Vermont politics moves slightly towards world average

What I’m about to relate is microscopic in its significance compared to the violence and destruction that goes on elsewhere in the world. Somehow, the fact that here in Vermont we are living such a sheltered life makes this kind of petty idiocy all the more discouraging.

Montpelier, Vermont’s capital, had its Independence Day parade today, on the 3rd. I stood on State Street watching the floats, bands, and politicians go by. At one point our governor, Jim Douglas, walked by with a crowd of supporters in matching t-shirts. About thirty seconds later a scrawny guy in a Santa Claus outfit trotted by in the opposite direction and was almost immediately tackled by several men in Douglas t-shirts. They were obviously angry and set about twisting his arms behind him, crunching his face into the sidewalk, standing on his legs, and generally making life uncomfortable for him.

There was a general cry of “What did he do?’ and “Why are you beating up Santa?” The answer came back, “He assaulted the governor.” Whoa. Whackjob in Santa suit punches governor during parade. Surreal and disturbing.

I left them to their one-sided wrestling match and walked up the street a little ways. I saw a couple talking about something, and the looks on their faces told me that their subject was the incident. “What happened with Santa and Douglas?” I asked. “Squirted him in the face with a can of whipped cream. Totally covered him. Funny as hell.”

(Update, for what it's worth: It was actually a pie. See the WCAX article in the comments.)

I turned back to where the scrum had just occurred, but Santa and the Douglas guys had disappeared. (I later heard that the police had arrested and cuffed the prankster.)

I stood there for a long moment trying to reconcile a face full of Reddi-Whip with the angry bone crunching I had just witnessed. Ok, it was a childish prank, and certainly not the most brilliant move ever made, but the response was unnecessary and out of proportion. Santa was no longer anywhere near the governor. Aside from his dignity, the governor was uninjured. He was farther up the street, waving and smiling. The Douglas boyos, under the pretense of a citizen’s arrest, had bypassed the legal system and administered some extra-judicial punishment.

If you are tempted to say, “Well, the moron had it coming,” remember the symmetry of the law. If a few self-appointed enforcers are allowed to beat him up, then they can do the same to you for some other real or imagined insult. It’s the way they do politics in Zimbabwe.

The prankster’s motivation remains a mystery to me (Update: See the comment - Vt. Yankee decommissioning), although when I related the story to friends, the majority expressed dismay that they had missed the squirting. More than one person said that pie would have been more traditional and appropriate. Ultimately, the act was inarticulate and useless.

The motivation of the Douglas crowd was more obvious. The governor (and candidate for reelection) had suffered an injury to his dignity. Dignity is the control of one’s perception by other people, and image control is the key to political success. As Drew Westen wrote about in his excellent book “The Political Brain”, people first react emotionally to any kind of attack on their preferred candidate, and then follow up with irrationality. In this case, also with violence.

Prank protest and thug response. I hope this isn’t a trend.

Symington plus Pollina equals VIRV

In a recent post I called the 2008 Vermont gubernatorial election for the Republican incumbent, Jim Douglas. I did so because former Speaker of the House Gaye Symington’s entry into the race will split the left of center vote. I did not accuse either the Democrat, Symington, or Progressive contender Anthony Pollina of being a spoiler, but with both of them in the race I consider the election spoiled.

I have been thinking about the problem since then and wishing that our legislature had passed an Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) bill. IRV is a voting process whereby each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. In the event that there is no candidate with a majority of the votes, those who voted for the candidate with the least votes get their second choice votes distributed according to their preference among the remaining candidates. And so it goes until there is a clear winner. This allows voters to express their preference for a dark horse candidate without helping out a candidate they don’t like. IRV is used in Burlington, Vermont, as well a cities, states, and countries around the world.

But we don’t have IRV. If Symington and Pollina agree on it, we could have VIRV, or Virtual Instant Runoff Voting. I am operating on the assumption that most Democrats supporting Symington would prefer Pollina to Douglas and that most Progressives supporting Pollina would prefer Symington to Douglas.

What if both Pollina and Symington announced that, in the event that neither of them had a measurable lead over Douglas in late October, the one with lower poll numbers would drop out and ask his or her followers to vote for the other?

Let’s say a poll is conducted on October 20. Douglas has 43%, Candidate X (either Symington or Pollina – I’m being deliberately nonspecific) has 38% and Candidate Y has 19%. We can safely assume that Candidate Y is not going to pull 19-plus percentage points in the last two weeks of the campaign. Candidate Y has had a fair chance to compete and express political points during the campaign season, but pragmatically speaking is out of the race. What would be the point in carrying on? VIRV would merely do what IRV would have done, had our legislature been so wise as to pass it.

There are details the two campaigns would have to work out. Which poll(s) would be used? How much of a gap in the numbers would there have to be in order to trigger VIRV? If Symington and Pollina are effectively tied in the late October polls, what then?

