As the curtain greatfully drops on 2011, the year turns out to have been a remarkable exercise in cinematic repetition. So far, the top seven pictures at the domestic box office have been sequels, an alignment that appears unmatched in movie history. In terms of ticket sales the most popular seven films to date have been Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1; The Hangover Part II; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Fast Five; and Cars 2. The strong opening for Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol suggests that it may well join a list that also includes Rise of the Planet of the Apes, from yet another film series, in the ninth position. 
December 29, 2011
December 26, 2011
After the 40-14 Denver Broncos’ loss to the Buffalo Bills Saturday, Bill Maher tweeted, “Wow, Jesus just fucked #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere in hell Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler ‘Hey, Buffalo’s killing them.’” I’m not a fan of Bill Maher, but I was thinking pretty much the same thing about Tebow. As you would expect, the well-deserved dig didn’t go over well with Christians. Fox Business’ “Follow the Money” host Eric Bolling got things rolling with his Twitter response: “Bill Maher is disgusting vile trash. 
December 16, 2011
A new survey shows Mormon women outnumber men in the LDS Church — and the gap appears to be widening, especially in Utah. Sociologists Rick Phillips, of the University of North Florida, and Ryan Cragun, of the University of Tampa, suggest it could be because Mormon men in the Beehive State are abandoning their faith at a greater rate than women. But other scholars see an array of possible reasons, including the view that more women than men join the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The report, Mormons in the United States 1990-2008: Socio-Demographic Trends and Regional Differences, relies on data culled from the American Religious Identification Survey, which is built on a large, nationally representative sample of 113,723 respondents in 1990, including 1,742 self-identified Mormons, and 54,461 people with 783 Mormons in 2008. 
December 15, 2011
Almost nine years after the first American tanks began the illegal invasion, today the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission in Iraq, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics, bankrupt both countries, and leave a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world. Defense Secretary 
December 14, 2011
The world is even smaller than you thought. Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported recently that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74. The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb. The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings have been posted on Facebook’s site. The experiment took one month. The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, 
it was just 4.37. However, a Microsoft study in 2008, using a more conservative definition of friend, found an average chain of 6.6 people in a group of 240 million who exchanged chat messages. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who led the study in 2008, said that network was based on people who exchanged messages, rather than those who identified as “buddies.” “When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest,” the company wrote on its blog, “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.” The caveat there is “Facebook user” — like the Milgram study, the cohort was a self-selected group, in this case people with online access who use a particular Web site. Though the study was by far the largest of its kind, it raised questions about definitions of terms like “friend” on Facebook. Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell and a faculty adviser to an author of the new study, said some links might be more meaningful than others. Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said. The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data and how it has drawn people more tightly together, for better or worse.
December 13, 2011
The notebooks in which Sir Isaac Newton worked out the theories on which much classical science
is based have been put online by Cambridge University. More than 4,000 pages have been scanned, including his annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, containing Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newton wrote mainly in Latin and Greek, the scientific language of his time, and was reluctant to publish. The university plans to put almost all of its Newton collection online. The papers mark the launch of the Cambridge Digital Library project to digitize its collections. Check out this video. Really, really cool.
December 11, 2011
The past decade has been the hottest on record, according to a report released in November. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN's weather agency, blamed rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for a trend which has seen 13 of the 15 warmest years on record occur since 1997. According to WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud "Concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have reached new highs. Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and this warming is due to human activities." The WMO said 2011 would likely end as the 10th warmest year since record-keeping began in 1850. 2011 was influenced by an especially strong La Nina event, 
a phenomenon driven by cooler than average sea temperatures in the Pacific and frequently tied to extreme conditions in Asia, Africa and South America. A La Nina – the opposite of an El Nino event – tends to have a cooling effect on average global temperatures. 2011 has been the hottest year in which a La Nina occurred. This year's La Nina was linked to flooding in Thailand, drought in eastern Africa and the southern United States, and recent incedibly high winds that damaged much of the west coast and intermountain west. Elsewhere, Arctic sea ice shrunk to its lowest volume on record this year– some 4,200 cubic kilometers. By surface area, ice dropped about 35 percent below the 1979-2000 average to arrive at its second-lowest point. The record-low was set in 2007. According to the report, “We are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2-2.4 degree Centigrade rise in average global temperatures which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our Earth, biosphere and oceans." Concentrations of the main greenhouse gasses blamed for climate change were growing more rapidly than during the 1990s. Carbon dioxide rose by 2.3 parts per million (ppm) in the sapce of a year to reach 389 ppm in 2010. That compares to an annual average rise of 1.5 ppm during the 1990s.
