I haven’t been posting regularly for several weeks now, so I thought it was time to give this site’s legions of loyal readers (LOL!) an update on what has bee going on.

For better or worse, it appears that for the time being I simply do not have the resources to continue to maintain the site in the fashion in which I had hoped to operate it. This may change in the coming months, depending on the disposition of some assets in which I have an interest.  If a transaction involving those assets is completed, I may be able to resume the site’s activities in the weeks or months ahead.

In the meantime, the site will have to remain dormant, and eventually it may have to be taken down completely.  Watch this space for further news.  I invite readers to search the index at the left of the homepage for features and posts that may be of interest. . . .

The “tea party” activists think they are getting a raw deal from the media these days.  Fair enough: one, two or a dozen instances of incendiary rhetoric do not necessarily make for a trend.

A more serious vein of criticism is suggested by remarks contained in a Washington Post article from this past Thursday. The piece focused upon Tennessee farmer and Republican Congressional hopeful Stephen Fincher, who “could be a perfect ‘tea party’ candidate: a gospel-singing cotton farmer … seeking to right the listing ship of Washington with a commitment to lower taxes and smaller government.”

There’s just one problem: “Fincher accepts roughly $200,000 in farm subsidies each year.”

One supporter of Fincher sees no problem. “He is for getting the budget balanced. He does not want this health care. He is right in line with the views we are holding true to.” Another says: “I don’t see the agricultural subsidy thing as an issue at all … If it were an issue, then we would never elect a farmer to Congress at all. Because basically, most farmers get agriculture subsidies. If they didn’t, they’d be broke, and we’d be buying our food from China.” In his own defense, the candidate says: “People are quick to say with their mouth full, ‘Well, the American farmer is on the dole.’… But a loaf of bread is two bucks when it could be 10 bucks. I know what it is with the government in my business. We would be all for not having government in our business, but we need a fair system.”

These people represent themselves as tribunes of the oppressed masses, but what they really are, are affulent voters who haven’t thought through the implications of their own libertarianism. They’re not being oppressed. Their opposition to the health-care reform legislation borders on the hysterical. In their own detached and disinterested opinion, they’re overtaxed.

Somewhere in a trailer park, there’s a family with a kid on a respirator, and no health insurance. They’d like a “fair system” in health care, just as Mr. Fincher wants a “fair system” in agriculture.  I wonder whether he is aware that libertarians will belittle the invocation of “fairness” in either case.  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander….

On the whole, I tend to look at the representations of climate-change skeptics with a skeptical eye, as regular visitors to this site will have noted. For me, the skepticism smacks too much of a corporate public-relations campaign, going back two or three decades.  On the other hand, it was no less of a thinker than John Stuart Mill who reminded us of the benefits of freewheeling debate, involving even the views of those we might regard as absolutely repugnant.  In that spirit, a lengthy feature posted last week on the English-language website of German newsmagazine Der Spiegel merits close attention.  Highlights:

– The reputation of the Nobel-prizewinning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been compromised. “In mid-March, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon slammed on the brakes and appointed a watchdog for the IPCC…. There is already a consensus today that deep-seated reforms are needed at the IPCC. The selection of its authors and reviewers was not sufficiently nonpartisan, there was not enough communication among the working groups, and there were no mechanisms on how to handle errors.” In Germany, the prestigious Leibniz Association has called for the resignation of IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri.

– Reconstruction of global temperatures from historical records is extremely complicated. “At a number of weather stations, temperatures rose because houses and factories had been built around them. Elsewhere, stations were moved and, as a result, suddenly produced different readings.” Due to these and other complicating factors, the data had to be “homogenized” by means of statistical methods.  Unfortunately, British climatologist Phil Jones, one of the principals in the “Climategate” affair, admitted under pressure from climate-change skeptics that he “had deleted his notes on how he performed the homogenization. This means that it is not possible to reconstruct how the raw data turned into his temperature curve.” Pressure is building to “start from scratch” on the calculation of the global temperature curve — a process that could take years.

– The latest estimates indicate that, even in the face of ongoing warming, an increase in the incidence of “monster storms” such as Hurricane Katrina is not to be expected. “According to the models, the high latitudes will heat up more substantially than the equatorial zones (which also explains why climate change is already so visible in the Arctic regions). On balance, temperature differences on the Earth’s surface will decrease, which in turn will even reduce wind speeds — meaning the much-feared monster storms are unlikely to materialize.”

– Climate change may produce winners as well as losers. Canada, Russia, and Germany may benefit from a more temperate climate.  On the other hand, subtropical regions, including the southern United States, Australia, South Africa, and such Mediterranean countries as Spain, Italy and Greece may suffer from more frequent drought conditions.

The feature concludes with the thoughts of German climatologist Hans von Storch: “Climate change isn’t going to happen overnight. We still have enough time to react.” That’s not inconsistent with the position staked out elsewhere on this site….