As I noted in my previous essay on the subject, in the long run the Democrats and the Progressives need to shed some ideological fixations and cooperate. We need statewide IRV to have any pretense of democracy in a three party state. In the meantime, Pollina and Symington can agree to approximate it to serve the will of the people.

Crimen Sollicitationis

By now, the concept of a pedophile priest is not surprising. Articles about complaints, prosecutions and lawsuits related to priestly sexual misconduct appear in the news media every week. Back in 2006, the British television news program Panorama broadcast a special program on the way the Catholic Church handled abusive priests, a program that resulted in the resignation of an Irish Bishop. They provided a copy of a secret church document, the Crimen Sollicitationis (Crime of Solicitation), which outlined Vatican policy on dealing with priests who commit sexual crimes. The document, written and distributed in 1962, was updated in 2001 by none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. (If you can handle the Latin, here’s the now-public update, I believe) The document lays out an entire formalized judicial process for prosecuting priests who solicited and/or engaged in sexual acts. The penalties are entirely canonical, ranging from a rebuke to removal from office. This document is significant, not only in how it defines the relationships within the church, but also between church and state. (There is evidence of a previous version of the document from 1922, “De modo procedendi in causis sollicitationis.”)

The first significant thing about the Crimen Sollicitationis is that it was necessary. Some decades ago the church realized that it had enough of a sexual misconduct problem on its hands to warrant special instructions. In section 5 of the text it states that the local authority (Bishop, abbot, or prelate) may delegate these cases, but “they may not commit these cases on an habitual basis, or for the entire group of these cases...”. This is not the only reference in the text to a “series of cases.” It seems that they were numerous enough to be a time management problem for church administrators. Some of these cases were, no doubt, priests getting some consensual action with parishioners. Some, as we have seen in the news, involved rape or molestation.

The second significant thing about the document is its emphasis on secrecy. By secrecy I mean not only the usual protection of privacy appropriate to an allegation of sexual misconduct, but also a secrecy that restricts the prosecution of the matter to the Catholic church itself. The opening instruction states: “This text is to be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published or added to with any commentaries.” The very existence of a church policy on sexual misconduct by priests was to be secret.

Sections 11 through 13 address the secrecy of the process and the oath of secrecy to be taken by all involved, including the accuser(s) and witnesses. These matters are termed a “secret of the Holy Office, in all matters and with all persons, under penalty of excommunication latae sententiae, ipso facto, and without any declaration of such a penalty having been incurred...” Translating the Latin, this means that anyone who breaks the silence is booted out of the church at that moment, without any due process, and (by Catholic standards) will roast in hell for all eternity. The text makes it clear in Section 23, covering the questioning of the accuser, “And before he is dismissed, there should be presented to him, as above, an oath of observing the secret, threatening him, if there is a need, with an excommunication reserved to the Ordinary or to the Holy See.”

The oath itself is set down in an appendix to the instructions. After mentioning excommunication, it continues, “Further, I shall observe this secret absolutely and in every way with all who have no legitimate part in the treatment of this same matter, or, who are not constricted by the same sworn bond; nor will I ever, directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or a word, by writing or in any other way and under whatever type of pretext, even for the most urgent and most serious cause, even for the purpose of a greater good, commit anything against this fidelity to the secret, unless a particular faculty or dispensation has been expressly given to me by the Supreme Pontiff.”

The glaring omission in this 39 page document is any admonition to cooperate with the police in cases where there is reasonable cause to think that a sex crime has been committed. There are no instructions on how to coordinate internal disciplinary measures with the civil authorities. This is not a situation where a particular bishop can take the fall for failing to report cases of rape or molestation to the police. The Crimen Sollicitationis requires that the local church authorities report all cases to the Holy See.

In 2002, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops issued the Revised Essential Norms, a document outlining new church policy on cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests or other church employees. This policy was revised in 2005. This time they got it right, but 40 years too late. Perhaps 1,500 years too late? The Catholic Church has had a long history of wielding temporal power through theological means and justification. The mindset of being above civil law has to be a tough thing to discard.

An illustrative side note: Before the advent of public education just about the only literate people around were clergy, and literacy itself was both rare and valuable. Hence the legal concept of “benefit of clergy.” Well into the 17th century someone convicted of a capital crime could escape the noose by reading from the Bible, proving his literacy. The convict would generally suffer some punishment, such as branding, but for centuries it meant that a monk or priest could literally get away with murder.

In an essay on FindLaw, law professor Marci Hamilton makes a convincing case for going after the Catholic Church using the federal RICO statute (Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations). She proposes that in the same way the RICO statute has been used against labor unions gone corrupt through the influence of criminals, so too the statute could be used to bring accountability to the church.