December 10, 2011
2010 census data show that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which is termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That is, one in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it. As for all of that inspirational, up-by-their-bootstrap talk you hear on the Republican campaign trail, over half of the near poor in the new tally actually fell into that group from higher income levels as their resources were sapped by medical expenses, taxes, work-related costs, and other unavoidable outlays. The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy. Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann have called for taxing the poor and near poor more heavily, 
December 8, 2011
Most of us don’t know much about our great-grandparents. Mormons probably know more than most people because of the emphasis on genealogy. But even Mormons don’t have access to much information about them. I’m doing some research on my great-grandfather Russell and his aunt, and even though they were both public figures for a while, there isn’t a lot of information about them, especially personal information. What there is consists of a few photographs, what they wrote, and what a few others wrote about them. But that absence of information is something that will be forever changed as a result of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital content the average person can now produce in a lifetime. 
December 6, 2011
December 6, 2011
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President,
We write to express our strong support for your recent decision to bring our troops home from Iraq by year’s end. We were relieved to learn that our service men and women will be home from Iraq for the holidays.
The ongoing war in Afghanistan, by contrast, threatens to stretch our commitment into another decade. In August you announced the gradual removal of the “surge” troops, and yet over 70,000 troops will remain in Afghanistan at this time next year. This is unsustainable and counterproductive. There is unanimous agreement that the future of Afghanistan depends on Afghans and their regional allies implementing a political solution. There is simply no military solution to the current challenges in Afghanistan and maintaining an American military presence only delays the inevitable political process while putting our brave men and women in uniform in harms’ way.
Furthermore, it is crucial that Congress plays its proper Constitutional role in any decision to leave U.S. troops in a potential combat zone. While the United States is currently scheduled to hand over full control over security and remove all combat troops by the end of 2014, a new agreement could result in an indefinite military commitment and significant financial costs, all without further Congressional approval. Dating back to 2009, eleven acts authorizing and funding troop presence in Afghanistan have included a provision specifically prohibiting the establishment of permanent bases in Afghanistan. Any agreement that obliges the U.S. to a security commitment in Afghanistan must be bound by the Constitution, and be specifically authorized by an Act of Congress, or with the advice and consent of the Senate.
While reports indicate that President Karzai plans on requiring any future strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. to be approved by the Afghan Parliament, a traditional tribal gathering, or both, there is no plan to have similar Congressional input. It is unconscionable that America could make new, lasting military commitments of tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars without express approval from Congress.
Rebuilding America must remain our top priority, and this should be reflected in our budgetary priorities. We need to end the wars and invest the savings in job creation for our future.
Sincerely,
Congressmembers Barbara Lee and Walter Jones
now with 30 other congressmember co-signers
November 24, 2011
Decided to have a traditional Thanksgiving celebration this year. I invited the neighbors over, then after dinner killed them all off.
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 12, 2011
The Hubble Space Telescope, despite being in the last phase of its tenure in orbit, continues to offer new glimpses into the universe. Now the telescope has peered deep into space and 10 billion years into the past and delivered new images of 18 dwarf galaxies that are, to the excitement of scientists, creating stars at an extremely rapid rate. In fact, the galaxies are churning out stars at such a rate that the number of stars in them would double in just 10 million years. To form stars so rapidly you must have an enormous amount of gas condensing in the cores of these galaxies. By comparison, our galaxy, the much older and larger Milky Way, 
has taken a thousand times longer to double its star count. The observations were part of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), an ambitious three-year project that studies the most distant galaxies in the universe. CANDELS is using Hubble to image a much larger region of space than was observed before, and is going extremely deep into the infrared end of the light spectrum to pick up the faintest specks of light. The new discovery came when CANDELS found a population of small "dwarf" galaxies that were unusually bright in one particular wavelength. They have turned up in the Hubble images because the radiation from young, hot stars has caused the oxygen in the gas surrounding them to light up like a fluorescent sign. Galaxies with rapidly forming stars characteristically feature huge quantities of oxygen, an element astronomers were not expecting to find. Many current models suggest dwarf galaxies form stars more slowly, over billions of years, to gradually build up to what we see today. However, the implications of these observations is that galaxies form the bulk of their stars extremely rapidly in a burst of star formation. This turns our picture of star formation on its head. 
