The blogosphere is all atwitter over Sandy and global warming. The National Journal suggested that Sandy Could Revive Climate Change Debate and George Washington University's Face the Facts reported that Billion-dollar natural disasters on the increase. It is useful to remember that global warming really means ocean warming: the mass of water in the ocean is far greater than that of the atmosphere, and the ocean currents carry the heat around (dry land is less important than ocean). And while the atmosphere's temperature bonks around, the ocean's temperature is rising. As the Tampa Bay Times reported, way at the bottom of their article, one of the explanations for the appearance of storms like Sandy is that the Gulf Stream temperature has risen to 5 - 9 degrees above normal.

Larry King moderated a "debate" between Green candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, Constitution candidate Virgil Goode, and Justice candidate Rocky Anderson which, according to the New York Times, resulted in more agreement than disagreement.

Four quite different parties agree on positions quite different from the consensus positions of the Democratic and Republican parties, and that brings us back to the old conundrum: why do voters say that prefer policy X and then vote otherwise? The assumption of beltway pundits is that voters are stupid, readily manipulated by advertizers. Another possibility is that voters simply do not care about policy; they want to vote for someone like themselves - perhaps even someone who (as Elizabeth Coggs put it) looks like you - and they also want to vote for a winner. Those four outsiders, in their separate and unequal debate that might as well have been conducted in a parking lot, did not look like the sort of people Americans would feel comfortable voting for.

What's really depressing is how many of these stories are not new. The top story, Signs of an Emerging Police State, is largely concerned with President Obama's continuation of President Bush's expansion of a policy that goes back at least to World War I. The second story, Oceans in Peril, is a familiar one for fans of Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau. Actually new news appears only in the third story, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Worse than Anticipated, and even that one is really just another episode in the longstanding docudrama of nuclear hazards. The fourth one, FBI Agents Responsible for Majority of Terrorist Plots in the United States, is also another episode in the history of America's own Special Branch, with previous episodes including Abscam and CoIntelPro, all under the heading of J. Edgar is alive and well.

# 5 and # 6 are more interesting, and possibly not for the reason Project Censored would give. For Number Five, First Federal Reserve Audit Reveals Trillions Loaned to Major Banks, the big news is that the Federal Reserve will undergo periodic audits and some of the results will be made public. For Number Six, Small Network of Corporations Run the Global Economy, the big news is that we now have a new statistical tool to find out what's going on in the economy. The story may be: we now have access to more information and analytic tools. The problem remains: getting people to pay attention.

I rarely watch debates, but yesterday I was staying with a relative who wanted to watch round two of Obama versus Romney, or at least as much of it as we could stand. The pundits are all agog over Obama coming out swinging: David Horsey writes that Barack Obama takes command in second presidential debate, USA Today reported that Instant polls give Obama edge in second debate, and Reuters reported that Obama, Romney quote each other to score points.

That's putting it mildly. Considered from the Liberal to Left point of view - which is not impressed by the stylistic issues that obsess the pundits - the debate shows what's wrong with political discourse in this country. A single exchange early in the debate shows what's wrong.

From the NPR transcript, Philip Tricolla asked President Obama, Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department? Look at the candidates' reactions:

• Obama loosed a lot of noise about how we need more sources of energy - he hints at environmental concerns but doesn't say why we need new sources - and claims Romney is a stooge of the oil companies.
• Romney claimed that Obama is blocking drilling and mining for coal in federal lands, because we need coal.
• Obama claimed Romney is changing his position on coal and oil imports are down and we're making jobs making fuel efficient cars.
• Then Romney and Obama hurled tomatos at each other until Ms. Crowley asked Obama if he would kindly answer Mr. Tricolla's question.
• But Obama babbled about pipelines and how wind energy is producing jobs, so Ms. Crowley gave up and moved on to the next question.

What Obama should have said was, "Gas prices are not going down. Oil production in the United States peaked four decades ago and global oil production is peaking now. You can see the peak in the increasing sea depths for offshore drilling, and the enthusiasm for junk gas like those dirty shale deposits in Canada Mr. Romney is so excited about. I don't like it, you don't like it, but what's going to happen to oil drilling is what happened to whaling: when you run out, you run out, and go for something else. We went into oil drilling when whaling went bust, and now we have to use new sources of energy." And that's when he should have talked about solar, nuclear, wind, etc.

So why didn't they talk about the fact that Ms. Crowley was on target when she described high gas prices as the new normal?

