Utah’s tax burden is fairly high compared to other states. State and local government finances data show Utah’s tax burden, including mandatory fees, ranks 16th highest in the country and fourth highest among western states. Even so, a recent Utah Foundation report says Utah’s education funding effort has fallen significantly since 1995, placing it 26th in the nation for the amount of tax revenue public education received for every $1,000 in personal income in 2009. “It’s a big deal because we’re a people that has chosen to value family and to have a lot of kids, and when we survey Utah voters about the issues, they really care about education,” said Steve Kroes, president of the Utah Foundation. “It’s always in the top one or two issues on their minds, and funding is one of the aspects of education that they are most concerned about, and yet, through the political process, we’re not seeing that funding receive the priority that voters seem to want.” Over the years, the foundation has published a number of reports explaining what it has called “Utah’s education paradox” — the fact that while Utah has long had the lowest per-pupil spending in the country, it also spent a high proportion of personal income on schools. 
Kroes said people often still use that education paradox notion as an excuse for why the state doesn’t put more money into education, but “the excuse doesn’t hold water any more.” The report says Utah has the lowest per-pupil spending in the nation partly because of the state’s high proportion of children, but it also notes the decline in the education funding effort. In 2009, Utah’s education funding effort was nearly $48 per $1,000 in personal income, meaning about 4.8 percent of all income earned in the state went toward public education, the report says, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That was down from $56.44 in 1992, when Utah ranked eighth in the nation for its education funding effort. The report attributes the decline in education funding effort to a number of things, including changes in how much of their incomes Utahns have spent, in general, on state and local government. It also attributes the decline to a shift in spending from education to other areas, including health and human services, transportation, and law and order. Kroes said it’s clear policymakers, over the past two decades, have placed a higher priority on other programs or on reducing taxes than on education funding. Another good example of how the corporate-controlled legislature is actually harming the people of the state. And as Hugh Nibley once said, education is the only thing Mormons are willing to pay for and not get. Now, they’re not even willing to pay for it. Nice values.
June 29, 2011
June 23, 2011
Unfortunately, the President's idea of a substantial drawdown of troops in Afghanistan is not even close to enough. I urge you to vote "NO" on the Defense Appropriation Bill. The only money that should go to Afghanistan is for the significant drawdown of troops. I support Rep. 
June 22, 2011
The Utah Department of Community and Culture on Tuesday laid off the state archaeologist and two assistants, leaving the Antiquities section with just two employees: those responsible for maintaining a database necessary for development of roads, railways, buildings, and other projects. Officials say the measures were budget-driven, but skeptics suspect it is related to opposition to a proposed Utah Transit Authority (UTA) station. Department acting Director Mike Hansen said he was simply carrying out budget cuts ordered by the Legislature. Assistant state archaeologist Ronald Rood, who was among those dismissed, said that no other programs in the state Division of History had been cut and suggested there may have been a political motive behind the change: to eliminate employees who sought to protect archaeological sites threatened by development, 
Speaker Greg Curtis had pushed the Department of Natural Resources to delay a conservation easement planned for the site because a client wanted to trade for the land to develop the station. Governor Gary Herbert is a former president of the Utah Association of Realtors. Also The archaeologists’ dismissals comes at a time when lawmakers have ordered the Department of Community and Culture to consider eliminating itself. The bill specifying that was sponsored by Rep. Wayne Harper, a West Jordan Republican and developer. Forrest Cuch, former longtime Utah Indian Affairs director, charged Tuesday that Utah will be in violation of state and federal law because of the firings. He added that he is convinced the archaeology professionals were snared in the Draper FrontRunner station controversy, just as he was. Cuch was fired in February for what the governor characterized as “insubordination.” Cuch, who disputed the official reason for his termination, also said a federal investigation is in order in the archaeology shakeup. “It’s time this stopped, this violation of federal law,” Cuch said. “Some of these people need to be put in jail.” Utahns, in the words of Edward Abbey, remain committed to putting green portapotties in their living rooms if they can make a buck. Greed is strangling even the past, not just our future.
June 21, 2011
As reported in the New York Times:
The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view. To some, this could conjure up comparisons to the agents of repressive governments in the Middle East who monitor online protests and exact retribution offline. But the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons. When a freelance photographer, Rich Lam, digested his pictures of the riots in Vancouver, he spotted several shots of a man and a woman, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, in the middle of a like-nobody’s-watching kiss. When the photos were published, a worldwide dragnet of sorts ensued to identify the “kissing couple.” Within a day, the couple’s 
relatives had tipped off news Web sites to their identities, and there they were, Monday, on the “Today” show: Scott Jones and Alex Thomas, the latest proof that thanks to the Internet, every day could be a day that will be remembered around the world…The “kissing couple” will most likely enjoy just a tweet’s worth of fame, but it is noteworthy that they were tracked down at all. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Experts say that Web sites like Facebook, which require real identities and encourage the sharing of photographs and videos, have hastened this change. “Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.” This growing “publicness,” as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and for ordinary people’s right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems. Technology will play an even greater role in the identification of once-anonymous individuals: Facebook, for instance, is already using facial recognition technology in ways that are alarming to European regulators. Publicity — something normally associated with celebrities — is no longer scarce.