Astronomers are able to make detailed analyses of dwarf galaxies because there are other, much closer, examples orbiting the Milky Way, which can be used for comparison. On top of that, there was the significant fact that so many dwarf galaxies were discovered apparently behaving the same way at the same time indicating that this must be a very common process. It's not yet clear exactly how old these dwarf galaxies are, though they must be significantly younger than the Milky Way. Similarly, astronomers cannot be sure how many generations of stars have appeared previously in those galaxies, since the new wave of star births is outshining any older siblings they have. The big mystery is why this population of young galaxies was creating stars at such a high rate. Alas, the Hubble may not be around to unravel that one. The aging telescope has now been in orbit around the Earth since 1990, and received one last upgrade - which included the Wide Field Camera 3 used by CANDELS - in 2009.
November 9, 2011
According to a Commerce Department report, Exploring the Digital Nation — Computer and Internet Use at Home, 82.3% of Utah homes are connected to the internet, the highest percentage in the country. 79.7 percent are connected via high-speed broadband, and another 2.6 percent have dial-up service. Nationally, 68 percent of homes have broadband connections and another 3 percent have dial-up. No. 2 behind Utah is New Hampshire, where 77.8 percent of homes have broadband and 3.2 percent have dial-up. Lowest in the nation is Mississippi, where 51.7 percent have broadband and 6 percent have dial-up. 
October 31, 2011
Although there is more than enough food to feed the world's growing population, the global economic system benefits the industrialized nations in a way that creates hunger in developing countries. Every 3 seconds, someone starves to death. 
In the United States, every celebration is turned into a reason to buy.
Happy Halloween.
October 30, 2011
Recently Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust. It doesn’t get any more immoral than that. Our financial industry (actually, their financial industry) has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. 
October 25, 2011
Brand-new research finds that people who drink coffee are at reduced risk of developing basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. And the more they drink, the lower the risk. The research, presented recently at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Boston, looked at coffee consumption and the risk of three forms of skin cancer - basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and the rarer and more deadly melanoma - among about 113,000 participants in two long-term health surveys. Though easily treated through minor surgery and not typically deadly, 
October 21, 2011
President Obama
Great, great news, only nine years too late.
Now we just need to get out of Afghanistan.
October 19, 2011
House Republicans approved an egregious measure last week that would shrink access to abortion to the point of endangering women’s lives. Currently, hospitals receiving federal money must administer necessary emergency medical services to pregnant women, including abortion. However, the Protect Life Act would allow hospitals to refuse to perform an emergency abortion on religious or moral grounds even if a woman’s life was at stake. Representative Joe Pitts, the Pennsylvania Republican who introduced the bill, contends it involves no new risk to women. That is a lie. This could be life-threatening to women, especially those living in communities with only one hospital. 
Catholic hospitals alone account for about 15 percent of the nation’s hospital beds. The need to accommodate religious doctrine does not give health providers serving the general public license to deny essential care. Beyond emergency treatment, the Pitts bill would effectively ban insurance coverage for abortion in the new state health insurance exchanges set up as part of health care reform, even though the reform law already places unnecessary restrictions on insurers and the insured to make sure no federal money is used to pay for abortions. The bill would also allow states to override the health reform law’s requirement that new insurance plans cover certain preventive health services without a co-pay, potentially making birth control a target. For now, the measure has little chance of becoming law, with Democrats controlling the Senate and President Obama in the White House. But with state abortion restrictions proliferating, the bill is another warning that supporters of women’s reproductive rights need to push back a lot harder.