Attentive regular visitors to this site will notice that the overnight press reviews have been removed from the right sidebar. I am discontinuing the feature for the time being. This will enable me to enjoy more regular sleeping hours, and to devote more time to conventional blog posts.

As I mentioned in a recent post, visitors to the site will have noticed that blog posts have been less frequent, going back to late last month. I have felt compelled to pull back from my more frequent posting, at least for a few weeks. The performance of the site in terms of visitors and advertising clicks has not been proportionate to the effort I have been putting into it. Therefore, for a few weeks I will be blogging less frequently, perhaps once or twice a week. In the meantime, the site will be revamped, and I am contracting for a public-relations service that should help to bring it to the attention of more readers. Furthermore, I will be relocating operations, which will disrupt the operation of the site when the time comes.

I expect, then, to be pulling back on the frequency of blog posts for a period of 90 to 120 days. I may be able to post a couple of features and/or interviews during that time. Otherwise, there will be a reduction in posting activity on the site, but I will not be leaving it completely dormant, as I had to do from late 2008 until almost a year later.

Expect to see a revamped site with frequent daily blogging sometime in June or July. Until then, watch this space for more news….

Posted Wednesday, February 10 at 12:23 AM CST, 1:23 AM EST, 0623 GMT.

Top editorial and op-ed commentaries in the Wednesday editions of the leading U. S. newspapers:

1) In the Wall Street Journal, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, along with John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, offers “Ten GOP Health Ideas for Obama.” Among the ideas: “The current taxation of health insurance is arbitrary and unfair, giving lavish subsidies to some, like those who get Cadillac coverage from their employers, and almost no relief to people who have to buy their own…. A step in the right direction would be to give Americans the choice of a generous tax credit or the ability to deduct the value of their health insurance up to a certain amount…. Employers should be encouraged to provide employees with insurance that travels with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Also, individuals should have the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines. When insurers compete for consumers, prices will fall and quality will improve.”

2) In the WSJ, Ralph Nader, along with Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, responds to the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision on campaign finance. “The court majority, self-styled believers in precedent and judicial restraint, overturned two major Supreme Court decisions and reversed decades of campaign-finance laws aimed at preventing corporations from having undo influence over local, state and national elections…. In the absence of a future court overturning Citizens United, the fundamental response should be a constitutional amendment. We must exclude all commercial corporations and other artificial commercial entities from participating in political activities…. Corporations are not humans. They do not vote. They should not be accorded a constitutional right to influence elections or public policies, especially given their enormous embedded privileges and immunities compared to real people.” Nader and Weissman also call for the passage of Fair Elections Now Act to provide federal funding for congressional campaigns.

3) In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman recounts his recent discussions with prominent Yemenis in the public and private sectors. “Most had been educated in America or had kids studying there, and they were all bemoaning how the decline of the Yemeni education system, the proliferation of exclusively religious schools here and the falloff in scholarships for Yemeni kids to study in America were producing a very different Yemeni generation than their own. They spoke fondly of U.S. schools that were based on merit, taught them to think freely and prepared them with the skills to thrive.” Friedman also had the opportunity to participate in a venerable Yemeni tradition. “Qat is the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work — and sometimes during. My hosts insisted that qat actually makes your senses sharper and that you could chew and chisel the top of a mosque minaret at the same time. I quit after 15 minutes, but the Yemeni officials, lawmakers and businessmen I was with chewed on for three hours — and they made a lot of sense along the way.”

Sunday was a big day for sports fans. My buddy, John Lambremont, who toils as an attorney and part-time poet in Baton Rouge, is a long-suffering Saints supporter who has come up with some reflections in rhyme. I’m sure he won’t mind if I share his handiwork with readers of this site.

I’ve just posted here an interview with Frank Schaeffer — screenwriter, film director, and son of conservative Christian theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer. Frank Schaeffer was a prominent Religious Right activist along with his father, but later in life he has abandoned some of his earlier views. I think readers will find the interview fascinating….

Posted Monday, December 21 at 4:23 AM CST, 5:23 AM EST, 1023 GMT.

Top editorial and op-ed commentaries in the Monday editions of the leading U. S. newspapers:

1) In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson expresses apprehension at the prospect of passage of the emerging health-care reform bill. “Obama’s plan amounts to this: partial coverage of the uninsured; modest improvements (possibly) in their health; sizable budgetary costs worsening a bleak outlook; significant, unpredictable changes in insurance markets; weak spending control. This is a bad bargain. Health benefits are overstated, long-term economic costs understated. The country would be the worse for this legislation’s passage.”

2) In the WP, E. J. Dionne calls upon progressives to rally around the health-care bill. The watering down of the bill, which has provoked scorn from the left, was “not the product of some magic show in which more conservative senators are endowed with mysteriously ingenious negotiating abilities while liberals are a bunch of bunglers. The whole system is biased to the right because the Senate itself — a body in which Wyoming and Utah have as much representation as New York and California — is tilted in a conservative direction…. In light of this, the notion that letting the current health-care bill perish would produce a more progressive bill later is preposterous…. Enactment of a single bill will not mark the end of the struggle. It will open a series of new opportunities. It’s a lot easier to improve a system premised on the idea that everyone should have health coverage than to create such a system in the first place.”