In fact, back in 2005 Philip Hower settled a RICO case against the Catholic Church. According to Hower's attorney, Ivan Abrams, this was the first RICO case against the church to make it through the judicial process intact. Hower was a seminarian who blew the whistle on sexually abusive priests and was denied ordination as a result.

The trial of the Catholic Church continues, mostly in civil court, all over this country and around the world. This is good, but it is not enough. There is plenty of evidence from successful civil suits that church employees throughout the hierarchy engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to obstruct justice. The federal government needs to reassert the rule of law over the rule of theocrats and subject the church to accountability. The Department of Justice should open a comprehensive criminal investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-ups of sex crimes.

Why I am not having a Barack attack

Your Minor Heretic is not caught up in the giddiness that surrounds Barack Obama. I was discussing this with an astute friend, and she chided me for my lack of empathy. She said (quoting from memory here), “Imagine you've just had your head held underwater for eight years. You finally come up and take a great big breath and someone says, 'What's the big deal? It's just air.'” Well put.

Yes, I am going to vote for Barack Obama. No, I don't trust him any farther than I could shot-put an anvil. It's not really about him, personally. It's about the process that got him where he is and the web of influences that would surround him as president.

Democracy is like being on a tightrope. It is an unstable and unnerving condition maintained only by the constant attention of brave and practiced people, who are in that position against their own natural tendencies. It is a natural behavior for people to reproduce their families in their political structures, which often means looking to Daddy for solutions. We have an unfortunate tendency to replace one unsuccessful Daddy with another, in the hope that the new Daddy will finally kiss our booboo and make it better. Most people are less attentive to the means by which we select the new Daddy, which is the ultimate factor in determining the quality of the leader. That is how we ended up with the new George II. That is why am not leaping with joy over the prospect of Obama. Same process, same results.

Yes, I am sure that Barack Obama would be a far better president than either George W. Bush or the lobbyist-ridden militarist neocon John McCain. However, I think that Obama's mantra of change would be more accurate as “small change.”

I looked at Barack Obama's own website. I like a lot of what he says: changing labor laws to benefit aspiring union members, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, supporting renewable energy, emphasizing diplomacy over force.

In some areas, though, there is a kind of political anemia. I found that in terms of fighting for poor people who can't always make it from paycheck to paycheck he wants to cap the interest on payday loans to 36%. As the kids say, “Big whoop.” I know people who have been socked with rates far less than that and found them unsupportable. His health insurance plan leaves the gravy train to private health insurance behemoths intact. He wants to “reform” No Child Left Behind rather than scrapping an educational program that amounts to bayoneting the wounded. On his website there is a paragraph about prioritizing a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but I found his recent speech to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby) somewhere between pandering and groveling. In it he declared that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," an absolute show stopper for most Palestinians. Even some Israeli hawks have publicly backed off from this position. My general impression of his proposals is of a gardener trimming weeds without actually pulling them up.

As much as I consider him (as far as I can tell, from this distance) a decent and honorable man, I wonder what will happen when he dives into the sausage mill we call the Oval Office. He has as many political debts as any former occupant. He has raised a lot of money through small online donations, but about half of his $270 million has come in chunks of more than $200. Four out of five of his top sources were the employees of huge financial firms (Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc.).

In response to the accusation of being influenced by money, Barack Obama and other members of Congress can rightfully say, “I vote how I like.” To this I respond, “That's because they like how you vote.” If Obama or his colleagues had opinions that truly offended the small cadre of millionaire donors, most would never have succeeded in politics. Let's elect Barack Obama, but not allow ourselves to feel satisfied with that. We can't cut him any slack or lose sight of the larger effort.

For real change, we should concentrate on changing the process rather than just trading for a new personality. We all need to become single issue voters for a little while, that issue being electoral reform - 99% public campaign financing, paper ballots, instant runoff voting, uniform and fair electoral rules, independent bi or tri or quadra-partisan election committees, and so on. Then we can pay attention to candidates.

Aperture (A follow-on to The Hydrogen Humvee and Other Fairy Tales)

This brings us to the subject of aperture. This is the concept that anything powered by renewable energy requires a certain amount of area exposed to the sun, or wind, or water, to collect enough energy to operate. The reality is that switching our present methods of life over to a renewable fuel won't work. The energy bloated lifestyle we live can only be supplied by tapping the hundreds of millions of years of accumulated energy trapped in the coal beds and oil fields under the earth. The hydrogen Hummer is only the most blatantly misleading example of renewable energy use. Still, it is only slightly beyond most of our technology in its unsustainability. Such wishful thinking extends in more subtle ways throughout the renewable energy industry.