October 10, 2011
It has been a record year for new legislation designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote — 19 laws and two executive actions in 14 states dominated by Republicans, according to a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice. As a result, more than five million eligible voters will have a harder time participating in the 2012 election. Of course the Republicans passing these laws never acknowledge their real purpose, which is to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to vote Democratic, particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities. They insist that laws requiring government identification cards to vote are only to protect the sanctity of the ballot from unscrupulous voters. Cutting back on early voting, which has been popular among working people who often cannot afford to take off from their jobs on Election Day, will save money, they claim. None of these explanations are true. There is almost no voting fraud in America. And none of the lawmakers who claim there is have ever been able to document any but the most isolated cases. The only reason Republicans are passing these laws is to give themselves a political edge by suppressing Democratic votes. 
The most widespread hurdle has been the demand for photo identification at the polls, a departure from the longstanding practice of using voters’ signatures or household identification like a utility bill. Seven states this year have passed laws requiring strict photo ID to vote, and similar measures were introduced in 27 other states. More than 21 million citizens — 11 percent of the population — do not have government ID cards. Many of them are poor, or elderly, or black and Hispanic and could have a hard time navigating the bureaucracy to get a card. In Kansas, the secretary of state, Kris Kobach (who also wrote Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law), pushed for an ID law on the basis of a list of 221 reported instances of voter fraud in Kansas since 1997. Even if that were true, it would be an infinitesimal percentage of the votes cast during that period, but it is not true. When The Wichita Eagle looked into the local cases on the list, the newspaper found that almost all were honest mistakes: a parent trying to vote for a student away at college, or signatures on mail-in ballots that didn’t precisely match those on file. In one case of supposed “fraud,” a confused non-citizen was asked at the motor vehicles bureau whether she wanted to fill out a voter registration form, and did so not realizing she was ineligible to vote. Some of the desperate Republican attempts to keep college students from voting are almost comical in their transparent partisanship. No college ID card in Wisconsin meets the state’s new stringent requirements (as lawmakers knew full well), so the elections board proposed that colleges add stickers to the cards with expiration dates and signatures. Republican lawmakers protested that the stickers would lead to — yes, voter fraud. Other states are beginning to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, or are finding other ways to make it harder to register. Some are cutting back on programs allowing early voting, or imposing new restrictions on absentee ballots, alarmed that early voting was popular among black voters supporting Barack Obama in 2008. In all cases, they are abusing the trust placed in them by twisting democracy’s machinery to partisan ends.
October 7, 2011
From Paul Krugman:
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people. When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever. It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point. 
What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right. A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts. In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis. Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand? Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. 
October 6, 2011
While I hear it’s been in the 80s in Minnesota, in Utah, we skipped right past autumn and went directly to winter:
September 22, 2011
On this date in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in rebel states should be free as of January 1, 1863.
September 20, 2011
People with diabetes are at increased risk of having a heart attack or stroke at an early age, and diabetes appears to dramatically increase a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia later in life, according to a new study conducted in Japan and led by Yutaka Kiyohara, M.D., an environmental medicine researcher at Kyushu University, in Fukuoka. The study included more than 1,000 men and women over age 60. At the beginning, tests showed that 15% of the participants had full-fledged diabetes, while 23% had prediabetes, also known as impaired glucose tolerance. 
The participants were all dementia-free when the tests were done, but over the next 15 years 23% received a diagnosis of dementia. Slightly less than half of those cases were deemed to be Alzheimer's disease, with the remainder roughly split between vascular dementia and dementia due to other causes. The diagnoses were confirmed with brain scans of living patients and brain autopsies in deceased patients. Both diabetes and prediabetes were associated with an increased risk of dementia diagnosis, although the association was weaker for prediabetes. And the link persisted even after the researchers took into account several factors associated with both diabetes and dementia risk, such as age, sex, blood pressure, and body mass index. The researchers found that people with diabetes were twice as likely as the other study participants to develop Alzheimer's disease within 15 years. They were also 1.75 times more likely to develop dementia of any kind. 
