January 26, 2011

Here in Salt Lake City, the State Legislature is considering a bill to honor the Browning M1911 pistol by making it the official state firearm. That’s right, a committee in the Utah House of Representatives voted 9 to 2 this week to approve a bill that would add the Browning pistol to the pantheon of official state things, along with the bird (seagull), rock (coal), dance (square), and official state cooking pot (Dutch oven). “This firearm is Utah,” Representative Carl Wimmer, the Browning bill’s sponsor, told The Salt Lake Tribune. Capitol observers say the Browning bill has an excellent chance of becoming law. Last Monday, the Utah State Capitol celebrated Browning Day, honoring John Moses Browning, native son and maker of the nominee for Official State Firearm. There were speeches, a proclamation, a flyover by a National Guard helicopter, and, of course, a rotunda full of guns. “We recognize his efforts to preserve the Constitution,” Gov. Gary Herbert said, in keeping with what appears to be a new Republican regulation requiring all party members to mention the Constitution at least once in every three sentences. It is generally not a good idea to dwell on the strange behavior of the state legislature since it leads to bottomless despair. For example, Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator, tried to improve upon the Browning Day celebrations by suggesting they be scheduled to coincide with Martin Luther King Day since “both made tremendous contributions to individual freedom and individual liberty.” But it’s a symptom of a new streak of craziness abroad in the land, which wants to introduce guns into every conceivable part of American life: National parks, schools, bars, airports. Especially in Utah, where the second-least amount of money is spent on education per child of all the states, but one legislator wants to make gun training mandatory in schools. “There is abundant research suggesting in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, goes down,” Utah’s new United States senator, Mike Lee, told CNN. Actually, there’s a ton of debate about this, which is hard to resolve given the fact that, as Michael Luo reported in The New York Times, the N.R.A.’s crack lobbyists have managed to stop almost all federal financing for scientific research on gun-related questions. But Lee has definitely made the list of most creative commentators on these matters, ever since he dismissed calls for a calmer political rhetoric after the Tucson massacre by arguing that “the shooter wins if we, who’ve been elected, change what we do just because of what he did.” And, Jason Chaffetz, the congressman from Utah County’s response to the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was that he was going to start wearing his gun more. Obviously, God dwells here. And he’s carrying a gun.

January 23, 2011

Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.

Edmund Husserl

January 21, 2011

Happily, we continue to learn more about our human ancestral past. With every, mostly fragmentary, addition to the physical evidence, the picture changes. The mysteries, and the fascination, seem only to keep growing. A case in point is the recent discovery at Denisova Cave, in Siberia, of a finger bone, 50,000 years old. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, based in Leipzig, Germany, have extracted the entire genome from the finger bone and found that it belongs to a previously unknown hominid they have called Denisovans. Researchers will need more skeletal samples before they can say what the Denisovans looked like. But they are believed to have emerged from Africa at roughly the same time as Neanderthals — 500,000 years ago — and settled much farther east. The scientists reached this conclusion by comparing Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes with the genomes of modern humans. In Nature last month, they reported that as much as 4.8 percent of Denisovan DNA turned up in the DNA of people living in Papua New Guinea and the nearby island of Bougainville. Given the distance between Siberia and Papua New Guinea, there’s every possibility the Denisovans were as successful and wide ranging as Neanderthals, who settled in Europe and the Near East. The story that needs updating in our minds isn’t just the existence of another hominid. It’s the fact that humans overlapped and interbred with both Neanderthals and with Denisovans. We carry the traces of these cousins in our genes. What is still unanswered is why we humans survived and prospered, while the Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared. After all, Neanderthals and Denisovans had already prospered for 200,000 or 300,000 years by the time they faded away.

January 13, 2011

New figures for the global climate show that 2010 was the wettest year in the historical record, and it tied 2005 as the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The figures confirm that 2010 will go down as one of the more remarkable years in the annals of climatology. It featured prodigious snowstorms that broke seasonal records in the United States and Europe; a record-shattering summer heat wave that scorched Russia; strong floods that drove people from their homes in places like Pakistan, Australia, California, and Tennessee; a severe die-off of coral reefs; and a continuation in the global trend of a warming climate. Two agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reported that the global average surface temperature for 2010 had tied the record set in 2005. The analyses differ slightly; in the NOAA version, the 2010 temperature was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 20th century, which is 57 degrees. It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001. The earth has been warming in fits and starts for decades, and a large majority of climatologists say that is because humans are releasing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Maybe that’s because the carbon dioxide level has increased about 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

January 10, 2011

Check out this excellent article from the Atlantic, “The Tyranny of Defense,Inc.” (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342/). The author, Andrew Bacevitch, is retired military, a good writer, and very perceptive. I really enjoyed his book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, as well.  Sad but true.

January 6, 2011

John Boehner, the new speaker, promised the incoming House members of the 112th Congress to “give the government back to the American people.” But away from the camera, the chamber’s new Republican leadership is busy doing the opposite. Darrell Issa of California, the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has sent out letters to 150 businesses and trade groups, asking them for suggestions on loosening what he called “job-killing” corporate regulations. This, of course, has nothing to do with Mr. Boehner’s tearful populism and everything to do with the tens of millions in corporate dollars that helped propel the Republicans to power in the House. Businesses have complained about the Obama administration’s expanded, and necessary, oversight of finance, health care, and food production, among other areas. Now they have helped elect a House leadership that is eager to do their bidding. Mr. Issa did not have to wait long for answers to his query. To cite just a few: Financial companies have protested the new controls on debit-card fees, which were enacted to save small businesses billions of dollars and to lower prices. Manufacturers said they did not like the proposed E.P.A. limits on greenhouse gas emissions, intended to begin addressing global warming. There were even complaints about the cost to business of proposed federal limits on how long truck drivers can be behind the wheel, which would save lives on the highway. None of this should be surprising, especially coming from Mr. Issa, who has already made clear his intention to harass the Obama administration with “seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks.” One of his targets, he has said, would be the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is intended to curb some of the financial industry’s worst practices and help head off another meltdown. Apparently he required no hearings or the slightest smidgen of evidence to declare that President Obama is “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” even if he now claims that corrupt does not mean criminal. The new Republican leaders love to insert the phrase “job-killing” in front of everything they oppose, hoping it might mask their true intentions. Mr. Boehner has been speaker for just one day. But it is already clear that the Republicans’ plan is to serve their corporate donors, above all else.