On April 17, 2012, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011, an increase of $138 billion over the previous year. The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion. Why are military expenditures continuing to increase, indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing, given the governmental austerity measures of recent years? Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, libraries, healthcare, housing, parks, and other vital social services. 
There have been no corresponding cuts in military budgets. In fact, this past year, nations spent more money on the military than at any time in human history. In the good ol’ USofA, House Republicans have been trying to wriggle out of the agreement they made in August that will force deep cuts in military spending. Now we know how they propose to do it: They will take tens of billions out of programs for the poorest Americans, particularly food stamps, along with health care for the middle class. The House Agriculture Committee voted on Wednesday to cut $33 billion over the next decade out of food stamps. That would immediately end benefits for two million people, and reduce benefits for the remaining 44 million people who use the program. A family of four would find their benefits lowered by $57 a month beginning in September, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The committee trimmed job training for food-stamp recipients by 72 percent; 280,000 students would no longer be eligible for free meals. The budget deal reached last August — the one Republicans triggered with their disastrous debt-ceiling crisis — calls for a painful sequester of $600 billion to both military and domestic spending over a decade. 
The Republicans could have accepted the military cuts they had agreed to or they could have joined with Democrats in reducing the cuts by raising taxes on the rich. Instead, the 2013 budget, written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, put all the cuts on the domestic side. Representative Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican, explained that the Constitution requires Congress to pay for defense but that food stamps and other domestic programs were lower priorities. Agriculture was one of six committees ordered to find cuts to protect the military budget. The Ways and Means Committee has to cut $53 billion, and its members have already begun taking most of that money out of health care reform, starting with subsidies for insurance exchanges. The Financial Services Committee is planning to save $35 billion by eliminating the F.D.I.C.’s ability to take over failing banks, and hobbling the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a $5.4 billion cut. The agriculture committee, told to find $33 billion in cuts, could have substantially reduced the farm subsidies that now amount to more than $15 billion a year. Instead, the entire amount is coming out of food stamps. Makes your heart swell with pride, doesn’t it.
April 22, 2012
April 19, 2012
About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country's north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education. Since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban, which banned education for women and girls, females have returned to schools, especially in Kabul. But periodic attacks still occur against girls, teachers, and their school buildings. "We are 100 percent sure that the water they drank inside their classes was poisoned. 
April 17, 2012
Data released for Equal Pay Day show that wages for Utah women remain considerably lower than for men. Women in Utah are paid 69 cents for every dollar paid to men — amounting to a yearly gap of $14,446. And with nearly 85,500 Utah households led by women, the new data show that these gaps harm families and the state economy, according to a report by National Partnership for Women & Families. A woman working full time, year round receives $32,163 per year, while the median yearly pay for a man is $46,609. 
Women are paid 69 cents for every dollar paid to men, amounting to a yearly gap of $14,446 between full-time working men and women. African American and Latina women working full time are paid 52 cents for every dollar paid to men, a difference of more than $22,200 per year. Women working full time, year round are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to all men. African American women are paid 62 cents and Latinas are paid 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. The analysis ranks Utah 48th among the 50 states in gender-based wage gap. Only Louisiana, ranked 49th, and Wyoming, 50th, fare worse. The gap in earnings for Utah women isn’t all that surprising, considering their poor college graduation rates according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services. Utah has the worst disparity in the nation between men and women earning bachelor’s degrees or higher — a difference of 6 percentage points. The Utah education gap more than doubles that of the next closest state, Idaho, at 2.4 percentage points, while the national average is 0.6 points. Yes, the Patriarchal Order still thrives in Utah.
April 14, 2012
New analyses of capital punishment show gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it. In Connecticut, a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime. Decades of research show that racial bias pervades death penalty cases. Minority defendants with white victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than others;
35 percent of those executed nationally since 1976 were black, though blacks currently make up 12.6 percent of the population. The problem of inadequate counsel permeates the system, with many indigent defendants sentenced to death after major blunders by court-assigned lawyers. And a horrific number of innocent people have ended up on death row: 17 convicts with death sentences have been exonerated with DNA evidence since 1993, 123 with other evidence since 1973. Any careful evaluation leads to what the American Law Institute concluded after a review of decades of executions: the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class, and politics. Not to mention that it is immoral for a nation to kill its own people. Capital punishment, by overwhelming evidence, should be abolished throughout the United States.
April 10, 2012
When it comes to “reforming the global financial system”, regulators have focused on banks. Weakened by the 2008 crisis, destabilised by the eurozone sovereign debt mess, and then hit with higher capital requirements, traditional lenders are on the retreat. Meanwhile, the "shadow banking" system, a phrase used to encompass a broad range of institutions and mechanisms, from hedge funds to "repo" markets, has recovered more rapidly and is poised to usurp banks in a variety of ways. Regulators are now grappling with how to deal with a vast sector that has little or no supervision. Shadow banking was a fundamental cause of the banking crisis; it is not a separate phenomenon from banking but a deeply related one. 
April 8, 2012
Letters written by George Washington, Henry David Thoreau’s pencil-drawn map of Walden Pond, and Mark Twain’s manuscript of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” are among the items from the New York Public Library’s American collections that will soon be digitized and made available to the public online. The library, aided by a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation, 
April 5, 2012
According to NOAA, March 2012 will go down as the warmest March in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895. In addition, the three-month period of January, February, and March was the warmest first quarter ever recorded in the Lower 48 states.
April 3, 2012
There’s good news and bad news. As befits my always sunny worldview, we’ll do the good news first. According to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about one-fifth of U.S. adults have read an e-book in the past year. And if you expand that to include Americans over 16 who have used an e-reader device or app to read news articles or magazine-style features, the figure is 43%. E-book users tend to read more often than people who read only print material, Pew found. In particular, they read more books. A typical e-book user read 24 books in the past year, compared with the 15 books reported by typical non-e-book users. 
