that they want to force women to bring to term. In the meantime, John Boehner’s reluctance to shut down the entire federal government over Planned Parenthood funding has cost him his position as Speaker of the House of Representatives, leaving the House Republicans, as one commenter put it without even ineffectual “adult supervision”.

We’ve also heard that people like President Barack Obama have helped create anti-police hysteria by acknowledging in mild terms that a few police officers have on a few occasions done bad stuff and that Black Lives Matter activists are helping to create a war on cops. Never mind that far fewer police have been killed in the line of duty during Obama’s term than in equivalent periods in past administrations reaching back to the 1970s, or that the number of people killed by police in the first week of September was greater than the number of police killed in the entire year to date, or that Obama said a lot of positive things about most police officers, or that there have been many – and I do mean many – cases in which police officers have literally gotten away with completely unjustifiable murder, or that Black Lives Matter activists have never called for attacks on police, just reforms to address the problems which anyone who has been paying in attention clearly exist in how the police and the justice system treat minorities, especially African Americans.

Of course few Republican national figures can go very long without attacking the current Democratic front runner Hillary Rodham Clinton for something or other. An old favorite is her supposed responsibility for “allowing” the terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, including the ambassador (though Republicans seem to have conveniently forgotten that their favorite president, Ronald Reagan, “allowed” an attack on the US embassy in Lebanon that killed a couple hundred Marines). The current favorite, though, is Hillary’s deletion of private emails that she used when doing government business as US Secretary of State. Never mind that she was doing pretty much what her predecessors had done, or that there is no indication that she violated any procedures that were in place at the time; the desperate need for the Republicans to dig up a scandal to bring her down means that we can expect them to keep dredging the issue up until the general election (unless perhaps Bernie Sanders can manage to upset her in the Democratic primaries).

ISIL of course is the current favorite foreign bogeyman of the American right wing. Lindsey Graham, and the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program is their favorite example of the supposed weakness of Obama’s foreign policy. Lindsey Graham famously warned that without military action by the US, ISIL would come to the US and “kill us all”, and most of his fellow candidates have been only a little less hyperbolic about the threat. At the same time, they seem to regard the agreement with Iran as a total capitulation. Never mind the fact that, while truly awful, ISIL has not shown any capability of striking seriously in the US (right wing terrorists have killed more people in recent years in the US than Islamic terrorists of any sort have) or that the Iran agreement is really a fairly decent deal, and much better than the alternative. Only Rand Paul acted disinclined to wade into another war in the Middle East, and John Kaisch was the only other Republican candidate to evince any reluctance to immediately throw out the Iran agreement if elected.

Of course where other issues have been mentioned, the rhetoric hasn’t been much better. Only Graham has fully acknowledged the reality of climate change, the others sticking to the same denial of reality that has dominated the Republican party on this issue. On taxes they mostly offer the same old giveaways to the rich and on the budget they are mostly eager to gut social programs and foreign aid, while dumping even more money on the one part of the government where the vast majority of the actual waste is, namely the Pentagon.

So what are we to make of this bunch? On every issue, there are at best one or two candidates who have semi-reasonable positions, but those same candidates invariable have terrible or even absurd positions on other issues. Take the Donald, the current front runner in the polls, for example. While his less completely unhinged attitude toward Planned Parenthood and his willingness to raise taxes on at least a few rich people (e.g. hedge fund managers) might seem to make him like one of the less repellent options, his xenophobia and sexism are more worthy of one of the lower types of Internet trolls than of a serious candidate for president of the US, and in any case, anyone delusional enough to doubt whether Barack Obama was born in the US should be automatically disqualified from any political office. Graham is almost reasonable on climate change but terrible on foreign policy and most other things. Paul has halfway sensible stances on issues like marijuana regulation, over-incarceration, government spying or the overreliance on military force in US foreign policy, but he would be terrible for the poor or the environment. Really, all of them would be so terrible that the race for the Republican nomination does really seem like a competition to be the top nut in the nuthouse.

The Syrian Refugee Crisis, Climate Change and a Grim Future

The refugee crisis on the borders of Europe has dominated international news in recent weeks, with attention focused on the flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly from Syria but also from countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea, who have been trying to get into the European by boat from Turkey to Greece and overland through the Balkans, sometimes with tragic consequences. There are a lot of issues related to this topic that are worth addressing, such as the failure of the international community to do more to end the war on Syria (while much of the blame goes to Russia and Iran for their insistence on propping up the murderous Assad regime, the West could certainly have done and being doing more) or to do more for the millions of refugees still stuck in camps in the region, not to mention the poor response of Europe and the US to the immediate crisis, not only the disgustingly nationalistic and xenophobic actions of people like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his supporters, but also the failure of countries like the UK and the US to offer to take in much larger numbers of refugees (kudos to Martin O’Malley for being the first US presidential candidate to call for the US to offer a home to a substantial number of the refugees). But I’d like to focus on an aspect of this crisis that has been less discussed, except on a few more progressive and environmentally oriented sites, namely the relationship between the Syrian crisis and climate change and what it bodes for the future.

While it is of course an exaggeration to say that climate change was the sole or even the major cause of the Syrian crisis (the Assad government’s violent response to peaceful protests, for one thing, had more than a little to do with it), it is almost certain that it was a contributing factor. The distinction between a sole cause and a contributing factor is one that some people have a hard time comprehending, especially when talking about climate change. It is impossible to directly attribute any weather event entirely to climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change is not affecting these events. For example, we can’t say that any particular typhoon or hurricane was “caused” by climate change in the sense that we can be sure it wouldn’t have happened without the global warming caused by humans, but we can say that climate change makes typhoons more likely and increases their severity. Another example of this is drought, such as the extremely severe one afflicting the west coast of the United States, particularly California. This drought might still have occurred if humans had not changed the climate, but it almost certainly would not have been as severe. What’s more, if warming trends continue, such droughts will become more common.

This brings us back to Syria. Over several years preceding the uprising against Assad, Syria and its neighbors had been hit by one of the worst droughts in recorded history. This caused great suffering among ordinary Syrians, so naturally there was a high level of discontent. It didn’t take much for this discontent to erupt into first mass protests and then, when the government reacted violently, open rebellion, and the widespread nature of the hardships meant that more Syrians were receptive to the call to revolt. Of course it is impossible to state for sure that the rebellion wouldn’t have occurred or have been as widespread without the drought, just as it is impossible to say that anthropogenic climate change alone caused the drought itself. But it is almost certain that climate change exacerbated the drought, and it is highly probable that the drought was at least one cause of the rebellion. This is hardly without precedent; many rebellions, migrations, and other upheavals throughout history have been shown to have natural disasters such as famines, floods and so forth as a major cause. What is different about the Syrian crisis is that this drought was almost certainly worsened by global warming, a worldwide problem that humanity is still failing to address properly.

