Review: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

It is incorrect to call the forces that injure black Americans, "white supremacy". When you look at the minds, hearts, and habits of the antebellum south, and when you trace a historical line from before the Revolution to the present, then there is only one possible name you can use to describe those forces: The Slave Power. The Slave Power is a dominating force, directly opposed to the individualistic, freedom-loving nature of the American spirit. It is the force that carried Africans over the ocean. It is the force that claimed 3/5ths a vote for an unfree people. It is the force that shoots a black child and plants drugs on their body. It dehumanizes and brutalizes those that challenge it. It is also a pathetic force. It is uninventive, uncreative, and unimaginative. It cannot look forward but instead looks backward. It does not look upward but instead looks outward. In the mind of Slave Power, slavery is an inescapable historical norm. When the Slave Power sees a fork in the river, it sees a plantation, not a city. When it looks at a waste it sees cotton. Give the Slave Power gold for a bushel of cotton, and it doesn't buy a painting, or get a degree, or build a machine. It buys another slave to harvest cotton. In this way, the Slave Power is not the same as "White Supremacy". It leaches and destroys the white people in which it resides. It saps their intellectual ability. It teaches them to be weak, dumb, and dull. Show me a southern Ivy League school. Show me a world-changing Southern scientist. Show me anything culturally interesting about the South. There in the absence of an answer is the chain of Slave Power attached to the Southern white man's soul just as it is chained to the black man's neck and feet. The Civil War is when the Slave Power was brought to heel by the very same forces of Enlightenment that gave America birth: patriotism, justice, liberty, equity, pragmatism, and creativity. Those forces -all explicitly rejected by the Slave Power- are the parts of the Republic's soul that still fight against the Slave Power to this day. Because, again, the Slave Power was never vanquished completely. The cultural trappings and political trends it started continued afterward. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was energized by the Slave Power. The Mexican war was to fulfill the Slave Power's hunger. These two of America's sins- Indian genocide and imperialism- may still have happened had an African slave ship never landed on her shores, but it is hard to believe they would have happened with such ferocity. It is impossible to come away from reading the Battle Cry of Freedom without having a sense of patriotism. When you know that the country that you were raised in is imperfect, it might seem like the opposite of patriotism. But in this beautiful history, you can see America's perfectibility. If Slave Power could be shunted out of office, then it can be driven from our nation's souls forever.

Review: Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know

"It is, I promise, worse than you think."

These are the words that David Wallace-Wells used to begin his epic New York Magazine article, The Uninhabitable Earth. In it he paints a picture: vast swaths of the Earth are heated to become inhabitable. Enormous cyclones and snowstorms bury civilization in seas of water. The soil dries up, chokes, and blows away. Mass food riots lead to millions of refugees, and diseases spread up and across the world.

"The basic resources that we rely upon. All of them are adversely impacted by climate change and with a growing global population. So you’ve got more competition over fewer resources among a growing global population. It’s a recipe for a conflict nightmare" David quotes Mike Mann, the bannermen held up as anti-alarmist by climate moderates for quibbling with a single satellite statistic.

In my mailbox was Wallace-Well's first and foremost citation, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. I ordered it pretty much immediately. Wallace-Wells was simply being too poetic, too devasting to simply take him at his word. I knew climate change would be bad. But that bad, this fast? That seemed impossible!

But he literally just cribbed his essay from Climate Change's chapter 3.

Romm walks you through the science. Nearly every line is cited as we go from the beginning logic, "Carbon dioxide makes things warm up" to "These are the list of extreme weather events attributable to climate change" to "Vast destruction will rain down upon us". This overall structure is broken down into units of questions. This turns the book, in essence, into a 280 page FAQ. However, it turns out that it is the most readable FAQ I've ever seen. It became a page-turner as it builds out a sketch of what we can expect from global warming.

When I reviewed Klein's, "This Changes Everything", I pointed out that there was an inexorable logic to climate change:

Estimates of the number of tons of carbon that we can safely burn before we have to stop range from 250 gigatons of Carbon to 500 gigatons of carbon (the conservative answer that Klein quotes). The number of gigatons that we know about. The number of gigatons that we as a civilization have the power to burn in our lifetime? 2,000 gigatons.


Joseph Romm brought to my attention similarly inexorable mathematics: in order to stay below the "safe" 2-degree threshold, we have to stay under 450 ppm. We are currently raising the atmospheric content at a rate of 2ppm/year. We're at ~410 ppm. You ought to be able to do that math for yourself.

Wallace-Wells says, "Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope." He is right. You can reduce the chemistry to numbers or you can reduce the lives of the people endangered to numbers, but its scale is unfathomable.

But Romm's book helps make it a bit less unfathomable.