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“He didn’t get fat by accident.” - Top Chef

Much like the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, there are certain truths I hold to be self-evident. Delaying legislation is tantamount to inaction. The bulk of media content is crap. Some entity — I don’t care if it’s UNICEF, the Federal Reserve, or The Gap — should show its concern for the appearance of humanity by offering a program providing yoga pants to anyone trading capri pants. They’ve got to be comparably comfortable, and they’re universally more flattering. This list isn’t exhaustive, but you get the idea: everyone’s clings to his or her own foundational notions.

Not long ago, the current Pope — who completed his term in the Hitler Youth long before gaining his infallibility — invited any number of Anglicans to adjust their personal truths in such a way as might recognize the Holy Father as their telegraph line to the cosmic supervisor. What’s difficult to know is whether, in a world where the U.S. is prosecuted a pair of military imbroglios abroad while debating health care, energy, and finance reform domestically, the nuanced relations between Catholics and semi-Catholics merit much attention.

Of course, it’s big news in Britain, and Catholics are rapt. It has yet to be seen whether anyone else is willing to undertake learning enough about the Catholic organizational structure to care. If Georgetown’s data are to be believed, however, much of the American populace is not only aware of the structure in question but also potentially affected by the Papal invitation.

Then again, anecdotal evidence makes one look askance at the Georgetown numbers. I may not know the Catechism, the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation, or how the Crucifixion made it okay to eat bacon and shellfish (with cheese and cream sauce, no less), but I do know how to read a table and process arithmetic. According to that table, just over one-fifth of all Americans are nominal Catholics, and about 1 American in 12 attends Catholic Mass at least once a week. Do they live in secluded enclaves or something? I resided within throwing distance of Georgia Tech’s Catholic Center for a number of years, and I can assure you that nowhere near the 1,000 or so undergraduates who would have represented 1/12th of enrollment were in attendance every Sunday. In the years since leaving the immediate locus of Catholicism, I have repeatedly been in the presence of 11 other people, and rarely have any of us been Papal acolytes. Such experiences may not substantively refute Georgetown’s statistics, but, as I said, they make a person skeptical. These are, after all, the same priests who educated Allen Iverson; mistakes have been made.

Among interested parties, perspectives vary widely. Ross Douthat [Note: Here is an explanation of why I provide no link.] thinks this is part of a Papal effort to unify Christendom against Islam. Perhaps because the prospect of global holy war troubles sensible people, this doesn’t appear to be a widely-touted interpretation. Rather, as the good people at NPR explain in the course of considering many things, mainstream discourse centers on the question of whether the Pope is attempting to poach parishioners or provide sanctuary to Anglicans troubled by the Episcopalian Church’s egalitarian shift away from heteronormative patriarchy. Considering this earlier report on a large group of conservative American Anglicans seeking to put some organizational distance between themselves and the Episcopal power structure, the latter reading may not be as subjective as it first appears.

Regardless, having gone through the motions, I find myself unimpressed with this entire drama. Were any real progress being made in Congress, I would have found a better topic for this post.

As you may have noticed, however, this subject matter has offered plenty of excuse to make light of organized religion. Should you find my levity to be unduly irreverent, then you might prefer to view Collision, a soon-to-be-released film taken from footage of the debate tour staged by Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson. In my capacity as reporter of the well-known, I’ll say that Hitchens takes religion — and his distaste for it — at least as seriously as he takes his Scotch.

Also in related news, the French appear to have determined that Scientology is a cult rather than a religion. Much as they do in preparations for continental war, they follow the Germans’ lead in this matter. Not to be seen as failing their cultural stereotypes, however, the French have found the Church of Scientology guilty of poorly-defined cult-like behavior, whereas the Germans simply force the Church to operate as a business rather than a religion.

What’s curious, to my mind, is why all religions aren’t treated as businesses. Do they not provide a service in return for a user-determined fee? Do they not accrue resources, pay employees, and support political candidates/issues? Why should someone called to industrial research be taxed differently than someone called to espouse unsubstantiated oral histories? Think on that and get back to me.

“Well, I don’t know how many years on this Earth I got left. I’m gonna get real weird with it.” - It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

[Note: Obviously, I began this post last week and then set it aside. Intervening circumstances caused some delay, but it's here now, so try not to complain.]

Early last week, Politico reported that the Tea Party yahoos have moved from protesting progress to promoting prospective pols in opposition to Republicans they feel have failed to display the requisite zeal in obstructing reform efforts. Personally, I can sympathize with people trying to keep Carly Fiorina from becoming part of the C-SPAN cast, but all Charlie Crist did to draw their ire was accept federal funds to keep his state afloat. Some people just aren’t satisfied with moderated irrationality.

These aren’t the first trappings of material dissent within the Republican Party. There was already work being done by free market fundamentalists such as the Club for Growth, American Enterprise Institute, and Heritage Foundation. As you may recall, it was the threat of a thus-funded challenger that caused Arlen Specter to flee the Republican Party. One has yet to see whether the people who thought it was a good idea to purchase bagged tea and dump in on the floor of a secluded D.C. conference room to protest, umm, taxes(?) will be able to play nicely with the people who think government needs to stop preventing the country’s wealth distribution from becoming as top-heavy as possible.

