Earlier this week I warned that postings would be light, but I hate letting multiple days go by without an update. I hope to get back on track shortly. Thanks for checking back!

• I tuned into Science Friday today as I drove back from school and caught the tail end of a discussion of the report I linked to early this week about Arctic melting. One of the participants doesn't seem to be listed on the link above, but she had some good points to make. First, she explained the physics of the issue: there's a "pump" action in Arctic sea water -- cold salt water is heavy and sinks to the bottom, making room for warmer water from the Gulf of Mexico, which passes Europe on its way. This current is called the "North Atlantic Drift," and it is responsible for Europe's relatively mild climate. Melting ice "floods" the Arctic sea waters with fresh water, which disrupts this pump action and, in turn, that warm water current. Continued disruption of that current could eventually plunge temperatures in Europe. (Here's a good graphic and a better explanation than I'm giving.) So in addition to the devastating near-term effects on indigenous people and wildlife, the impact goes "global" in a big way. This woman then answered a question about the recommendations for reducing global warming. She said a "political" body is responsible for writing the policy recommendations, and they will be presenting their report on or around November 24. She said they took the scientists' findings, created policy recommendations, took the recs back to the scientists and asked if they were saying anything that couldn't be backed up with the science, and the scientists gave their blessing. But, she says, this committee is encountering resistance. 8 countries that make up the Arctic Council (those countries with some part of their landmass in the Artic Circle) - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US. 7 of them are supporting the panel's recommendations for policy changes to slow the melting. One wild guess who's not...
  
  I've tried to tell myself that even with their majority in Congress, some Republican senators will have a hard time selling constituents on drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it really looks as though ANWR's days are numbered. A foot is already in the door.
  
  
• I really am - for the moment, at least - tired of the electoral post-mortems. I'm especially tired of the easy "moral values" story that misses what are sure to be far more proximal causes. I'm also just plain tired; my brain isn't working very well. So maybe someone can help me figure out what Brad Carson is saying here. I watched Carson - Democratic senate candidate from Oklahoma - on "Meet the Press" a few weeks ago, when he appeared with his opponent Tom Coburn (who brought the crisis of "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools to national attention). I didn't realize who I was watching, at first, and thought they were both conservative Republicans. Just "shows to go ya" (as my father would say) what passes for a Democrat in some parts of the country. So the tone of his column here doesn't surprise me, but I can't figure out what he's advocating here by blaming "modernity."

  The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one's self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one's family; whether an individual is just that--a free-floating atom--or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only "tolerance." These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.
  
  For the vast majority of Oklahomans--and, I would suspect, voters in other red states--these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren't deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a "false consciousness" or Fox News or whatever today's excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma--and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states--reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it.
  
  That is what Antonin Scalia famously called the Kulturkampf. And there can be no doubt either that this is a fundamental dynamic in American politics or on which side of this conflict the electorate rests. Last Tuesday, I ran 7 percent ahead of John Kerry, and my opponent ran a full 13 percent behind President Bush. In most states, this would have been more than sufficient to ensure my victory. But not in Oklahoma. At least not last Tuesday. And, while the defeat was all my own, the failure was of the party to which I swear allegiance, which uncritically embraces a modernity that so many others reject.

• Jac Wilder VerSteeg asks "is there a 'Christian' tax code?" in this great piece (via The Revealer):

  Liberals are elitists, and that's one reason John Kerry and his ilk lost. To reverse their inclination to elitism, liberals must study at the feet of the heartland's Christian conservatives, the only people on Earth who know what God wants and therefore possess a mandate to make all creatures conform to His will. Such depth of humility will be difficult to match.
  
  With the transformation from Grand Old Party to God's Own Party, every aspect of Republican policy must be imbued with "values."
  
  Interestingly, of all the domestic policy issues he might take on, President Bush has put tax reform at the top of his second term's to-do list.
  
  The dry tax code might seem the opposite of a values-rich opportunity; in fact, it is anything but. The "value" of money is different from the "values" that played such a key role on Nov. 2, but how an individual or an individual nation expends money's value is a clear expression of core moral values.
  
  My grandfather, John M. VerSteeg, a minister who spent most of his career in Ohio, regularly preached on the connection between money and morals. He even wrote a book about it in 1943, When Christ Controls, in which he advocated, "Having preached that Christ needs some of our cash, let us preach that all of our cash needs Christ."
  
  Christian conservatives have been very clear about how they don't want their tax money spent. None of it must go to abortions here or abroad, none of it must pay for sex education that goes beyond abstinence, none of it must pay benefits to gay partners of public employees. If they could, some Christian conservatives would add all public education to their must-not-support list. While these items involve serious moral issues, aside from education they don't make much budgetary difference.
  
  On a federal level, even public education isn't that big a deal. States and local governments pay more than 90 percent of public education's cost.
  
  Less clear is what Christian conservatives think the federal government should spend its money on. Defense, for sure. Because aggression isn't a moral value, however, the government should expect Christians to be aware of the dividing line and withdraw support from politicians who cross it. Revenge isn't a moral value, either, and it would be disappointing to find Christians supporting politicians who spend the Pentagon's billions for that purpose.
  
  Some conservatives, Christian and otherwise, would stop after defense and, perhaps, transportation infrastructure. Let families and private charities fill in for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are government's other major expenditures, aside from debt. How would those private entities afford it? With money they don't pay in federal taxes, of course.
  
  Two major problems pop up. Replace comprehensive programs such as Social Security with a patchwork, and more people will fall through the cracks and suffer — not an example of Christian charity. Equally troublesome is that just cutting what people pay in taxes could not possibly cover what government spends on social programs. There's a huge deficit, remember? It's hard to imagine Christians being content with the outcome if they take over the levers of government power and use them to drop the trap door from under the nation's needy and infirm. Christian control of government would seem to argue for more money spent on medicine, shelter and other essentials.
  
  No matter how President Bush reforms the tax code, it is likely that the major government expenditures will remain the same. In reality, the tax code reforms he's talking about involve not so much how the money is spent but how the money is raised and from whom. President Bush's first-term policies shifted the tax burden from wealthier people not so much onto today's less affluent people as onto our children. There's that deficit again. Several reforms that will get a look this term — such as a flat tax, a national sales tax and its first cousin, the value-added tax — would, in their pure forms, shift the tax burden even more from the wealthy onto the middle class.
  
  Is there such a thing as a Christian tax code? Certainly, there's a tax code that embodies Judeo-Christian values. It cares for the sick and recognizes the obligation of the wealthy to aid the poor. Call it a values-added tax. If that is what the values voters who returned George Bush to the White House really want, this elitist liberal would humbly support them.

  (Recall that conservative Republican evangelical Alabama governor Bob Riley tried to propose a Christian tax code, and was eaten alive for it, even by his own kind.)
  
  
• One of the many reasons we won't miss him:

  ...In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.
  
  "The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas an put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers' group...

• Finally, in honor of Veteran's Day yesterday, please reflect on these faces.