The reality is that f we do not take dramatic steps in the immediate future, current warming trends will continue, which means that droughts, floods, and other weather events influenced by climate change will become more frequent and severe. This in turn means that the refugee crisis that we are seeing now is just a harbinger of worse things to come. Either we take immediate action to deal with climate change, or in coming decades we can expect to see many refugee crises, whether caused directly by natural disasters or by wars that result from them, some of which will be as bad as or even worse than the one we are seeing now. For example, right-wingers in the US like to rail against undocumented immigrants from Latin America (despite the historically low numbers coming in recent years); climate change is expected to cause severe droughts not only in the western US but in Mexico and Central America. If that happens the US is likely to see a flood of migrants in numbers out of the worst nightmares of American xenophobes. So it is highly ironic that it is for the most part the exact same people that most fear and hate refugees and migrants that are preventing action on climate change. Of course given the complex nature of the relationship between climate change and refugee crises, it will be hard to change the attitudes of people who seem to even lack the intellectual capacity to understand and accept the simple reality of climate change itself.

What I've Been Reading: January 2015 to June 2015

As is evident from the length of time since my last post on my reading and the limited number of books in this post (though I should point out that one of the entries below is a trilogy of books), it should be obvious that I am getting even less reading than I did last year. This is in large part because I've acquired a laptop computer and have been trying to get some work on my various music and other projects done on it while commuting instead of reading as I did in the past - and as has been true for an even longer time, going through emails on my phone also takes up some of my commuting time. But I still manage to a bit of reading at home or on other occasions, so here are a few of the books I read earlier this year (more recent books will have to wait for a future post).

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Set in Istanbul in the late 16th century at the height of the Ottoman Empire, My Name Is Red is a historical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (indeed it seems to have been one of the main reasons he won the award). The story is a murder mystery, a tale of intrigue among miniaturists working to illustrate manuscripts for the Sultan, told in the first person through the eyes of a rotating cast of characters. While the use of shifting viewpoints to tell a tale is common enough, here not only do we hear much of the tale from the perspective of the obvious protagonists like Black, who is asked to solve the mystery by his maternal uncle and former mentor Enishte Effendi, or Shekure, Enishte’s daughter and the woman Black loves, but also through the eyes of the murderer, the three chief suspects, various minor characters and even non-living characters such as the murder victim, who opens the story with the declaration “I am a corpse” and several of the illustrations themselves, the latter brought to life by a storyteller in a coffee shop frequented by many of the miniaturists (though interestingly enough – and probably not coincidentally – we never hear the voice of the storyteller himself).

The story is engaging, and the characters are well drawn. The reader also learns a great deal about the art of illustrating manuscripts in the Islamic world and its historical development. The tension between the miniaturists and the sometimes capricious rulers who make use of their talents on the one hand and those who follow a stricter interpretation of Islam on the other hand forms one of the central underlying conflicts in the story, along with the struggle between those like Effendi who want to incorporate Western influences into Ottoman art and those who are repelled by the idea. It is surely not a coincidence that Pamuk chooses to build his novel around conflicts such as religion versus secularism and tradition versus modernity that continue to roil society in Turkey and in the wider Islamic world. There is also a strong element of metafiction, as the characters often express awareness that they are part of a story. In addition, not only is the name of Shekure’s younger son Orhan, like that of the author, but his older brother Shevket shares his name with the real Orhan’s older brother, and Shekure herself has the same name as the author’s real mother. Furthermore, Shekure reveals at the end that it is Orhan who has written down the final version of the story. She warns the reader that Orhan may have distorted some of their characters, concluding: “For the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn’t a lie that Orhan wouldn’t deign to tell.”

Cleverly written and yet more readable than most consciously “literary” novels, incorporating both interesting historical information and themes with modern parallels, My Name Is Red is worthy of its reputation as a Nobel Prize winning novel without being overly difficult or lacking in entertainment value. Readers interested in murder mysteries, Turkey, history, Islamic art, conflicts between tradition and modernity or good literature in general will find it worth reading.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
This series of dystopian science fiction novels (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay) for young adults is probably one of the best known of the genre, not only due to the best-selling status of the novels themselves but also due to the movie adaptations, which have also done very well at the box office. The novels are certainly entertaining and generally pretty well done, though they aren’t without their flaws. They are not very deep or literary, and there are some story elements that slightly strain credulity. There is also sometimes a touch of melodrama in the way Katniss Everdeen (the protagonist from whose point of view the reader follows the story) sees what is happening to her. For instance, when she realizes that her fellow Hunger Games contestant Peeta has not given up on surviving the games, she automatically assumes that he’s planning to kill her. Admittedly, given the rules, he couldn’t win without her dying at some point, but as is made quite clear once the games start, even if winning the games was actually his goal, the chance that he would have had to kill her himself would have been very small. In fact, I suspect Katniss’s tendency toward melodrama arose mainly through Collins’s deliberate effort to keep drawing the reader on. Virtually every chapter ends on, if not a cliffhanger, a dramatic revelation or other statement designed to get the reader to continue on to the next chapter to see what happens.

Despite these issues, it’s easy to see why the books are popular. Katniss is an interesting character, if not always very likeable, and the story moves at a dizzying pace. There are quite a few dramatic plot twists and surprises that keep readers on the edge of their seat, eager to find out what else may be in store. The world of the Hunger Games is also interesting, though it is less detailed than some other fictional worlds and there are occasionally believability issues. Overall, The Hunger Games books are not exactly great literature, but as pure escapist entertainment, they are a good option for readers of all ages.

[Side note: The popularity of The Hunger Games books led to an influence on real world events, as anti-coup protesters in Thailand used the defiant salute from the books (and the movies) to express their opposition to the military takeover, in some cases getting arrested for it.]

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Pinocchio is one of many characters from children’s literature and folk tales that is regrettably most familiar from the Disney version. Unlike characters from folk tales like Cinderella, Snow White, or Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) but like Peter Pan, Pinocchio comes from a more modern novel, in this case a 19th century book by Carlo Collodi. This means that there aren’t numerous different versions of the story, so without reading the original novel most people will only be exposed to the Disney version. On the other hand, it also means that there is a definitive original, which is not the case for most folk tales, whose origins are usually lost in the mists of time. In either case, while the Disney versions of the stories are not bad, their tendency to so vastly overshadow earlier versions is not a good thing (Disney’s propensity for using and essentially taking over public domain characters while going to great lengths to protect their own original copyrights is also hypocritical, but that is another issue). So I was curious to find out what the original Pinocchio was like, though to tell the truth it’s been so long since I’ve seen the Disney movie that my memories of it are rather vague.