September 13, 2011
From the Salt Lake Tribune:
Ever since the LDS Church declared its support for the Utah Compact, advocating compassion in the illegal immigration debate, and support of Utah’s guest-worker law, tea-party Mormons have seemed to waver between following their church leaders or Glenn Beck. Delegates at Republican conventions, while debating whether to ask for the Legislature’s repeal of the guest-worker bill, argued among themselves about the church’s role in the issue, whether it had a right to express an opinion, and what its statements really meant. Now we have the definitive answer from a former Arizona state senator who ran in the Republican primary for governor of that state last year and is a loudly proclaimed tea-party Mormon steeped in the belief she and all other good people are surrounded by government conspiracies. 
Arizona State Sen. Karen Johnson says her beloved Mormon Church was brainwashed by evil liberals. And now, she surmises, Mormon leaders have something in common with the news media: They wallow in ignorance by opposing her righteousness. Yep, in the world of Johnson and the tradition of Mormon conservatives in her area of Mesa, Ariz., the LDS Church in Utah is now a liberal bastion. Johnson, who gave a speech in the Arizona Senate in 2008 alleging the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was the result of government conspiracy, wrote a lengthy piece on her blog last week that claims the Utah Compact was a carefully crafted conspiracy that sucked Mormon leaders in by using LDS code words. Johnson, who was named worst legislator of the year by the Arizona Republic in 2002, charged in her editorial that nobody would claim authorship of the Utah Compact which, among other things, advocates keeping families together when dealing with undocumented workers who Johnson and other tea partiers say should all be deported. She had harsh words for such liberal radicals as Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce President and former president of the Utah Senate Lane Beattie. Another liberal rascal revealed by her research is Paul Mero, of the Sutherland Institute (and you thought that was a conservative think tank). She unmasked the plot by pointing out that Chamber of Commerce executive Natalie Gochnour couldn’t say in a television interview who was the actual author of the compact. Johnson mocked Gochnour’s answer that up to 100 people had input into the final product. But Johnson found out that the real culprit was longtime political consultant Carter Livingston, a Democrat. Livingston was working with the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigration Forum and, in an interview uncovered by Johnson, said that in order to work with the conservative culture in Utah to arrive at a solution, he tried to find common ground, like keeping families together. And that’s what duped the church, says Johnson. The Arizona political culture from which Johnson comes is the same culture that created the political philosophy of Utah Eagle Forum president Gayle Ruzicka, who, while living in Arizona was part of the political machine that elected former Republican Gov. Evan Mecham, later disgraced by scandal. Ruzicka moved to Utah after that and has been molding Utah County in the image of Mesa ever since.
September 12, 2011
This is what I wrote in my journal about yesterday:
Can’t really stand having the TV on now or reading the papers. Everything is about feeding our orgy of self pity on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 without any intelligent discussion of the causes or what has happened since. The way that event was politicized and used to undermine the democratic elements of our republic has tainted it for me.
This is what Paul Krugman wrote:
The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America 
– a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud. It was a time when tough talk was confused with real heroism, when people who made speeches, then feathered their own political or financial nests, were exalted along with – and sometimes above – those who put their lives on the line, both on the evil day and after. So it was a shameful episode in our nation’s history – and it’s one that I can’t help thinking about whenever we talk about 9/11 itself. Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud. But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.
September 6, 2011
How many species are there on this planet? In 1691, the scientist John Ray estimated that there were 20,000 species of insects. His numbers were significantly off — so far, at least a million insect species have been described. But he reached that estimate the way most scientists still do, by extrapolating from the number of already known species. Three centuries later, there is still no scientific consensus on the total number of species. The most rigorous attempt at a statistical analysis of the problem, a recent study led by scientists at Dalhousie University, concludes that there are about 8.7 million species on Earth. The team analyzed the numerical relationship between species, genus, family, and order in well-studied life-forms and used that pattern to estimate the number of species in categories of life that haven’t been well studied. 