At the moment, the aptly named Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks know-nothing propaganda machine appear to have hornswaggled the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. The district has been represented by a Republican for the duration of its existence, but the 3rd-party Conservative candidate is now drawing enough support to leave the Democrat, Owens, with a slight lead. Not since Ross Perot has conservative cannibalism so well served the national interests.

However, there are more interesting questions to ask than the outcome of NY 23. Late last month, I speculated on what might be motivating the inchoate rage of the populist right, and the intervening weeks have brought more data to bear on such speculation.

Last week, for instance, 538 included a handy chart in their post on the impact of different demographics’ level of reverence for authority on American politics. Unfortunately, what they didn’t touch — but one imagines is explained in the cited book — is how a person, institute, or document gains legitimacy as an authority. For instance, one would imagine that the government would be recognized as an authoritative body, yet, the profile of a authority-seeker coincides with a description of current Republican Party, which is avowedly anti-government. They are Southern, rural, uneducated, and Evangelically Christian.

Perhaps the answer lies in the data accumulated by Jonathon Haidt and others at YourMorals.org (YM). By breaking down morality into 5 components and asking participants to declare their political leanings, the academics at YM have determined that liberals are more concerned with harm and fairness while conservatives are more riled by affronts to loyalty, authority, and purity. Those findings would certainly seem to jibe with the rhetoric of self-proclaimed Constitutional conservatives, who might see all but the foundational documents of federal government to be devices of adulteration. The only problem with such thinking is that it’s a step back from democracy as such, choosing to imbue what is oldest with the kind of regency once allowed to monarchs.

While we’re on the topic of who or what might be oldest, let’s discuss a more recent 538 post, which includes a whole slew of fancy, color-coded maps. Andrew Gelman uses them to navigate the impacts of age and income level on one’s opinion about federal health care spending. Along the way, however, he happens to illustrate quite clearly that young people identify as liberal and poor people identify as Democrats. Assuming dialectical definitions, that means that wealthier folks are Republicans and conservatism tends to come with age. That might be why you’ve never heard of the Gray Panthers.

You know what else comes with age? Racism. In the August issue of the American Sociological Review, Dr. Robert Kunovich uses data from the International Social Survey Program to examine the factors that contribute to one’s sense of national identity. [Abstract here] In the course of doing so, he delineates between ethnic and civic factors. Ethnic factors include ancestry, location of birth, and religion; civic factors include language fluency, the feeling of membership, and respect for laws and institutions. Although the majority of participants revealed a preference for civic national identity, the preference for ethnically-defined identity rose progressively with respondents’ age.

What does it all mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe I’ve just spent a few hundred words saying that conservatives are conservative. Maybe the correlation between age and ethnic identity draws on data skewed by populations around the world who were traumatized by violent ethnic conflicts in previous decades.

If I thought that were the case, then this post would be joining the ranks of those left to rot, unpublished, on my rented server space. There’s plenty of room.

We already know that the democratic landscape is becoming more stratified, and the median age of the American citizenry is rising. Among the many problems related to these developments is the prospect that a plurality of registered voters will begin to take a more reactionary view of what constitutes legitimate government and a narrower view of who might be “real” Americans. Either of these developments could lead national discourse far off track in the coming decades, when we’ll have plenty of real duties to discharge, both foreign and domestic.

“And I have made my own little effort to point out how the House and Senate Republicans consistently make progress almost impossible — even progress in directions they actually approve of deep down in their teeny little hearts.” - Gail Collins

Max Baucus’ neutered health care proposal escaped committee. Before anyone runs off to throw a commensurately drab party, we might note that there are a few more items on the national agenda. Considering that the editorial John Kerry and Lindsey Graham wrote for the New York Times has already provoked analysis from the inimitable Nate Silver, climate change and its accoutrement would would seem to be the next issue to share the zeitgeist with our ongoing military interventions.

One assumes the editorial outlines a prospective bill. In case you don’t feel like reading it, here’s a brief recap:

1. Climate change is real and scary. We recognize the need to diminish carbon emissions, but really, in all seriousness, we’re ready to bend over backwards to make sure industrial corporations don’t face disincentives to doing business.
2. Wind and solar are neat. Also, there are way too many constraints to building nuclear reactors. Let’s loosen those silly regulations and find some smart people claiming to research nuclear waste disposal. We’d like to throw some money at them.
3. As long as we’re talking about climate change, let’s throw some money at people claiming to develop “clean coal” technology. There’s plenty to burn in the mines right here at home, and we shouldn’t let a silly thing like the end of life as we know it keep us from shoveling it into our power plants. While we’re on the subject, let’s find a way to sell or lease some more off-shore drilling rights.
4. Admittedly, we’ve been a little slow on the uptake when it comes to developing cleaner energy technologies. Since some other countries have already begun developing said technologies in earnest, let’s slap tariffs on the goods they export to us. That probably wouldn’t start a trade war.
5. Did we mention that we’re ready to bend over backwards to keep our proposed nominal emissions disincentives from raising costs to energy and other corporations? Yeah, we’re really serious about that part.