Pinocchio is initially extremely mischievous, even nasty, to his creator Geppetto and to the Talking Cricket (who he kills early on, though the cricket reappears as a ghost), but he soon resolves to turn over a new leaf. Unfortunately, he keeps getting tempted and returns to his mischievous ways. The series of adventures Pinocchio has have a slightly old fashioned feel to them, vaguely resembling earlier folk tales or perhaps the adventures of slightly more modern (but still older than Pinocchio) characters such as Don Quixote or Tom Jones. Many of the adventures were used in the Disney version, though I don’t remember enough of the latter to determine how much they were changed. The cricket at least underwent a fairly drastic transformation in the Disney version. But overall I really can’t judge whether the Disney version of the story was much worse or better that the original. The latter at least is reasonably interesting and entertaining, though there are better books around.

The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic by Robert O’Connell
As I think I have mentioned previously on this blog, one of my favorite subjects as a kid, aside from astronomy and planetary science, was ancient history, and in particular the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. So of course my favorite historical figure was the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, and I read pretty much every book on him and his home city of Carthage that was available at any of the local libraries. While I also read plenty on other historical topics (general histories of Greece and Rome and so forth), Hannibal and the Punic Wars was my main focus. While today the scope of my historical reading has broadened considerably, I still can’t resist picking up any interesting looking new take on Hannibal and his career, and so when I saw this book in a used book store on a visit to the US a few years ago, of course I had to get it. Interestingly, subsequently I saw a Chinese translation of this book placed prominently on a display table in a bookstore in Taiwan, which surprised me a little, because as interesting as I think Hannibal is myself, the topic is a little esoteric and so not something I’d expect to attract a particularly wide audience.

The Ghosts of Cannae, as the title suggests, takes as its centerpiece Hannibal’s most famous and most complete victory over the Romans, the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, but it also covers the background and aftermath of the battle. It is a lucid, well done account, though I don’t necessarily completely agree with all of his interpretations and conclusions. For example, he concludes that Hannibal made a mistake by failing to march on Rome after the battle, though he admits that it was a long shot and acknowledges that the majority of modern scholars think Hannibal’s decision was the right one (assuming that there was even any debate about it, as Livy claims with his story about the Carthaginian officer Maharbal’s urging Hannibal to go to Rome). Of course we can’t be sure that such a march, long and difficult though it would have been, especially considering exhausted state of the victors and the substantial casualties they had suffered, wouldn’t have somehow caused Rome’s will to collapse, and we know that Hannibal’s chosen strategy of breaking up Rome’s alliances ultimately failed. But considering the difficulties of an immediate march on Rome, it’s likely that Hannibal didn’t even seriously consider the idea, and it’s probable that it was not a realistic option anyway for the reasons mentioned above. For that matter, if a few things had gone differently later in the war (for example, if Hasdrubal had defeated the Scipio brothers and go on to march on Italy in 215 BCE), it is possible that Hannibal’s strategy could have been successful. But all in all O’Connell’s account is a solid addition to the body of work on Hannibal and his war against Rome.

The Clean Power Plan, Presidential Candidates in the US and Taiwan, and Jimmy Carter

There are a number of current topics that I’d love to have to time to talk about in some detail, but due to lack of time I will just offer a few brief comments on each. In some cases, I may find a chance to come back to them and talk about them in more depth in the future. In my last blog post I talked about the Iran nuclear agreement, which, as I observed, is imperfect but worth supporting, especially given the lack of realistic alternatives. Aside from the nuclear agreement (which is the work of a number of countries, not just the US and Taiwan), US President Barack Obama has announced another important initiative in the last few weeks, one which is at least as important as the Iran deal, and that is his (or rather the EPA’s) Clean Power Plan. This takes a big step toward fighting climate change and reducing pollution by setting strict limits on carbon emissions. As might be expected, there has been loud opposition from polluting industries and the right wing politicians in their pockets, but the truth is if put into effect the plan will be to the benefit of almost everyone except those who directly profit from polluting industries like coal. It won’t even be that difficult for most utilities to comply with the plan, and of course it will make the air much cleaner, not to mention reduce the US’s carbon emissions and thereby help reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change. In fact, if anything the plan may not be ambitious enough. The truth is we need to quickly reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane if we are to avoid warming that will have dramatic (and in the near term at least mostly negative and even highly destructive) effects all over the world.

Speaking of President Obama, much of the news from the US has been focused on the candidates to take over for him when he leaves office, even though the actual election isn’t until late next year. Taiwan is also having a presidential election, though it is at the beginning of the year, so the similar focus on election politics is a little more justifiable. In both races the most likely winners are women who are imperfect but acceptable choices, if not super exciting (Hillary Rodham Clinton in the US and Tsai Yingwen in Taiwan). On the other side there are some completely awful choices (the entire bunch of Republican candidates in the US and Hong Xiuzhu and James Soong in Taiwan). The US race also has at least one quite exciting candidate and a couple others who have some excellent positions on certain issues (Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and possibly Lawrence Lessig), though their prospects for actually winning are uncertain. At some point in the future, I would like to go over these races in more detail. For now regarding the US race I will just note that while I think Clinton has said many of the right things on numerous issues and I expect that I will vote for her if she ends up winning the Democratic nomination as expected, Sanders is better than Clinton on the majority of issues and offers a much better prospect of real change – if he could get elected. O’Malley stands out especially on the environment, having gone into even more detail than Sanders on the steps he would take to deal with climate change (though what Sanders has said so far on the issue has also been great, whereas Clinton has been good but regrettably vague on a few key points). Lessig, who only announced his prospective candidacy, is running on the single issue of making a radical overhaul to the US election system, promising to resign once he gets his program passed. Though the seems like a rather quixotic campaign, he is perfectly correct about the need for major reforms, and I’ll admit that the idea that someone I’ve met and briefly spoken to (I helped translate for him in an interview session with a few reporters in Taiwan when he came to promote Creative Commons) may run for president of the US.