3) In the New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that the infighting over passage of the health-care reform bill demonstrates the need for reform of the U.S. Senate, especially the filibuster rule. “Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.”

4) In the NYT, Ross Douthat comments that the new cinematic release “Avatar” reflects both Hollywood’s propensity toward nature-worship and Americans’ tendency to pick and choose from among the components of various religious traditions. “We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,’ and a piping-hot apocalypse.”

Readers who consume right-of-center media may wonder why the claims of climate-change skeptics are not taken at face value on this site and elsewhere. For one thing, I would refer readers to an article posted on the Foreign Policy site last week by Annie Lowery.  Lowery: “Many of the climate researchers I contacted for this story seemed so wearied by the whole thing they could barely summon the energy to explain or comment on the incident. For, more than anything, the emails evince Jones and others scientists’ almost desperate desire to keep the wagons circled — not because the science is shaky, but because they feel the field is under siege. Indeed, in the past 20 or 30 years, climate change has become not just a scientific interest, but a lightening-rod [sic] political issue.”

Lowery consulted physicist Spencer Weart, who emphasized the significance of the 1995 “Leipzig Declaration,” an attack on the findings of climatologists which he characterized as “a political statement [which] helped turn lab-bound climate scientists into political actors on a global stage.” One specialist who produced commentaries for the Wall Street Journal editorial page was exposed by colleagues who revealed that “he was on the payroll of tobacco companies while arguing against the carcinogenic effects of second-hand smoke. The dialogue never got any nicer.”

Lowery: “And, particularly within the past 10 years, climatologists have faced increasing harassment: constant haranguing emails and hate mail; picketing at conventions; skeptical and inquisitive calls from Capitol Hill and think tanks and blogs; repeated Freedom of Information Act requests for datasets; even death threats. In turn, ’scandals’ accusing various scientists of falsifying data or colluding for political reasons have ever since arisen at critical decision-making moments, such as during governmental debates on policies like cap-and-trade.” The takeaway: “It seems probable that [Phil Jones,  of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit] and his colleagues believed internecine scientific disputes might be used as a cudgel by politically motivated skeptics. His defensiveness, in such a heated and politicized milieu, seems understandable if not defensible.”

Jones and his colleagues showed poor political judgment. However, I would argue that their sins pale beside those of their critics. The climatologists didn’t start the politicization of this issue. It was started a decade and a half or more ago, by purveyors of bought-and-paid-for opinion who willfully refused to admit the possibility of anthropocentric  global warming.

In evaluating a matter like this, citizens have to make judgments about who is trustworthy and who is not. If we assume that everybody is on the take, then it is impossible to make any judgment at all. Ad hominem considerations cannot be dismissed out of hand. If someone insists that “everything is a scam,” the significance of that statement could be what it reveals about the individual who makes it….

Bjorn Lomborg, whose views I have attempted to monitor fairly closely on this site, is out with a fairly lengthy essay on the English-language site of Der Spiegel, as the climate summit kicks off in Copenhagen.

One important point of emphasis for Lomborg is his estimate of the cost of mitigating climate change by means of short-to-intermediate-term emissions cuts such as those being contemplated at Copenhagen. As a point of comparison, the special report on climate change in the current issue of the London Economist can serve as a benchmark. The London publication accepts for the sake of argument the estimate of LSE economist Lord Stern, in a 2006 report prepared at the behest of Tony Blair, according to which an adequate mitigation could be achieved at a cost of 1% of world output annually. Lomborg accepts a much higher estimate by Richard Tol, to the effect that a carbon tax intended to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius “could reduce world GDP by a staggering 12.9% in 2100 — the equivalent of €27 trillion a year.”

In the current article, Lomborg is as outspoken as he has ever been on behalf of a crash R&D program on part of world governments to mitigate climate change by means of alternative energy sources. “The most effective policy response would be to dramatically increase public funds on research and development into non-CO2 based energy…. Research and development investments of around €66 billion a year will be needed. That is fifty-fold more than is spent by governments now, but a fraction of the cost of proposed carbon cuts…. We cannot rely on private enterprise. As with medical research, many of the required early, innovative breakthroughs will not reap significant financial rewards, so there is no strong incentive for private investment today…. Carbon taxes could play an important secondary role in supporting research and development.”

If Lomborg is serious about this, I hope he will think carefully about who his friends and enemies are.  I don’t know whether the mavens of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, for whom he has written a series of columns lately (this one being the latest), will take any more kindly to “green R&D” than they have to cap-and-trade.  I’m already seeing polemic directed against “green pork.” For instance, here is a broadside from Sunday’s Washington Post, by a columnist renowned for his bowtie and spectacles: “Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments’ attempts to manipulate Earth’s temperature now comprise one of the world’s largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies….”