Before we start picking these points apart, let’s take a deep breath and remember that the Waxman-Markey Bill (a.k.a. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009) has already passed in the House and has yet to be formally dismantled by the Senate. In other words, it would seem that what Kerry and Graham propose is an alternative to reasonable legislation already wending its way through Congress. I’m not saying that our would-be House of Lords can be expected to ratify Waxman-Markey, but a person might see offering an alternative as prematurely conceding defeat.

Now, let’s talk about what Kerry and Graham actually do have to say. They’re take on creating a system to phase out emissions’ role as an economic externality is much like that of the Knights Who Say Ni; they want something that looks nice but is “not too expensive.” Considering that the point of pricing emissions is to make them cost-prohibitive, such a system seems self-defeating. Perhaps the Senators were poorly briefed.

Earlier this year, our little clique had a discussion about nuclear energy and waste. [here and here; hat tips to Burnham, Sack, and Miles] Allow a moment to revisit and update that exchange.

Notwithstanding the fact that Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer might make a better Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid has acquired for his constituency an enduring block on implementation of Yucca Mountain as a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. Nonetheless, if this article from the May/June issue of Miller-McCune is to be believed, we already have the capacity to store about as much nuclear waste as could conceivably be domestically produced. There doesn’t seem to be much need for such temporary on-site storage as is currently undertaken, but maybe that’s part of the regulatory reform Kerry and Graham are seeking.

Of course, that doesn’t ameliorate the hairy issue of unmarked trains and trucks transporting nuclear waste along commercial routes. They claim those containers are more or less impenetrable/indestructible, but if that were really the case, then there wouldn’t be such a clamor to bury them in non-porous mineral caverns. I won’t belabor the point.

Perhaps the most important point to be made is that, even in the absence of regulatory delay, it takes something like a decade to get a nuclear power plant online. Also, we would need to build an enormous amount of them, if they’re to substantially diminish the amount of power derived from fossil fuels. In other words, Kerry and Graham want to keep burning outlandish amounts of fuel for the foreseeable future and then be more or less locked into the production of large amounts of nuclear waste for the proceeding decades. Not only are nuclear plants difficult to take off-line, but the people who built them would need to keep them running at least long enough to recoup the initial capital investment.

Anyone, including the Senators in question, is free to discard the notion that sustainable energy sources such as wind and solar aren’t viable. The system Graham and Kerry propose, however, essentially discards the possibility that those sources might become viable in the next half-century without saying as much. At the very least, this cedes the research and development of those technologies to Europe and Asia, and that sounds like a sub-optimal course of action, economically.

Meanwhile, they want to the U.S. to host more off-shore oil exploration. This was a popular idea at last year’s Republican National Convention, but it’s a great example of people getting enthusiastic about a proposal that only sounds good in its most simplistic articulation.

For starters, let’s recognize what we’re really discussing. The government is not in the business of drilling oil. What these gentlemen are proposing is the offering of more off-shore oil rights leases. Much like the nuclear power issue, this is a plan that takes a number of years to implement. The ocean is big. How big? Well, a Pacific oil rights lease usually covers a 3-mile square. First a company has to be convinced that square is worth acquiring, then it has to do enough exploration to confirm its beliefs and divine the ideal places to drill. At that point, it can begin the arduous process of erecting a platform and drilling underwater. If that doesn’t strike you as a dodgy enough prospect, then you might be reminded that such endeavors proceed only so long as they’re validated by economic and resource projections.

Moreover, one has to wonder what’s wrong with the ocean floor already available for drilling. As this map [PDF] shows, roughly a quarter of the Gulf of Mexico has already been leased to the private sector. Looking at this map [PDF] — which is similar but more detailed — one sees that, with the exception of coastline between Mobile and Mexico, those 37-odd million acres are largely inactive in terms of drilling. It’s quite unclear how anyone besides the oil companies would benefit from providing more stock of prospective resources before the current stock has been exhausted far enough to create demand.

As somewhat of an aside, those of you in a “blame Reagan” mood (as I invariably am) might enjoy shaking your fists while reading this article, which outlines changes made to leasing policy during the early ’80’s. [Spoiler Alert!] Those changes diminished demand-side competition and lowered the rent paid to the government.

This post has gotten long, and one is reluctant to dignify the notion of “clean coal.” Considering that coal is one of the few resources of which the U.S. still holds an extensive stock, making coal emission-free is a very appealing idea. Unfortunately, it’s much farther from the reality in which we live than is a wind- and solar-based electrical infrastructure.

All right, this may be incomplete, but I’d already begun drafting something completely different before this rant came to mind. Look forward to more analysis of partisanship, demographics, and the notion of nationality in the relatively near future.