Talking of US presidents, a sadder piece of news is that former US President Jimmy Carter announced the other day that he has cancer that has already spread through much of his body. Since he is already 90 years old, his prospects of surviving advanced cancer are probably not very good. But he has done a lot of excellent work since leaving office in 1980, and indeed is one of the best ex-presidents the US has ever had, so he can look back on a life of real accomplishment. The job he did as president is not highly rated by most people, but even this is a bit unfair. He did have some flaws, particularly his inability to delegate well and his difficulty in establishing good relations with Congress, though some of the fault for that was on the side of Congress. Carter was a true outsider, unlike some politicians since who have run under that label, and that made it harder for him to get things accomplished. But many of the problems that he faced in his presidency were not his fault and it is questionable whether he could have done much else about them. Many of his ideas were good, such as making human rights a more important factor in foreign policy, even if the execution left something to be desired. In fact, if he had been reelected it’s quite possible that in a number of areas the US (and even the world) would be considerably better off. In Carter’s day there were some prospects of a move away from rampant capitalism and excessive reliance of fossil fuels, for instance, but with the election of Ronald Reagan that all went out the window and instead the US got supply side economics and severe backsliding on the environmental front, not to mention an overly aggressive foreign policy. Movement toward renewable energy basically came to a halt for the next two decades. The parody newspaper The Onion captured the contrast well on its faux front page from 1980. Under the article headline “Campaign ‘80” there are pictures of Carter and Reagan and quotes representing their political agendas. Carter’s is “Let’s Talk Better Mileage” while Reagan’s is “Kill the Bastards”. In the article, Carter talks about renewable energy, urban renewal, mass transit, job, infrastructure, and job training programs for disadvantaged minorities while criticizing Reagan’s proposed cuts to social programs and tax breaks for the wealthy, but Reagan just keeps repeating “kill the bastards.” The article is subtitled “Which Message Will Resonate with Voters?” Of course we know which one did, but even granted that the article greatly exaggerates the contrast for comic effect, I can’t help wondering what the world would be like if things had gone differently. Perhaps we wouldn't even need a Clean Power Plan. In any case, today Americans would do well to heed some of President Carter’s recent messages, such as his warning that the US has become an oligarchy. Maybe the US really does need to elect someone like Bernie Sanders, who at least would attempt to put America back on the path towards a greener, more egalitarian and more democratic society.

Some Thoughts on the Nuclear Deal with Iran

Now that an agreement has been signed with Iran on its nuclear program, the inevitable debate over whether it’s a good deal is raging in the US (interestingly, I haven’t heard anything about intense opposition to the deal in the European countries that are party to it, though there must be at least a little). Since it is a fairly far-reaching agreement and if implemented it has the potential to transform US-Iranian relations and the politics of the Middle East, numerous aspects of the agreement are being discussed and argued about. Those who favor the deal consider it the best chance to avoid even more conflict in that part of the world and prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, not to mention putting the US and Iran on a path toward more friendly or at least less hostile relations. Opponents call it capitulation to the Iranians, argue that Iran can and will cheat, and warn that reducing or ending sanctions on Iran will free it to cause more trouble in the region by backing violent regimes and terrorist groups. They also lament the agreement’s failure address issues such as Iran’s support for terror, its unlawful detention of several American citizens, or its poor human rights record in general.

I will address the latter concern first. I agree that Iran’s human rights record is terrible, its detention and treatment of both Iranian dissidents and the American citizens currently in its prisons is deplorable, and its support for terror groups and particularly the hideously bloodthirsty Syrian regime is appalling. However, those issues are not what the agreement was negotiated to address. Just as the US negotiated arms control treaties with the USSR that didn’t address human rights issues in the latter, there is no reason to expect an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program to address unrelated issues. This doesn’t mean that these issues don’t have to be addressed, though. It is my understanding that US sanctions imposed due to Iranian sponsorship of terrorism, for instance, will remain in place. It is quite possible, even probable, that the US government (and European governments) could and should do far more to pressure Iran over human rights issues. Many Western governments have shown a bad tendency to prioritize economic ties and business interests over human rights in their dealings with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and others, and we should put pressure on them to act differently not only in Iran’s case but others as well. But the nuclear agreement should be judge according to its purpose, which is preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons rather than for issues it is not designed to fix.

There are no doubt flaws in the agreement which Iran can exploit. Iran may be able to avoid coming clean about past weapons programs, and it may find ways to hide things from inspectors, especially given the uncertainty about whether inspectors will have sufficient access to military sites. But it will require Iran to dramatically reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium and its number of centrifuges, which at a minimum will put a bomb a little further from reach. It is true that it may not prove easy to re-impose sanctions should Iran violate the agreement, but I don’t think it will be as difficult as critics claim, nor do I think it will be as easy for Iran to cheat as they are asserting. Iran does have many incentives for adhering to the agreement, and if the moderates remain in charge (a point I will come back to), they probably will do so.

In any case, as I and many others have observed in the past, those critics calling this a bad deal, whether it is Republicans in the US Congress or Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have never laid out specifically what they would consider a good deal. From their rhetoric, a “good” deal would be unconditional surrender on the part of the Iranians, involving a complete dismantling of their entire nuclear program. Of course, there was never any chance that Iran would have agreed to such a deal, regardless of the pain sanctions might have been causing. After all, look at how tightly the North Korea clings to its nuclear bombs, even as its economy collapses and its people live at the edge of starvation. If the Iranian leadership is as sinister and power-mad as those most hostile to it claim, they would most certainly not hesitate to continue to pursue their nuclear ambitions in the absence of an agreement regardless of the sanctions, especially if they perceived the West as unremittingly hostile. It is also unlikely that the sanctions regime could be held together for long if the US rejects the agreement, as countries like China and Russia are too eager to do business with Iran. While this is not a good thing, given the authoritarian tendencies of all three, there is not much that the West can do about it at this point.

Given the critics’ lack of a clear vision of what a “good deal” would look like and the extreme unlikelihood of Iran being willing to make more concessions, the alternatives are these. The agreement can be carried out and Iran’s nuclear program can be made at least somewhat more peaceful and subject to a certain degree of scrutiny. Otherwise, the US can reject the agreement, as the Republicans in Congress want. What would follow from that? The Iranians, who are already quite close to acquiring a bomb, would have little reason not to proceed to actually producing one, and the only way the US or Israel could prevent them would be by starting a war. It is by no means certain that a few airstrikes could do sufficient damage to Iran’s facilities to put a bomb out of reach, so we are talking about a major war with a country that is considerably larger and more powerful than Iraq.