Think about a normal kind of energy consumption, such as burning fifty gallons of #2 fuel oil in December to heat your home. Each gallon contains about 132,000 BTUs of heat energy. Burned in a very efficient boiler, you would get around 85% of that into your house, or 112,200 BTUs. Fifty gallons would be 5.61 million BTU’s. What kind of south facing windows would you need to collect that in December in northern New England? An unshaded south facing double glazed window in Vermont allows in 480 BTUs per square foot per day in December, on average, or 14,880 for the month. To get your 5.61 million would require a wall of windows 38 feet wide and 10 feet tall, with enough mass behind them to store the incoming energy for a matter of days. Let’s say you wanted to keep your house at 65 F and had barrels of water you could get to 110 F in the sun. That would require roughly 15,000 gallons of water, or 272 55-gallon drums. You could also think of it as a 5 foot wide box 10 feet high running the length of your 38 foot wall. A tough retrofit for your average American house.

And, of course, making these windows takes energy, as do the barrels or the 38 foot solar swimming pool.

You could do as many people do up here in Vermont, and burn wood. It is a direct use of biomass, and can be done sustainably. A cord (128 cu. Ft.) per acre per year is about what you can get over time. Most hardwoods have between 20 and 25 million BTUs per cord. Call it 23. An average woodstove will get about 60% of that into your house, or 13.8 million. So, you would need 0.4 acres of decent hardwood forest to equal that 50 gallons of oil and get you through December. In 2002, 5.2 billion gallons of heating oil were sold to 6.3 million households in the Northeastern U.S. (EIA) That is the equivalent of 25,367,000 cords of hardwood, or the same number of acres of hardwood forest, carefully logged. Coincidentally, 25 million acres is roughly the amount of hardwood forest we have in the northeast. It would take every square acre we have, meticulously managed, to produce the heating energy equal to the oil we now burn in our homes. Of course, this doesn’t include the heat energy we use in the form of natural gas or propane. It doesn’t include the heat energy we use in our office buildings, stores, and factories. We clearly have a solar aperture shortfall in the firewood department.

This is just one example of the non-sustainability of our present energy use. I could take any aspect of our society, from transportation to commercial electrical use, and apply the same analysis to it.

Some well-informed students of solar or wind power may counter that we do have plenty of roof area for photovoltaic modules in this country, and enough windy places to power our present system twice over. True, in the abstract, and for electricity only. In reality, windy places are not always located conveniently to large population centers, and the wind doesn’t blow according to our electrical demand schedules. Solar power follows our peak demand curve better, but not perfectly, and not on cloudy days. Our society, as it is presently organized, needs dispatchable power, power that is available at the turn of a knob, when we need it and in the exact quantity we desire. Dispatchable power requires stored energy, either fuel or water behind a dam. For fuel, we are talking about biomass, which brings us back to the forest acreage problem. What about hydro? According to the National Hydropower Association, perhaps the most optimistic source one could find, hydroelectric power accounts for 8-12% of our present electrical demand, with 104 gigawatts of capacity. The NHA estimates that this could be expanded by 70 gigawatts if all environmental restraints were laid aside. So, best case scenario, hydroelectric power could handle 20% of our present demand. Generally speaking, a stable utility system using both variable and dispatchable power can only tolerate about 20% variable, the reverse of the percentages we could face. If we consider a renewable future where hydroelectric power is our major dispatchable source of electricity, then we would need to limit variable sources such as wind and solar to 20% of that, or 4% of our present consumption. If we abandon all environmental concerns about damming rivers, and have the economic and societal wherewithal to build the dams, our future electrical capacity would be limited to just under a quarter of what we use now.

We have a society that is dependent upon an artificially large solar aperture. Since we have a fixed amount of surface area on the earth, one might call this a time-distorted aperture. What we are taking advantage of are the millions of years of sunlight that were absorbed by algae, most recently during the Miocene period, 12 million years ago. As James Kunstler pointed out in his excellent book “The Long Emergency,” one brief squirt of charcoal lighter fluid is equivalent to some primeval plant absorbing sunlight for seven years. Taking the period from 1859 to 2059, we will have burned through roughly 200 million years of oil and gas production in about 200 years, a million to one ratio.

The conclusion I come to from all this is that we need to calculate our available, sustainable, practical solar apertures on a local and regional basis. By solar I mean all those energy sources we derive from natural processes: direct solar, wind, rivers, tides (ok, that's lunar), ocean waves, and biomass. Then we need to plot a path from our present modes and quantities of energy consumption to those that match the available aperture.

I have to say that almost all our present efforts towards sustainability are laughably weak compared to the problem. We replace light bulbs and buy hybrid cars when we need to fundamentally redesign our entire electrical grid and reorganize our population distribution. It's like preparing to jump out of a plane with a cocktail umbrella in each hand and focusing on the design of the cocktail umbrella. We're in for a sudden jolt unless we start thinking bigger.