And privacy is a thing of the analog past.
Oh yeah, Happy Summer!
June 19, 2011
I realized some time ago that the two most profound relationships in my life, at least to this point, have been with my father and with my son. I miss them both.
Happy Father’s Day.
June 14, 2011
In a keynote address to the International Labor Organization's (ILO) 100th labor conference, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told delegates at the ILO's headquarters in Geneva that cooperation between governments and global financial and social institutions needs to be strengthened, because social justice is linked to economic development. She cited Germany as an example for the importance of this link, saying that it was key for economic recovery in her country in 2009, when Germany's economy contracted by almost 5 percent. In response, the government introduced a short-term job-sharing scheme in which employers agreed to retain their workers in return for employees accepting shorter working hours and a reduction in wages. "What was very clear was that this bond between both sides of industry, between employers and employees, should not be lost," she said. However, Merkel also pointed out that there was a need for a strong social bond between employers and employees in periods of strong economic performance, not just in times of economic downturn. 
"The lesson to the world from the crisis should be more investment in social partnerships during periods of growth in order to establish resilient partnerships that can survive times of crisis," Merkel said. Raymond Torres, the Director of the International Institute for Labor Studies at the ILO, said Merkel drew some interesting parallels between history and today's situation in terms of socio-economic development. "She reminded the conference that social justice and social development are very important, and that labor is not a commodity," Torres said. Merkel ended her speech by turning her attention to the turbulent events in Tunisia, Syria and Yemen. She observed that one of the main triggers of the so-called Arab Spring was the high level of youth unemployment. On the other hand, in the United States, the current unemployment rate is 9.1%. There are 14 million people looking for work. That number does not include the people who want/need work but have given up looking. And the Republicans are insistent that social justice of any kind, especially financial stimulus to curb unemployment, would destroy the economy. Proud to live in what we are incessantly told is the greatest country in the world.
June 12, 2011
Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs. The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn’t Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009. But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it’s true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we’ll be forcing them to get private insurance —
if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare. By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector. This was supposed to save money; in fact, the program costs taxpayers substantially more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare. And then there’s the international evidence. The United States has the most privatized health care system in the advanced world; it also has, by far, the most expensive care, without gaining any clear advantage in quality for all that spending. Health is one area in which the public sector consistently does a better job than the private sector at controlling costs. Indeed, as the economist (and former Reagan adviser) Bruce Bartlett points out, high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden. So where’s the gain from pushing seniors out of an admittedly expensive system, Medicare, into even more expensive private health insurance?It’s time everyone realized that Republican proposals to “improve” or “save” anything are really proposals to put more money into the already-bulging pockets of the large corporations that are lining their pockets. Is this a great country, or what?
June 9, 2011
Three paragraphs from an excellent, and highly recommended, article on film, “In Defense of the Slow and the Boring:”
Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears…
So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It’s a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film’s 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can’t literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film’s punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think.
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MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.
Read it and weep.
June 7, 2011
Making progress on the Mary Ann Burnham Freeze book and articles. Hope to have them to publishers by the end of the summer. Here’s where I work:
So, no more fooling around, and back to work.
June 6, 2011
Scientists theorize that at the time of the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, matter and antimatter probably existed in equal quantities. For reasons scientists have yet to figure out, nature developed in a way that it preferred matter, so today our universe is made up mostly of matter, and antimatter has become extremely rare. One of physics' biggest questions is whether matter and antimatter in our observable universe really are asymmetric. We assume that the world is made up of symmetries, but maybe we have to think again. 
The scientific history of antimatter goes back quite some time, too: Scientists were aware of its existence at the beginning of the previous century, and they managed to prove its existence in the 1930s. Since then, it has been one of physics' big unsolved mysteries, and researchers have been trying to reproduce antimatter to analyze it further. By doing so, they hope to find out if there are places that are almost entirely antimatter, and what would happen on our planet if we could harness it. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland have managed to store anti-hydrogen atoms which they had trapped for 16 minutes. This, they hope, will bring them closer to solving the mysteries of antimatter. While it is not a scientific breakthrough because it always has been known to be possible, albeit very difficult, it certainly is an experimental breakthrough. Normally, particles and anti-particles annihilate each other with a lightning flash when they collide. The team who conducted the experiment at CERN managed to create what the experimenters refers to as a “soft landing” of particles and anti-particles so they didn't annihilate each other. In the study, published in the journal Nature Physics, the researchers report trapping some 300 anti-atoms. 
June 4, 2011
A deeply troubling article about the unexpected deline in food production caused by global warming:
It is part of this excellent series of articles called Temperature Rising. Be afraid, be very afraid.