Iran’s geopolitical stature is a point worth some additional scrutiny. On the one hand, hyperbolic claims that the Obama administration’s concessions to Iran are equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference are absurd not only in exaggerating the size of the concessions but in implying that Iran is as great a power and as much of a threat to world peace as Nazi Germany, which is not even remotely the case (incidentally, another lesson from that era that many forget is that it was the harsh terms that the Allies imposed on Germany after World War I that facilitated Hitler's rise, which is relevant to a point I'll discuss a little later about the agreement's potential effect of Iranian domestic politics). Conversely, however, Iran is not a small, weak country that the US could easily overpower in a fight. This doesn’t mean that the US should avoid a conflict with Iran no matter what; if, say, Iran actually started assembling a nuclear weapon and declared an intention to carry out the rhetorical threats that some of its more extreme leaders have made in the past against Israel, for instance, a military strike by the US would be justified. But a decision to launch a war should not be taken lightly, and if this agreement is not put into effect, it is hard to see what other options US would have to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Furthermore, it is worth remembering a bit about Iran’s history and its current society. Over most of the past 2600 years, ever since the rise of the Median and Persian Empires in the wake of the destruction of Assyrian power, Iran has been one of the most dominant nations in West Asia. While its power has waxed and waned. Its current position as one of the major powers in the region is commensurate with its historical position. Of course, history does not give Iran an automatic right to any particular status today, much less the right to push its neighbors around (the same point applies to China, which is fond of misusing history in this manner). But given Iran’s size, population, resources, and relative stability, it is not at all surprising that it has once more become one of the strongest countries in the region.

For these reasons, the Western approach to Iran can’t be merely one of containment. This is not to say that containment of a sort doesn’t have its place. The US and other nations should certainly work to counter problematic Iranian actions in the region, such as its support for the Syrian regime or groups like Hezbollah. But it is necessary to engage Iran too. It is worth remembering that despite the fundamentalist theocracy that is currently in power, Iran has a sizable, well-educated middle class, much of which has a quite secular outlook. Even among the clerics, there are moderate voices. It should be remembered that not all of the Iranian leadership has shown the type of unremitting hostility to Israel and the US that is commonly cited by opponents of the deal. The more moderate leaders should be encouraged as much as possible in the hope that in the future, a new Iranian leadership can take charge, one that will be far less interested in the aggressive approach of the hardliners in the current leadership. It is conceivable that in a few decades Iran could even transform into a secular democracy, if it is allowed to evolve in that direction as moderate forces gain more power. And which option is more likely to help Iranian moderates, accepting the agreement or rejecting it? Since the agreement is, on the Iranian side, the work of the moderate faction in the current leadership, if it proves beneficial to Iran and specifically to the average Iranian citizen, then it will certainly strengthen the moderates. Rejecting it, however, would mean that the hardliners would take over completely. They would probably even gain some support among the secular middle class, as an American rejection of the agreement would support the assertions of the hardliners that the US is completely hostile to Iran and no rapprochement with it is possible. Even those who would still prefer a more moderate approach might feel compelled to publicly support the nationalistic hardline view for fear of being accused of traitors.

All this doesn’t mean that an agreement which entirely favored the Iranians would be acceptable. But the truth is, the Iranians made plenty of concessions of their own. As mentioned above, they are giving up their enriched uranium and most of their centrifuges, as well as submitting to a fairly comprehensive inspection regime, if not as strong as would be considered ideal from a Western viewpoint. Also, the Iranian assertion that they have the right to a peaceful nuclear program is not unreasonable, as many other countries, including some with worse human rights records, also have nuclear power (of course I’d say all of them should be focusing more on renewable energy, but that’s another issue). While a lifting of sanctions may boost Iran’s ability to assist destructive parties elsewhere, the US and its allies can attempt to find ways to counter such actions on the part of Iran, including, if necessary, new sanctions. It is worth reiterating that this agreement, the negotiations that it came out of, and the sanctions that helped bring Iran to the table were all directed at Iran’s nuclear program, not anything else it might have been doing. While resolving the nuclear issue might have both good and bad effects elsewhere, this is unavoidable. As I said above, if the agreement makes it at least a lot less easy for Iran to acquire a bomb and at the same time boosts the moderate forces in the country, then it is adequate – especially considering the very unpalatable alternatives.

[Update: An additional point worth noting is not only do polls show that a majority of Jewish Americans support the agreement, a number of prominent Israeli security figures are also supporting it. Perhaps even more telling is the Iranian side of the debate. As discussed in some detail in this article, moderates, reformists, the majority of Iranian citizens and Iranian Americans and even many dissidents and exiled opponents of the current regime support the agreement, while the conservatives and hardliners have for the most part been critical of it. Not exactly what you'd expect to see if, like the deal's American and Israeli opponents claim, the agreement gave away far too much to Iran.]

Drawing the Curtain Back on Pluto and Charon

I have been interested in space and astronomy, particularly the solar system, for as long as I can remember; at least since I was in preschool. And of all the planets and other bodies in the solar system, the one that I found most fascinating in childhood was Pluto. Of course I am hardly alone in having Pluto as my “favorite planet”, but as to why I especially liked Pluto, it is a little difficult to say. I think it was in part simply that it was different; it was clearly unlike either the so-called terrestrial planets close to the Sun or the gas giants in the outer solar system. It’s status as the most distant planet, with an incredibly long orbit of 248 Earth years, may have played a role. Or maybe it was just that Pluto was so mysterious. When I first became interested in astronomy, most books had practically no information about Pluto at all, as next to nothing was known. Some of the astronomy books I would check out of the library, books that were already somewhat out of date at the time, even included some of the more wild early theories about Pluto, such as the suggestion that Pluto was in fact a fairly large planet, but was almost perfectly black, so that we were seeing the reflection of the sun off its surface like a mirror. This theory was developed to accommodate the idea that Pluto was indeed the theorized Planet X that was supposedly affecting the orbits of Uranus and Neptune (which would require a fairly massive planet) and yet failed to show a disc in even the largest telescopes of the day. More commonly, books of the time would declare Pluto to have a diameter of about 5000 km (3600 miles), which was in truth more of an upper limit than an estimate based on any concrete evidence, or repeat the then-common theory that Pluto was an escaped satellite of Neptune (this idea even crops up occasionally today in articles by non-scientists despite being long discredited; the truth is Pluto never comes anywhere remotely close to Neptune due to an orbital resonance, and actually gets closer to Uranus than it ever does to Neptune). In truth, even though it had been almost 5 decades since Pluto had been discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, the only things known with any degree of certainty about Pluto in those days was its orbital characteristics and that it had a rotation period of 6.39 days.

The mystery around Pluto began to clear up ever so slightly in the late 1970s. First methane was detected on its surface. Since methane ice is highly reflective, this was the first hint that Pluto was in fact even smaller than had been previously thought (with the constant downward revisions in estimates of Pluto's mass from the time of its discovery, at some point an astronomer joked that if the trend continued, it would soon disappear entirely!). Then in 1978 came the dramatic discovery of Pluto’s satellite - or perhaps companion would be a better term - Charon, which at half the diameter of Pluto is the largest moon with respect to its parent planet in the solar system (how hard it is to get a decent image of Pluto from Earth is illustrated by the fact that in the discovery photos of Charon, it appears as a fuzzy lump on the bigger fuzzy lump of Pluto - it took the Hubble Space Telescope to get a picture of the two clearly separated). The discovery of Charon in turn allowed Pluto’s mass to be calculated with some precision, showing that it was actually quite small for a planet, being considerable less massive than even the Earth’s Moon, let alone Mercury, the smallest inner planet, though still much larger than Ceres, the biggest asteroid. This discovery gave rise to the first arguments among astronomers about whether Pluto should be classified as a planet. But for me, while Pluto was now a little less mysterious, it remained as fascinating as ever, especially with the relative size of Charon making it more like a double planet system, if a small one (see here for an example of how Pluto and Charon orbit each other).

