OpenSpace4Life

Quick summary if you're in a hurry: Americans may be able to reverse the destruction of our civil liberties and ensure that the U.S. military can't lock us up and throw away the key, but unfortunately it involves getting Congress to act on our behalf, after they just did the reverse.  I think it's worth a try.  Please call your Senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011.
 
It's possible that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) isn't actually about to destroy the foundations of American freedom.  According to several sources including Time Magazine, the version of the NDAA now on its way to President Obama's desk "includes a Senate-passed compromise that says nothing in the legislation may be 'construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.'"  And while most blogs and online news sources* say otherwise, Mother Jones, usually a reliable source for progressive pessimism, claims that that language is enough to ensure that "if a future president does try to assert the authority to detain an American citizen without charge or trial, it won't be based on the authority in this bill."  A blogger on Daily Kos agrees, which makes two unlikely messengers telling us not to panic about the NDAA in particular.
 
But maybe this battle was already lost anyway.  The same Time article cited above also includes a quote from Senator Carl Levin claiming that "a June 2004 Supreme Court decision, in a case called Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, said U.S. citizens can be detained indefinitely."  (Levin is a Democrat, in case you were wondering.)  The same claim has been made about the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA), the bill that motivated me to invent the American Fascism Clock.  And Obama himself claims that the critical Section 1031 of the NDAA merely "attempts to expressly codify the detention authority that exists under the Authorization for Use of Military Force" (AUMF), which was passed on September 18, 2001.  (This argument has been used before to justify indefinite military detention of an actual U.S. citizen.)  If he's right, then the terrorists had already won their supposed "war on American freedom" only a week after it began.
 
And now is the time to reverse that victory, while we have at least some significant amount of media attention.  Senator Dianne Feinstein, who introduced the amendment mentioned above trying to limit the NDAA's impact on Americans, decided it was a good idea to make sure that the "existing law or authorities relating to the detention" of said Americans was clearly in keeping with the Bill of Rights (rather than being muddled by the AUMF, the Hamdi case, and/or the MCA), which is why she introduced the Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011 yesterday.  It contains one loophole: if our military arrests Americans vacationing in some other country, this bill won't ensure they get a trial or Habeas rights.  But it's still worth fighting very hard indeed to get the bill passed ASAP.  Please call your Senators!
 
Unlike the climate crisis, we actually have a lot of room to turn this one around.  As Time Magazine points out in the cover story defining "The Protester" as their 2011 Person of the Year: "In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. . .  The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City."  However pessimistic I may be about the current state of affairs in America, it's crystal clear that things could be a whole lot worse.
 
* Okay, that last link is to an opinion piece, but I included it because of the important point it makes: the NDAA includes a "ban on spending any money for civilian trials for any accused terrorist," meaning that even if the government wants to grant you due process after making some terrorism-related accusation against you, it effectively can't.

“We can
Each of us
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.”

-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

First the bad news: Obama wants to bring the unconstitutional policy of indefinite detention without trial home to American soil.  The argument for his position, prettified with the doublespeak phrase "prolonged detention," is that "Guantánamo’s remaining 240 detainees include cold-blooded jihadists and perhaps some so warped by their experience in custody that no president would be willing to free them . . . [but] some [of them] cannot be tried, in part for lack of evidence or because of tainted evidence."  The irony is palpable: we might need to keep holding some people indefinitely simply because they've grown to hate us so much for holding them indefinitely (and torturing them) that they would become dangerous terrorists if released.  This despite the fact that the government can't prove (without using "tainted" evidence, i.e. deeply classified and/or obtained under torture) that their prior actions even justified detaining them in the first place.

According to the ACLU, "Mr. Obama has not made the case persuasively that there is a worrisome category of detainees who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be convicted. The reason to have a criminal justice system at all, they say, is to trust it to decide who is guilty and who is not."  In short: Terrorists are criminals.  And yeah, occasionally our court system lets criminals go free by accident, including serial killers, arsonists, and other psychopaths.   But there's no sense in trying to make the system perfectly safe, because there's no such thing as perfection.  Our criminal justice system already ensures that these nightmare scenarios are extremely rare, while avoiding needless damage to our freedoms in the name of safety from criminals.  Obama says he's the president who listens to us, and he did listen on the liquid coal issue.  Now, we need to make him listen to this commonsense analysis.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is moving ahead.  A few committees will try to delay it, but Henry Waxman, one of its two authors, doesn't see any obstacle to getting it onto the full House floor this summer: "'I think we have a formidable coalition behind our legislation, and I think they will see the wisdom of some of our decisions. And then we're going to talk through where we have differences and then we'll resolve them.'"  Speaker Pelosi also "has said she wants to act in the House this year. Pelosi could force the legislation through the different committees by giving them time constraints and using the Rules Committee to combine the various sections."  And once the bill is brought to the floor, "House Majority Whip James Clyburn . . . [said] last week that he could find the 218 votes to pass the legislation."