June 2, 2011
The Obama administration has rightly decided to reject a mean-spirited and dangerous Indiana law banning the use of Medicaid funds at Planned Parenthood clinics, which provide vital health services to low-income women. The law, signed by Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana in May, is just one effort by Republican-led state legislatures around the country to end public financing for Planned Parenthood — a goal the House Republicans failed to achieve in the budget deal in April. The organization is a favorite target because a small percentage of its work involves providing abortion care even though no government money is used for that purpose. Governor Daniels and Republican lawmakers, by depriving Planned Parenthood of about $3 million in government funds, would punish thousands of low-income women on Medicaid, who stand to lose access to affordable contraception, life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Making it harder for women to obtain birth control is certainly a poor strategy for reducing the number of abortions. On Wednesday, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, said the Indiana law, which is already in effect, 
violates federal Medicaid law by imposing impermissible restrictions on the freedom of Medicaid beneficiaries to choose health care providers. Although Mr. Berwick’s letter to Indiana officials did not say it explicitly, Indiana could lose millions of dollars in Medicaid financing unless it changes its law. In a bulletin to state officials around the country, the Medicaid office warned that states may not exclude doctors, clinics or other providers from Medicaid “because they separately provide abortion services.” So far, Indiana isn’t budging. The issue will be taken up on Monday in federal court in Indiana where Planned Parenthood has filed a suit challenging the state’s action on statutory and constitutional grounds. The organization properly argues that it may not be penalized for engaging in constitutionally protected activities, like providing abortion services with its own money. The Obama administration’s opposition to the Indiana law could help deter other states — including North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Tennessee — from moving forward with similar measures to restrict payments to Planned Parenthood, either under Medicaid or Title X, the main federal family planning program. Kansas, for example, has enacted provisions to block Planned Parenthood from receiving any Title X money. The measures against Planned Parenthood come amid further efforts to limit access to abortion. Just since April, six states — Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas — have enacted laws banning insurance coverage of abortion in the health insurance exchanges created as part of federal health care reform, bringing the total to 14 states. Two states — Arizona and Texas — joined three others in making ultrasounds mandatory for women seeking to terminate pregnancies. Bills expected to be signed soon by Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, contain both types of provisions. Many of these fresh attacks on reproductive rights, not surprisingly, have come in states where the midterm elections left Republicans in charge of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion.
May 30, 2011
Congress has reliably defeated efforts to end the Afghan War on the back of strong support from a number of Representatives who have never seen a war they didn’t like. The highly anticipated vote in the House of Representatives on May 26 was assumed to be a defeat before it began, but turned out extremely close. Indeed, though the amendment was defeated, it lost only 204-215, and carried more than 90% of the sitting Democratic representatives. With the bipartisan bill also carrying a number of freshmen Republicans’ support, a couple of shifts here or there could have actually swung the vote the other way, and left President Obama’s ambition to keep the war going beyond 2014 in an awful mess. The amendment would’ve called on the administration to begin wrapping up the war and negotiating a settlement that would allow for a pullout. A much more aggressive version sponsored by Rep. Chaffetz (R – UT) was also voted on, falling 123-294. The Chaffetz Amendment was far more ambitious and would’ve required a full withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan within 60 days. 
The closer amendment, sponsored by Jim McGovern (D – MA) did not set any explicit dates. The loss is still surely a disappointment, but when one considers that the 2010 vote on materially the same amendment got only 138 yes votes, there is no doubt which side the momentum is on. It also means the 2012 vote, and surely there will be one, will not be presumed to be a “slam dunk” for the administration going in. The combination of the two votes also shows that the antiwar sentiment is surprisingly deep. The Chaffetz amendment still managed to carry a solid majority of President Obama’s own party, and the McGovern amendment came within a hair’s breadth of passing. Polls have long showed the American public squarely against the already decade-long war. Today’s vote suggests that while Congress has still not caught up with public opinion, they are coming around slowly but surely. Assuming that the war continues to grow less popular throughout the year, both amendments can probably count on picking up additional support among representatives ahead of the 2012 election. Not only that, but the votes show Republican opposition growing largely on the basis of incoming freshmen. This suggests that while the “old-hand” politicians can be stubbornly reluctant to abandon an unpopular conflict they voted for at one point, as they get filtered out this lingering support eventually crumbles. Despite administration claims to the contrary, public opposition can eventually end America’s wars. Let’s hope it does. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now.
May 28, 2011
Carbon emissions from energy use reached a record level last year, up 5% from the previous record in 2008, the International Energy Agency said. 
The Paris-based agency called the findings a "serious setback" to limit global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), which was set at the U.N. climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico, last year. The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020. Carbon emissions climbed to a record 30.6 gigatons in 2010. For the 2-degree goal to remain attainable, emissions in 2020 can't be greater than 32 gigatonnes. And for that to happen, carbon dioxide emissions over the next 10 years have to rise less than they did between 2009 and 2010, the agency says. This raises the prospect of dangerous temperature increases later in the century. 
If the predictions hold, sea levels could rise two meters by the end of the century, displacing around 2.5% of the world's population over the course of the century. Furthermore, rainforests will be at risk of retreat in eastern Amazonia, Central America, and some parts of Africa. But not to worry, the rainforests only produce the vast majority of the oxygen humans use to breathe. None of this is really a problem for me. I’m old and won’t live more than 20 years at the most. But my grandson, Gavin Russell, is going to be living on a planet unfit for humans. But it’s alright because the top 1% of humans will have had far more money than they could ever use. Greed is strangling us all.