I don’t want to delve into the debate over Pluto’s planetary status in great detail here, but there are a few things worth pointing out. First of all, as I mentioned above, while Pluto certainly is very small in comparison with the eight universally recognized major planets, it is still much larger than any asteroid, even Ceres (by far the biggest asteroid). At least one other recently discovered body in the outer solar system, Eris, is somewhat more massive than Pluto (though slightly smaller in diameter), but that alone doesn’t disqualify Pluto from planetary status, it just means that Eris itself also needs to have its status determined, and that it should be classified with Pluto. It should also be noted that the eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit is also irrelevant to whether or not it is a planet, as quite a few extrasolar planets have similarly eccentric orbits. I am not so attached to Pluto’s planetary status that I don’t recognize that it, along with Eris and several other large trans-Neptunian objects, are distinct from the major planets; in fact way back at the end of the 1980s I distinctly remember doing a high school project in which I suggested that Pluto belonged to a completely new class of objects (even though, with the possible exception of Chiron, an asteroid-like body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, no other similar objects had been discovered at that time) which I think I called cometoids or something like that. But essentially I think both sides are arguing about the wrong question. The argument shouldn’t be about Pluto per se; it should be about the minimum characteristics for a planet, wherever it is located. The definition that the IAU came up with when it reclassified Pluto, Eris and several other objects (including Ceres) as “dwarf planets” is vague and unsatisfactory. While any definition is going to be somewhat arbitrary, I think it makes more sense to define a planet based on its own physical characteristics, instead of vague criteria like “clearing its orbit”, as even in the outer reaches of our own solar system we may someday find an object the size of Mercury or Mars orbiting among smaller objects in the way Pluto does, and extrasolar planetary system will no doubt have all kinds of mixes of objects, whereas I think a definition of a planet should such that the same object would always be a planet if it is orbiting a star, regardless of what else may be orbiting in its neighborhood. What the qualifying characteristics should be is of course debatable, though several good possibilities, such as the object being large enough to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium, would result in Pluto and similarly sized objects being classified as planets. The point is that the definition should not be written either to deliberately include or exclude Pluto, but should be based as much as possible on clearly defined physical characteristics. Probably the easiest solution for the time being would be to keep the term “dwarf planet”, but to acknowledge that, as the name implies, a dwarf planet is still a planet, while we can refer to the eight bigger planets as “major planets” (though in that case we'd still need a definition for "major planets"). But in the end what we call Pluto is not that important, as it remains equally interesting regardless (for more arguments on both sides, see here and here).

In subsequent decades we learned even more about Pluto, first through mutual occultation events between Pluto and Charon, and then in the past few years through observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, including the discovery of four small moons of Pluto, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. But despite these advances, our knowledge of Pluto and its companions remained extremely limited, and the best images we had of it were extremely fuzzy, due to its great distance and small size. All of that has finally changed with the flyby of the Pluto system by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14. As a longtime “Plutophile”, it goes without saying that this is an event I have long awaited. But rather than attempting to summarize New Horizons’ discoveries so far myself (after all, one of the most exciting and dramatic things about it is the pictures, which are best seen elsewhere), I am providing some links to articles about the flyby and some of the discoveries that have been made so far, with many more to come as data continues to be sent back by New Horizons over the coming months.

Articles on Pluto's moons from the months prior to the close encounter can be found here and here.

An article on the significance of the New Horizons mission can be found here, and one about how great a value it is for the money is here.

Articles reporting on the flyby can be found here, here, here and here, with articles focusing on Pluto's atmosphere here and here, articles on the strange mountain on Charon here and here, and an article about the first relatively close-up picture on Nix here (one with pictures of both Nix and Hydra is here). A picture gallery of photos from the New Horizons mission, starting from the most recent images, can be found here.

An article on reactions to the flyby can be found here, and an article on possible future exploration by New Horizons can be found here. Unfortunately, there are no near future plans to send probes to Eris, now the largest object in the solar system that has never been visited by a space probe, or Sedna, which has by far the greatest average distance from the Sun of any known object of substantial size (it probably qualifies as a dwarf planet), but with this flyby of Pluto we have at least begun the exploration of the bodies of the far outer solar system, and after decades of wondering what they were like, I personally am happy to finally get to see what Pluto and Charon look like up close.

Reflections on the Confederate Flag (and More)

There’s been a lot of dramatic news out of the United States recently, including the US Supreme Court’s historic ruling declaring bans on same sex marriage unconstitutional (with a hilariously ironic dissent from Scalia calling the decision an attack on democracy, when the real assaults on democracy came in cases like Citizens United, where he and his right wing cohorts were in the majority), not to mention its ruling against a rather absurd challenge to the Affordable Care Act, its rulings upholding standards for proving housing discrimination and an independent redistricting committee in Arizona, or, on the negative side, their ruling against the EPA’s restrictions on mercury pollution. However, I want to focus on another news item that is unrelated to the Supreme Court, namely the reactions to the mass murder of innocent churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and particularly the debate over the Confederate flag.

Regarding the murders themselves, there is a lot that could be said, such as how they are yet another piece of evidence showing how disastrous it is for a society to allow guns to be so easily available, or how the reluctance of right wingers to admit that racism was the reason for the shootings just says that they have some of their own issues in that area, but my interest in history leads me to focus on the Confederate flag debate. I will, however, mention in passing that it is ridiculous for many, particularly on the right, to refuse to label these murders a terrorist act when they are exceptionally eager to call any attacks by extremist Muslims terrorism. Yes, Dylann Roof probably acted alone and in that sense was a lone nut, but the same was true of Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator in the mass shooting at Ft Hood in 2009, and yet Ted Cruz and his ilk have been adamant that the latter was a terrorist act. For that matter, even the Tsarnaev brothers seem to have acted alone in the Boston Marathon bombing. In all cases, you had one (or two, though it was clearly the elder Tsarnaev brother who was the driving force) disturbed individual, motivated largely or at least in part by a warped ideology, striking out violently at unsuspecting victims. If any violent act, even by individuals unconnected with a larger organization, intended to strike terror in the hearts of ordinary people in the name of some ideology is a terrorist act, then these three incidents could all be described as terrorism. If we restrict the definition of “terrorist acts” to those that are organized or at least directly assisted by a larger organization, then none of them are (though quite a few actions by governments would still fit the definition). But anyone who claims that the Waco and Boston incidents were terrorism but Charleston was not is quite simply full of it. The truth is, right-wing radicals are much more of a threat to the average American than groups like ISIL, though lone nuts of any stripe are a danger – and much more so when guns are easily available.