September 2, 2011
There’s good news and bad news about Utah, which is kind of an improvement because usually there is only bad news. Keeping with tradition, the bad news first:
A 2007 survey by the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice put Utah’s reported rape rate at 63.7 per 100,000 
females compared to the U.S. rate of 57.4 per 100,000 females. The survey also found that nearly one-third of Utah (still 60% Mormon) women surveyed had some type of sexual assault during their lifetimes. Surveys have shown that in many cases where family members are the perpetrators, other family members of the victim advise them not to tell authorities because they fear damage to the family image. That’s right, families are forever.
Next, the good news:
One characteristic about Salt Lake City that you may not have guessed is that it has the third-highest rate of same-sex couples among America’s mid-size cities (those with populations between 100,000 and 250,000). It even ranks in the top 10 for same-sex couples of all cities, with such well-known liberal places as Berkeley, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass.; and Madison, Wis. Salt Lake City has 17.31 same-sex couples per 1,000 households, with 1,290 such couples overall. 
That is more than double the national rate of 7.7. “It doesn’t surprise me,” Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker said. “I have known as mayor, and as anyone here who pays attention also knows, that we have a relatively large and active LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community.” A series of state-by-state data releases from the 2010 census containing data on same-sex couples was recently completed, allowing national comparisons. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law used it to rank states, counties, and cities. On the census form, a household head indicated that a second adult of the same sex is a spouse or an “unmarried partner.” The study uses census data on same-sex couple households to estimate the size of the LGBT population. That indicates about 8.5 percent of adults in Salt Lake City identify themselves as LGBT, compared with 3.8 percent of adults nationally. 
Among large cities with populations of more than 250,000 people, San Francisco has the highest rate of same-sex couples at 33.41 per 1,000 residents, followed by Seattle at 25.54 and Oakland, Calif., at 24.61. The proportion of households with same-sex couples in Salt Lake City is similar to that of Denver, Boston, and even Manhattan, which has 19.32 per 1,000 households. Cities like Salt Lake City, Denver, Atlanta, and Minneapolis have a “regional draw” for LGBT people who are looking to live in a more accepting city without leaving their home state or region. In the past, it was more common to move to San Francisco or New York, but now it’s easier to find a welcoming climate closer to home. Jakob Crawford, a 21-year-old gay man who lives in Salt Lake City, agrees. “Gay people in Utah come to Salt Lake City because it’s almost like an island of liberal progressives in a sea of conservative Mormon culture,” he says.
August 29, 2011
Women’s rights are increasingly under attack in the United States. Since last year, 13 states, including Kansas, have enacted laws banning insurance coverage of abortion in the health insurance exchanges created by the federal health care reform law. Some states have gone even further, aggressively restricting abortion coverage even in private insurance plans sold outside the exchanges. The Kansas statute, which is being challenged in court, forbids abortion coverage (except to save a woman’s life) in comprehensive insurance plans sold in the state, but permits companies to sell a separate rider covering abortion care for an additional cost. It also bars abortion services in policies sold after 2014 in the new exchanges. That part of the law, which also contains only a single exception limited to life endangerment, does not allow for a separate rider for broader abortion coverage. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Kansas, argues persuasively that the law is unconstitutional because it essentially levies a tax on a constitutionally protected procedure. 
August 27, 2011
For a hundred years, poll taxes were used throughout the South to keep African-Americans from voting. As Representative John Lewis points out:
Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri, and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification. 
Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes. Conservative proponents have argued for photo ID mandates by claiming that widespread voter impersonation exists in America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. While defending its photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of actual voter impersonation at any point in its history. Likewise, in Kansas, there were far more reports of U.F.O. sightings than allegations of voter fraud in the past decade. These theories of systematic fraud are really unfounded fears being exploited to threaten the franchise. In Georgia, Florida, Ohio, and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. 
August 24, 2011
There’s a new billboard along the 2100 South freeway just west of 5600 West in Salt Lake City. “Don’t believe in God?” it asks. “You are not alone.” The billboard was purchased by the Utah Coalition of Reason with a grant from the Washington D.C.-based United Coalition of Reason, and it will remain up through Sept. 19. “We’re hoping to reach a lot of people on their way to the Utah State Fair,” said Elaine Ball, director of the Utah coalition. “We want everybody to know we’re coming together as people who are atheists, agnostic, or freethinking and open to discussing ideas. 
