So let's end it.

About two weeks ago I started a thread in the German SF forum I visit daily, touting the title that is behind almost every headline in the nature/science sections of the news these days: The planet is heating up and we're all to blame! Well, on and off it's been a "heated" discussion with several folks there, which tends to go emotional in the beginning, to then either end in despisal of my extreme views or illogical arguments, or in quiescent semi-agreement that it is a true complex, hard to disentangle. Then silence.

What I'm missing here and in the "discussion" at large is someone thumping me and the occasional other doubter virtually on the soap-box-elevated speaker's shoulder, and crying heartily, "Good job for trying to illuminate the other side!" It is meant to be a scientific "debate", after all; and science supposedly thrives on founded opposition to its theories.

Why all the "d" words in quotes? Well, if you look and hear around, everyone agrees it's too late to "d" the thing anyway. Because we're already "c'ing" it...

All the media, and naturally all "with it" politicians, are repeating what's apparently the consensus among scientists: That we are on the brink of sudden climate change, of lots of ice condensing into water, urbanised coasts and whole islands disappearing, millions succumbing in the throes of Mother Earth's shuddering at the climb of several degrees in "her" average annual temperature in 90 (!) years or so.

But there is no consensus; some scientists disagree and that means that sleepy dragon Science is still kicking in a dream of its old objective hey-day high flights, and that we do not have that "c" word. The data is minimal, the obvious not necessarily true. (Isn't that obvious? E.g. only a fraction of all glaciers on the planet have actually been measured, when people talk of the majority melting - but how was this fraction selected, and is that a statistically representative sample?) And then we have computer models, lots of them, generating beautifully graphic, detailed future scenarios. Whatever happened to precision following accuracy? I.e., if computed models weren't able to predict our present levels of atmospheric gases, temperature and rain in the past, why should they be more accurate now predicting the near future? Yes, in just fifteen years, Al Gore tells us in An Unpleasant Truth, it'll all be over, if we continue doing nothing, all scientists and all models agree.

Well, perhaps by now, bloody-nosed, I, too, agree: We will be to blame in 15 years. If we do nothing. If we let this global computer game distract us from the really big problems - economic turmoil, poverty growing here and there "elsewhere", populistic extremism by men in too much power - we need to attack. Real soon now. So I agree with Crichton in his appendix to his badly disguised essay-as-a-novel State of Fear: Put the mouse aside, and go outside and meet the big bad breathing ice bear of worldly strife in the everyday. The chance to work for, to build, a respectable existence.

The balancing of wealth vs. a life on a pittance, of health vs. disease, infection and starvation, of a chance for personal and communal happiness.

And, perhaps, in fifteen years the weather will happen to be clement enough to see the global village handling global weather as another of the normal challenges of Life on Earth. And more of us simply making do.

I am. Perhaps my "politeness" is anchored by deep-seated apoplexy in the face of the strictures of everyday 21st century life? So much for blogging to become a better writer.

A teenage German permanent resident of Turkish origin, living in Bremen, visits Pakistan just after 9/11. On the road near the Afghan border, he is kidnapped by Pakistanis who then "sell" him to US forces. He is incarcerated in Pakistan, Afghanistan, finally in Guantanamo, where he vegetates without real cause for 4 years, often in solitary. Several times German military and State Information Service - the "BND", Germany's CIA - question him and "promise" release or transport to Turkey or even back to Germany. None of this ensues. A German lawyer and some US attorneys bring his case to the Supreme Court, which decides that the US must release material on the reasons for his detention. Bush & Co. simply ignore this for weeks on end; but in September, at the same time as a law passes Congress allowing the States to declare basically any foreigner, even if living legally on US soil, an enemy who no longer may apply for "habeas corpus", Bush releases the Bremen detainee as an act of mercy. The latter returns to Germany and tells of his ordeal, describes Guantanamo's tortureaucracy and in the process causes a special parliamentary committee to form - to look into the doings of German military in Iraq, and the BND. And the German foreign minister, who, when our previous chancellor's chief of staff, denied the Bremen man's extradition to Germany as offered to Germany by the US just after the man's arrival in Guantanamo. Are we not to think that both sides knew then he was - largely - innocent?

I don't know anything glib or rousing to say. I know I'm no longer listening to anything the US have to say about morals, democracy or the reasons for stationing troops in Japan, Korea, Germany, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. (List incomplete!) I want the German people responsible for ignoring this man's plight for years to step down now, move to Bremen and make it up personally to him. And I'm going to see if any of Berlin's old, mostly honourable tradition of anarchism is still alive; true anarchists never trust government, never practise force or violence except in self-defense. Perhaps I can learn something there, if anywhere.

Polite, that is. The West Wing - the first 2½ seasons, all I've seen so far - is infectious, intelligent, kitschy, touching, daring. Especially the latter. Picture it: We have a Democrat president, good-looking, Southern-twanged, not unintelligent - failing. So someone writes up a better president right then, in a movie, first somewhat non-descript as an interesting widower, with good dialogue and interesting supporting characters. And some time later the same man (WW's creator Sorkin) decides to show the US what a really good Democrat president could be like - in a hit TV series: Sheen's role as the nerdy, cool and inobviously handicapped president, who is discovered as chanceless candidate by a team of expert communicators/lawyers, who - surprise! - all believe in the social Democrat ethic to a tee. And wins. And becomes the focal point of the most powerful soap ever.

Sheen's president Bartlett, who to me looks somewhat like JFK might have at 60, captains a White magic House, that goes boldly through themes and events, and is powered by a lovable cast making even better dialogue, preferrably while on the move in long corridor walking marathons. These "drives" through the glassed-in freneticism of America's inner sanctum of power are cinematographic tours-de-force, that must be seen to be believed; files are constantly put down or picked up, conversants disappear to the left or to the right, only to be replaced by new ones continuing the talk if not the content, takes often taking up to half a minute or longer. The dialogue reminds me a lot of riveting Hawksian dialogues of earlier cinema, e.g. of His Girl Friday - quite astonishing, since that movie is as old as this president! Is the secret of WW's success this grand sense of "retro"? The States we could have had?

The most astonishing episode was the one done just after 9/11. It's a "what if" loop out of the sequence, and all main characters mirror the terrible event, commenting on it, on what's to be done, and - most importantly to me - how to see the perpetrators (paraphrased: the "KKK of Islam, not its mainstream"). I was blown away.

But in the end the series is too good - and naive, e.g. of the influence of the Pentagon in U.S. foreign policy - to be true. And it walks a dangereous path. It is like a far-removed spaceship with a sympathetic, but very powerful captain, who can save the world if he beats the odds again and again, who is kept on the true path by courageous "spin boys" and one girl, that aren't afraid to stand up to him when he gets too carried away. However, it plays in a world too similar to ours for us not to confuse the two, and wish we were in the TV, ever more since we see every day how far the real incumbent draws away from the fictitious one. Finally, in spite of good writing and interesting acting, it's a TV soap and follows the rules of soaps in this setting, inescapably trivialising it.

Absolute power portrayed as a TV series corrupts absolutely my power to not find the characters' behaviour supercilious, inhuman and, in the long run, well, trivial. The series takes itself seriously, in the majority of scenes, and that's my problem with it. My love and my hate of it.

I've managed to extricate myself after the first few episodes of the third season now. There are 4½ seasons to go; it just ended a few months ago. I'll have to think it through a bit, first. Or perhaps wait for another most powerful human on Earth more fitting to the TV role to be voted in before continuing, so as to prevent occasional attacks of nausea...