Now, some groups such as Greenpeace and the Energy Action Coalition (sponsor of Power Shift) say that the fossil fuel industry has already hijacked this bill, ensuring that the greenhouse-emission reduction targets aren't good enough and the offset allowances will easily permit America's greenhouse emissions to keep rising (though much more slowly) for the next 20 years.  But in my opinion, we are much better off passing a somewhat inadequate bill than letting it die.  Once we finally have the precedent of Congressional willingness to pass real climate legislation, it will be much easier to get another one passed that will rectify those inadequacies.  After all, right now it's easy to despair and presume that Big Oil and Big Coal will never let us pass a climate bill.  But once it's been done before, that all changes.

"He had that sense, or inward prophecy -- which a yong man had better never have been born, than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once, than utterly to relinquish -- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old, bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave -- as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century, since the epoch of Adam's grandchildren -- that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew.

"As to the main point -- may we never live to doubt it! -- as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay, in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view, whether he himself should contend for or against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm, infusing itself through the calmness of his character . . . would serve to keep his youth pure, and make his aspirations high."

- The House of the Seven Gables (first published in 1851), pp. 158-9

Ah, you say, but our era really will be different. For one thing, we have six kinds of political and ecological catastrophe coming up, which, based on the J-curve principle*, will hopefully motivate us to make major improvements to our society. Plus, sooner or later we'll have superhuman AIs running loose on the Internet, and then who knows what will happen?

Oddly enough, Hawthorne sort of predicted that too:

"'Then there is electricity -- the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!' exclaimed Clifford. 'Is that a humbug, too? Is it a fact -- or have I dreamt it -- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!"

- The House of the Seven Gables p. 230

* In its general form: "Sometimes, things have to get worse before they get better."

So, Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize and somehow I haven't posted about it until now. Well, maybe I've been reading too much Glen Barry lately, but I'm beginning to wonder just how far Gore's and Leonardo DiCaprio's strategy of top-down activism will get us. That said, I'll still vote for Gore for President if he decides to run.

In possibly related news, the mayor of Redlands finally put the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement on the agenda of a City Council meeting yesterday. I'm hoping it has less to do with Gore's Peace Prize than with what the City Clerk briefly noted: the Council had received twelve communications in support of adoption and only one in opposition. To toot my own horn a bit, at least two of the former were last-minute emails I persuaded my coworkers to write, and some or all of the rest were postcards that I printed up and helped distribute. The result was a bit anticlimactic--the motion passed without real debate, 5-0, just like almost everything else on the agenda. Still, now we have a continuous bloc of USMCPA support with our neighbors to the north (San Bernardino), south (Riverside), and east (Yucaipa).

Meanwhile, up north in Oakland, the Apollo Alliance has a new partner group: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and its new Green for All campaign. In the words of New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman, the Baker Center's president, Van Jones, is "on a crusade to help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener America. It’s about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can’t be outsourced." Replacing lost jobs for poor unskilled laborers, revitalizing our infrastructure, and cooling the planet: is there nothing green-collar jobs can't do?

I had a third related story, from this past Sunday's San Bernardino Sun, about how European cities are doing much better than their parent nations on meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol, but sadly it doesn't seem to be online. (Yes, I'm wasting literally tons of paper by getting a daily newspaper. It was a snap decision when some guy came to my door one day, and I'm really starting to regret it.)

Administration contacts say a military strike on Iran within six months is likely.

I'm thinking the Precautionary Principle applies here: they might not do it, but I should still move to Canada right away just in case they do (in which case there will seemingly be no option but to draft many thousands of new soldiers).

My video response to Chris Dodd's efforts aimed at reversing the dangerous trend toward the loss of civil liberties embodied in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

My entry in a global warming ad contest aimed at influencing the 2008 presidential candidates.

My entry for the YouTube Presidential Debate Question contest, asking pointed questions about the thorny issue of overpopulation. Post positive comments please!

And finally, check out the Church of Gaia/Earthseed main page for some recent updates.

Or so says Thomas L. Friedman in this amazing NY Times article discussing what to do about global warming.  11 pages long, and trust me, it's worth it.  Basically, the idea is that unlike new telephones with more features, people don't want to pay more for new methods of getting electricity or driving their cars.  So to grow the "alternative" market enough to bring prices down, especially if we want China to be able to make the switch anytime soon, the government needs to act to make fossil fuels more expensive so newer technologies can compete.  The open question, of course, is where we can find the political will to do that, since it would be immediately harmful to American citizens.

By the way: I was at two separate Step It Up events on Saturday in Redlands, in the heart of the Inland Empire, a bastion of conservatism within the mostly-blue state of California.

"Seeds of Gaia" is a short but extremely complex piece of animation with bits of live-action thrown in. I created it for the "clone project" in a Digital Cinema course. It's a music video about a possible future in which Earth is dying, but with the help of some rogue colonists, other worlds are coming to life. It goes by really fast, for two reasons: animation is hard work, and the timing has to be roughly in line with the music track, which is less than a minute long.

"World of the Ninja" isn't really mine. I helped make it, but it was written and directed by Diego Bustamante, a member of the Really Ambitious Filmmaking Team, which I founded. It's a parody of National Geographic specials, and apart from that, the title speaks for itself.