Getting back to the Confederate flag and the efforts to get removed from public places all around the southern US, I would first like to note that not only did I myself grow up in Texas, but many of my ancestors, at least on the paternal side, were Southerners, and quite a few fought for the Confederacy. My great-great-great grandfather in the direct paternal line, a German immigrant to Texas just after it joined the US, was an officer in the Confederate army, and several other ancestors fought on the Confederate side elsewhere in the South. The battle of Shiloh was fought at least in part on land belonging to members of one of my ancestral lines, the Cantrells. A number of my ancestors were slave owners as well (it’s also probable that at least one very distant ancestor was a slave himself, though that’s another story – and in any case some of the slave owners and Confederate soldiers in my ancestry would have been his descendants). As a matter of fact, I don’t know for certain of any ancestors who fought for the Union, though it’s possible some on my mother’s side did (most of her paternal ancestors were presumably living in the North at the time of the Civil War, though her maternal ancestors didn’t come until after 1900). So my own heritage is much more closely tied to the Confederacy than the Union.

Does this mean that I think the Confederate flag should be flying at state capitols around the South? Not at all. Though they themselves may have been unaware of it, the cause for which my Confederate ancestors fought was wrong. Despite the nonsensical arguments of pro-Confederate apologists, that cause was clearly slavery. Or as someone put it the other day, claiming it was about states’ rights is at best an incomplete statement of the reality, as it was about a particular “states’ right”, namely the right of states to keep slavery legal. This is clear from not only from the history of the years leading up to the Civil War, which were full of struggles between the North and South over slavery (the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and so forth), but the articles of secession of the various Confederate States, which repeatedly cited slavery. Then there was the Cornerstone Speech of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, in which he talked of how founders of the US like Thomas Jefferson considered slavery “wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically” and an “evil” that would disappear over time, then went on to say that they were “fundamentally wrong”, because their thinking “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.” Stephens (who ironically opposed secession before the war and worked for peace in the later years of the war) declared this to be an error, and that “our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Since the Confederate leaders explicitly stated that slavery was a major – even the major – motivation for their rebellion, claiming otherwise reflects either a complete ignorance of the history Confederate apologists claim to honor, or else a highly disingenuous attempt to whitewash history.

Of course, the North didn’t necessarily treat black people all that much better than the South did, and that was still true long after the war. Their ways of mistreating them were just different. My mother often cites an African-American saying that reflects this: “In the South white folks don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too big. But in the North they don't care how big you get as long as you don't get too close." As late as the 1970s, Randy Newman could still skewer this Northern hypocrisy in his song “Rednecks”. But the fact that many Northerners were both racists and hypocrites doesn’t change the basic fact that the Confederate flag is the symbol of a rebellion that was fought for the right to keep other people as slaves, and even in later years it was used as a symbol of racism (after all, South Carolina only raised it over their capitol building in the 1960s as a symbol of defiance against efforts to end segregation). It isn’t just that Dylann Roof “misused” the flag; the flag itself is inherently steeped in racist ideology. And it isn’t enough to say that it’s “part of our history” either. After all, the flag of the Third Reich is part of Germany’s history, but that doesn’t mean that Germans (other than neo-Nazi idiots) raise it in public. Even when I was young and ignorant (i.e., politically conservative), I found it vaguely disturbing that a popular show like The Dukes of Hazzard (which to be honest I never really watched) prominently featured a car named the “General Lee” with a big Confederate flag on it. If people in the South want to find a symbol of resistance against oppression by corrupt government officials, they can surely due better than a flag that itself stood for the oppression of an entire people in the interest of wealthy landowners.

Finally, I should note, as many others have, that just removing the Confederate flags is far from sufficient. The racism, both subtle and blatant, that still exists throughout the US (not just in the South) has to be addressed as well, as do the many other problems faced by African-Americans in particular due to the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Even if we’re only talking about historical symbols, aside from removing the flags, Southern states would do well to start changing the names of all the roads and buildings named after some of the most notorious pro-slavery leaders. But removing the flags, while a very small step, is nevertheless a step in the right direction.

Pope Francis and Climate Change

The Catholic Church has a long history, and in much of that time it has not been a force for good, but rather has stood for corruption, repression and stubborn conservatism. Even in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century work, the portrayal of the church is for the most part very negative. In modern times, the Catholic Church retains some exceptionally backward ideas about contraception, women, and homosexuality, among other things. I remember once years ago when Time magazine selected Pope John Paul II as its Man of the Year, one political cartoonist parodied their choice by drawing a magazine with John Paul II on the cover as Man of the Year, but with the name of the magazine changed to Behind the Times. While for the most part the Catholic Church is not nearly as radically right wing as many evangelical Protestant churches, given its size as the single largest Christian denomination in the world and indeed the world’s largest hierarchally-organized religious sect, with the Pope exercising ultimate religious authority over a billion people, its conservative bent has meant has acted as a major hindrance to progress on many issues. In other words, my overall view of the Catholic Church has tended to be negative. However, this has changed somewhat since Pope Francis took charge. While the Catholic Church still has many negatives, Francis has shown that with the right kind of leadership it can still be a strong force for good, a message he has reinforced with his recently released encyclical on climate change and the environment.

In the short time he has been in charge, Francis has managed to drastically change the image of the Catholic Church and the tone of its pronouncements, even if the substance of its teachings has not changed much. To a large degree, this has been due to a change in emphasis. Past Popes like John Paul II and Benedict XVI seemed to focus much more on defending some of the Church’s more conservative positions, such as its views on contraception, abortion and homosexuality. Francis, while not actually abandoning or contradicting these positions, except to express greater tolerance of those with views contrary to the Church’s teachings, has chosen to emphasize issues such as social justice and fighting poverty, areas where even in the past the Church has done much good. The problem in past years has been that the Vatican and much of the rest of the hierarchy has seemed to care much less about social justice than fighting for socially conservative positions or even covering up its own flaws, such as all the sexual abuse scandals that have come to light in past years. Symptomatic of this warped emphasis is the fact that many priests who had been found to be guilty of sexual abuse went unpunished, while one American nun who performed an emergency abortion in a hospital to save a woman’s life was excommunicated, though she was eventually reinstated. Another example is the case of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the American association of nuns that was punished by the Vatican for placing too much emphasis on social justice rather than the church’s teachings on issues such as abortion. However, despite initially allowing the inquiry (or perhaps we should say Inquisition) into the group’s work to continue, he ended it in April of this year and met with a delegation of the nuns for almost an hour. Also, he has removed some of the more conservative church officials from power and seems to genuinely be attempting to change the Church’s overall direction, thereby allowing it to play a more positive role in society.