• Obama knows very well about the production peak, but ever since Jimmy Carter's Malaise speech, Democrats (especially intellectually arrogant ones like Obama) have assumed that Americans are too cowardly to hear hard truths. This view was confirmed by America's negative reception to Walter Mondale's campaign message that Reagan was playing games with the budget and that the only possible fix was to raise taxes; Americans voted overwhelmingly for Reagan (as they had in Reagan's race against Carter), and when President Bush (senior) started repairing the budget by raising taxes, Americans voted Bush out of office. So Obama was following standard Democratic policy of not telling Americans what they figured Americans would refuse to hear.
• Romney also knows very well about the production peak, but since no one expects the slide to become serious for a decade or so (and with luck, the most serious consequences of global warming will also remain at bay), Romney would prefer to do nothing about it. One of the major effects of the Reagan Revolution was to convince the Republican Party that you gain nothing from talking about long-term issues, and you gain everything by promising the Moon - and then delivering by jacking up the debt. To an alarming extent, leading Republicans not only buy the strategy but buy the message, who cares about tomorrow?: the Economist columnist "Schumpeter" reports that Corporate America’s affection for Mitt Romney is the love that dare not speak its name, a report that only confirms the longstanding criticism that corporate CEOs no longer think further ahead than the next quarterly statement - and maybe it's time to abandon silly CEOs and enablers like Charles Schwab. And like the CEOs who Romney chats with on the track, Romney probably figures that if things go south after his watch, it's not his problem.

My relative and I got tired after a few minutes of nonsense, and did not watch the rest of the debate.

There is something blasphemous about the Taliban's reaction to girls going to school and learning to read. Malala Yousufzai is a teen activist - she wrote blogs about going to school, and they went viral - and on October 9, Taliban militants shot her and two friends; later, a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, saying, "If she survives this time, she won't next time."

Considering the number of literate women in the Prophet's life, and considering that that the written word of the Qu'ran is the closest thing we have to the words the Prophet recited, one would think that a pious Muslim would insist that all children learn to read so they can read the Qu'ran. But this assumes that people who claim to be pious Muslims (and certainly the Taliban claims that) actually take the Qu'ran seriously. But this may not be about Islam and the Qu'ran at all.

Belinda Jack, a tutorial fellow at Oxford, wrote a book on The Woman Reader, reviewed by The Guardian, describing the history of male unhappiness about women reading. A lot of the unhappiness was purely emotional, even if physicians dressed it up in scientific jargon, ranging from girls forbidden to read to gibes like Lord Ko-Ko's entry on people who never would be missed:

None of this has anything to do with religion; this is yet another cultural prejudice that people project onto scripture. Which brings us to the Protestant point: if girls learn to read, and read the Qu'ran, then they will find out what the Qu'ran really says - and does not say - and what happens to the mullahs then?

Whatever his other faults - and they were numerous - Martin Luther was a serious Protestant, and like all serious Protestants, he wanted everyone, from men to "even the weakest women", to read the Bible. That was, after all, what the Protestant Revolution was about. Perhaps what the House of Islam needs is a Martin Luther.

One of the problems with the abortion controversy is that much of it is not about destroying an entity that may or may not be a human being. Much of the Right wing push for criminalizing abortion is based on the usually unstated premise that pregnancy is God's punishment for sex, and the abortion is a way of interfering with the Will of God. Outside of the issue of exactly how a mere human being could interfere with the Will of God - and didn't we fight that fight before during the controversies over smallpox inoculation, the use of lightning rods and anesthesia? - there is the problem that there is something perverse in the premise that pregnancy is a punishment.

In fact, the premise is so perverse that practically no anti-abortion pundits advance it. What they advance, sincerely or otherwise, is a pro-life argument.

But if a pro-life argument is to be taken seriously, then the point must be to reduce the incidence of abortion; that would be a higher priority than, say, deterring sex. After all, if a fetus is an unborn child, saving unborn children is more important than, say, protecting the virginity of high school students (which surveys indicate is problematic at any rate).

Enter reality check. What is the most effective method of bring abortion rates down? That's an easy question for an armchair theorist: flood society with cheap or free contraceptives.

The Tampa Bay Times reports a confirmation of this armchair theorizing: Free birth control leads to fewer abortions. The result of providing a whole bunch of contraceptive options?

The effect on teen pregnancy was striking: 6.3 births per 1,000 teenagers in the study, compared with a national rate of 34 births per 1,000 teens in 2010. There also were lower rates of abortion: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the study, compared with almost 20 abortions per 1,000 women nationally.

The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists was quoted saying, "I would think if you were against abortions, you would be 100 percent for contraception access."

Well, you would be if innocent human life was actually what you were concerned about.

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