Also, a third of people who read e-content say they now spend more time reading than they did before e-books. This is especially true for people who own tablets and e-book readers. Currently 28% of Americans age 18 and older own at least one tablet or an e-book reader. And that's not even counting the people who read books on a Smartphone or iPod Touch app. For now, print reading material still rules the consumer market, however. Pew found that nearly three-fourths of U.S. adults read a printed book in 2011, and 11% listened to an audiobook. Print books are especially popular when people read to children. But, as common sense would dictate, print books are also the most popular choice when people want to borrow or lend a book, though the survey also found that just slightly more people prefer e-books over print for reading in bed. That’s the good news. On the flip side, Pew noted that nearly 20% of U.S. adults said they had not read a single book, electronic or print, in the past year. And that is indeed bad news.
March 31, 2012
By the end of the decade, exaFLOP computers are predicted to go online. Those machines will perform at least 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Supercomputer performance is measured in FLOPS, an acronym for FLoating Point Operations per Second. "Exa" is a metric prefix which stands for quintillion (or a billion billion). Exascale computers will perform approximately as many operations per second as 50 million laptops. Currently, the fastest supercomputers operate at the petaFLOP level, performing in excess of one quadrillion (or a million billion) operations per second. The first computer to break through the petaFLOP barrier was IBM's Roadrunner in 2008. But its reign as the fastest computer in the world didn't last long, with the Cray Jaguar installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
March 28, 2012
The ideological nature of the health care case was obvious on the last day of oral argument. By the time the proceedings were over, much of what the conservative justices said in court seemed like part of a politically driven exercise — especially because the issues addressed on Wednesday were not largely constitutional in nature. In fact, they were the kinds of policy questions that are properly left to Congress and state governments to answer, not the Supreme Court. The court heard arguments on the issue of “severability” — the question of what should happen with the rest of the 2,700-page statute if the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance is struck down. The insurance mandate was effectively reduced to a bumper sticker by the opponents in their constitutional challenge, and the entire law reduced to little more than an appendage to the mandate. “My approach would be to say that if you take the heart out of the statute, the statute’s gone,” Justice Antonin Scalia said, 
a position held by the law’s opponents, who want to demolish the whole thing. But H. Bartow Farr III, the lawyer appointed by the court to argue for upholding all other parts of the law if the mandate falls, showed how careless and wrong that view is. His presentation compellingly explained what Congress actually passed: a thoughtfully constructed, comprehensive solution to the enormous problems of insufficient insurance coverage and ever-mounting costs of health care. As Mr. Farr made clear, the fate of the mandate should not determine the survival of the other elements of the law — like prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging them higher fees — which can operate without the mandate. Under general principles, courts must avoid nullifying more of a law than is necessary. Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that it would be more extreme to preserve part of the statute than to strike down the whole thing because that would alter Congress’s intent. He could avoid this problem by upholding the mandate. The last issue before the court was the law’s expansion of Medicaid, which will be financed mostly by federal funds. The challengers contend the expansion coerces them to cover more poor people and that the penalty for refusing to do so would be a cutoff of federal money. This is a bizarre view that treats Medicaid, a voluntary federal-state partnership, as an affront to state sovereignty. There is no legitimate constitutional question on this issue. It is disturbing that the conservative justices seriously entertained the opponents’ argument. But it does fit perfectly into the judicial activism of the right wing.
March 26, 2012
New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else. Even in a country used to income inequality, these thefts are stunning. In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households. Still more astonishing was the 
extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income. And now, House Republicans just passed a budget that is an unbelievable mess of highly regressive tax cuts, large but unspecified reductions in discretionary spending (a category that importantly includes education, infrastructure, and research and development), and an evisceration of programs devoted to lifting those at the bottom, including unemployment insurance, food stamps, earned income tax credits, and many more. Obviously, policies of this sort would exacerbate the very problem of income inequality that most needs fixing. But that is clearly fundamental to their plan to turn the United States into a banana republic. God Bless America.
March 24, 2012
Intense rainfalls are getting bigger and more frequent, causing local governments, engineers and landowners to rethink whether sewer systems and other drainage features are up to their tasks. The storm water filtration pond near Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, for instance, needed to be cleaned out six years after it was built, instead of the 25 years designers expected. Researchers point directly at a warming climate as the cause. Warmer air holds more water vapor, and a longer storm season means intense storms can occur more frequently in what once were regarded as the off-seasons. As more northerly latitudes have warmed, the storm-producing clashes between warm and cold air masses have moved northward as well, 
a key reason why the Upper Midwest has seen a steep increase in extreme precipitation. The Upper Midwest saw a 31 percent increase in "intense" rainfalls (the statistical 1 percent events) from 1958 to 2007, over previous decades, according to the National Climactic Data Center. That was the second-highest increase among eight U.S. regions, including Alaska and Hawaii. New England and the Northeast saw a 67 percent increase. Overall, intense doses of precipitation have become more frequent and more intense in recent decades than at any other time in the historical record and account for a larger percentage of total precipitation, according to a study by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Meanwhile, recent weather in Minnesota is hinting that a drought that has persisted for about seven months across much of the state (longer in the Arrowhead) might be loosening its grip. But those kinds of variations don't mean the longer-term trends of increases in intense rainfall might also reverse quickly; excessive rain has been overpowering drought trends in recent decades. At the same time, the classic climate warming scenario dictates that both excess rain and drought are likely simultaneously, as heat evaporates moisture from the land, then dumps it elsewhere in spotty, unpredictable, summer-storm patterns.