This latest encyclical is a powerful example of the kind of positive role the Church can play in the world under Francis’s leadership. In essence, Francis has declared that fighting climate change and protecting the environment is a moral issue, one that it is intimately tied to fighting poverty and struggling for social justice, as it is the poor and disadvantaged of the world that will suffer – indeed are already suffering – from the effects of climate change, which, as he notes, is "a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods [that] represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day". He reviews the scientific consensus on climate change and points out the urgency of doing something about it now, noting "it is remarkable how weak international political responses have been". He condemns the short-sighted greed that has led to not only to our continued pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere despite our growing awareness of the harm they are causing but also other sorts of environmental destruction in so much of the world and declares that we need to radically adjust our priorities. He calls out over-consumption by the wealthy nations of the world as being a major cause of our current problems and calls on people to stop viewing endless economic growth and acquisition of material goods as “progress”, but instead to work to improve quality of life. Indeed, aside from being a much needed call to action on climate change, the encyclical is also an indictment of the entire system of rampant capitalism that ruins the environment and tramples on the poor and disadvantaged in the name of short term profit, as "economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain". He notes that claims that God gave the world to humans to exploit at will are bad theology, arguing "we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures", as it is clear that the Bible calls on humans to be good stewards of the Earth and its resources and that "responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world."

While I have not read the entire encyclical (and at 191 pages I may not ever get around to doing so), I agree pretty much completely with all the excerpts and paraphrases I’ve seen so far, with one notable exception, one that shows that Francis, for all his progressive pronouncements, still holds to some of the Church’s more backward teachings. At one point, he criticizes the view that overpopulation is to blame for the environmental problems we face and that we just need to limit population growth. Of course, few if any people with an understanding of the issues believes that overpopulation alone is the problem or halting population growth alone is the solution. Of course, as Francis says, over-consumption, waste and inequality, not to mention the short-sighted pursuit of profits that leads people to extract and burn destructive fossil fuels rather than search for alternatives, are at least as much the issue as population, if not more. There is no question that we could easily feed, clothe, house and educate all of the world’s seven billion plus people if we distributed our resources more equitably and used them more wisely. But it is also unquestionable that this would be much easier if there were far fewer people, and it will become much harder if the population keeps increasing at anything near the current rate. While so far our food production has managed to keep pace with our population growth, thanks to innovations such as the “green revolution” in agriculture, it is foolish to just assume it will continue to do so. No matter how environmentally sustainable our lifestyles, seven billion people cannot help but create a rather substantial strain on the Earth’s carrying capacity and great pressure on the habitats of other species, and of course it will be worse with eight, nine or ten billion. So even if we do everything else Francis suggests, population growth must still be restrained – not coercively, like in China, but through education and read availability of contraceptives and other forms of birth control, especially to women. This of course is the unspoken reason for Francis’s dismissal of overpopulation as an issue; admitting it was a problem would be an admission that the Church’s teaching on contraception is wrong and even harmful. While Francis appears to be far more willing than his predecessors to tolerate the use of contraception by Catholics, already quite common despite the Church’s position on them, he doesn’t seem to be prepared to actually overturn this, probably the most harmful of the Church’s teachings.

But despite this one notable flaw, if Catholics and even non-Catholics could take what the encyclical teaches to heart, the world would definitely be a better place. Of course, many will not, and even before its release right-wingers, conservatives, climate deniers, fossil fuel profiteers and others (many of which groups also happened to be targets for sharp criticism in the encyclical), began attacking it. Catholic Republicans like Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush questioned the appropriateness of the Pope addressing an issue such as climate change, saying he should stick to moral teachings. This is despite Francis’s convincing framing of human stewardship of the Earth as a moral issue, which makes at least as much logical sense than declaring homosexuality or even contraception to be a moral issue – indeed, I would say that these two only become a moral issue when people attack the former or try to reduce availability of the latter, because it is such attacks that are immoral. These Republican critics decry the Pope getting involved in what they call a “political” issue, but they don’t seem to object to the Church making pronouncements on abortion, which is at least as much a political issue as climate change. Indeed, as everything is some sense political, saying the Church should not express a viewpoint on political issues is tantamount to saying it should not express a viewpoint on anything. Furthermore, climate change is, or should be, much less a political issue than it is; it is only the climate deniers who reject the overwhelming scientific evidence who make it into a political issue. Or rather, the real political issue with climate change is not whether to do something about it, but what exactly we should do, and how we should distribute responsibility for taking action.

It’s worth pointing out that while the extreme right wing views of certain prominent Catholics like Santorum, Bush, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, or the various Catholic leaders who spoke against the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act might give the impression that most American Catholics take very conservative positions on issues such as climate change or homosexuality, polls show that in fact Francis’s position on climate change is more in accord with most American Catholics than with these political “leaders”, and many also support same-sex marriage (something that is true of many Catholics in other countries as well, with Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland being leaders in legalizing same-sex marriage). As is the case with the views of American Jews on Israel, where most ordinary Jews support a negotiated two-state solution and are willing to see Israel receive constructive criticism but many major Jewish organizations (with the notable exception of J Street) take a hardline position that admits of no criticism of Israel, it seems sometimes that the most extreme Catholics are the loudest and so give a misleading impression of the views of Catholics in general (for that matter, the same is true of Protestants, as many mainline Protestant churches favor action on climate change and support same-sex marriage, unlike some of the most outspoken Protestants who wave their opposition like a banner).

This encyclical, with its broad acceptance of the scientific consensus and its solid summary of the science itself, is also a reminder that despite some of the black marks in its past like the suppression of Galileo and the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, Catholics as individuals and even the Church itself has often played a positive role in advancing science. Many important scientific ideas, including genetics and the Big Bang, were first proposed by Catholics, and the Church itself accepts basic scientific ideas such as evolution, unlike many evangelical Protestants. Francis, who apparently has a background in chemistry, has consulted widely with scientists on climate change and indeed seems to have almost as much of a personal interest in science as the Dalai Lama, a religious leader who he has much in common with. Both of them accept that it makes no sense for religion to attempt to oppose itself to science, but rather to use science to help find ways to make the world a better place. With this encyclical on climate change, Francis has helped point out to both Catholics and non-Catholics ways in which we can work together to do just that.