We’re not trying to convert or de-convert people.” The Utah Coalition of Reason also seeks to act as a counterbalance to public discussions embracing religion and the blurring of lines between church and state. “It’s a concern that candidates embrace God publicly,” she said. “We’re in a political climate where it’s not acceptable to embrace humanism. We’d like to change that.” Among other things, the Salt Lake City billboard is part of a national campaign that seeks to remove any social stigma from those who do not believe in a deity. Non-believers are inundated with religious messages at every turn. This is just one, tiny counter assertion. The day after an article appeared, a local newspaper columnist wrote about being showered with emails denouncing the atheist billboard in terms he could not print. They are most afraid of “freethinking and open to discussing ideas”, attributes very rare in Utah and completely absent from Utah politics.
August 21, 2011
Throughout history, societies have struggled with how to deal with children and childhood. In the United States and elsewhere, a broad-based “child saving” movement emerged in the late 19th century to combat widespread child abuse in mines, mills, and factories. By the early 20th century, the “century of the child,” as a prescient book published in 1909 called it, was in full throttle. Most modern states embraced the general idea that government had a duty to protect the health, education, and welfare of children. Child labor was outlawed, as were the sale and marketing of tobacco, alcohol, and pornography to children. Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children. By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. 
In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform. But the 20th century also witnessed another momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation. Lawyers, policy makers, and business lobbied successfully for various rights and entitlements traditionally connected, legally, with personhood. New laws recognized corporations as legal — albeit artificial — “persons,” granting them many of the same legal rights and privileges as human beings. In an eerie parallel with the child-protective efforts, “the best interests of the corporation” was soon introduced as a legal precept. A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations, and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children. Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations. 
Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments. Children today are also exposed to increasing quantities of toxic chemicals. We know that children, because their biological systems are still developing, are uniquely vulnerable to the dangers posed by many common chemical compounds. We also know that corporations often use such chemicals as key ingredients in children’s products, saturating their environments. Yet these chemicals remain in circulation, as current federal laws, enacted with corporate profits in mind, demand unreasonably high proof of harm before curbing a chemical’s use. The challenge before us is to reignite the guiding ethos and practices of the century of the child. As Nelson Mandela has said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” By that measure, our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul. Greed is strangling us all, and, as always, children are harmed the most.
August 17, 2011
A dispute over breast-feeding at a Salt Lake City grocery store has sparked plans for a nationwide nurse-in this Saturday, when moms armed with hungry babies are expected to descend on dozens of Whole Foods Markets. Angelina Love, 23, was nursing her 17-month-old son while shopping at the Trolley Square store this June when an employee asked her to cover up. Another customer had complained after seeing Love feed her child with her tank top-style dress pulled down beneath her left breast. Love was shocked. “A breast-feeding woman is feeding her child,” she said this week. “She’s not exposing herself.” An employee explained that some customers found the behavior offensive. Several other employees arrived and said there were other places in the store she could nurse with more privacy, such as the café. 
They said they were trying to please everybody. “You’re putting shame on me and my family by telling me to cover up or asking me to move,” Love said she told the employees. The mother and employees couldn’t come to any resolution, so Love took the manager’s phone number and walked out of the store with her family. Now she is asking Whole Foods to develop a pro-breast-feeding policy and training that would prevent a similar confrontation from happening again. The corporation, which is welcoming the nurse-in, says such a change is in the works. “The bottom line is some people made some mistakes and we have addressed that internally,” said Libba Letton, a Whole Foods spokesperson. “This nurse-in is a great way to bring attention to an important issue.” Utah has one of the highest percentages of breast-feeding moms in the nation, according to the 2011 report card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 85 percent of children are breast-fed at some point, with 61.5 percent still nursing at six months, compared to 44.3 percent nationwide. If Love returns to Whole Foods and nurses her son, she will not be asked to cover herself, Letton said. A complaining customer would be told about the policy. But Love said, “I’m not going to shop in that store again until they make it sure this won’t happen again. Nursing a child is normal and not something unsightly that should be hidden.” I agree, and to support that, I plan to be at Whole Foods Saturday to keep an eye on things.
