March 28, 2011

More about conservative efforts to undermine intellectual freedom, this time from Paul Krugman:

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.” So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians. If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment. The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become. The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records. Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike. But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon. After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer. Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon? Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.) Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing. So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing. Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like. Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble. What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

March 27, 2011

The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors. The historian, William Cronon, is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and was recently elected president of the American Historical Association. Earlier this month, he was asked to write an Op-Ed article for The New York Times on the historical context of Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. While researching the subject, he posted on his blog several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states. In particular, he pointed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group, backed by business interests, that circulates draft legislation in every state capital, much of it similar to the Wisconsin law, and all of it unmatched by the left. Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms. The party refuses to say why it wants the messages; Mr. Cronon believes it is hoping to find that he is supporting the recall of Republican state senators, which would be against university policy and which he denies. This is a clear attempt to punish a critic and make other academics think twice before using the freedom of the American university to conduct legitimate research. Professors are not just ordinary state employees. As J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, noted in a similar case, state university faculty members are “employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives.” A political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues. And it makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous, which they in fact are. Not to mention ruthlessly anti-intellectual.

March 24, 2011

Here is the route of my daily walk (click for larger image):

6.11 miles, just a 10th of a mile short of a 10K.  The bottom graph shows the elevation change: 364 ft. Takes about 1 hour 45 minutes. All of it is through downtown Salt Lake City, which I really enjoy. I’m not planning to go much further, but I’m going to try to go much faster. I’ll have to work out something similar when I move down to American Fork in May. Happy trails.

March 23, 2011

The supposedly frugal Utah Legislature has privatized future state employee pensions, done away with state employee retirement benefits, and plans to close several state liquor stores and lay off 150 workers. But when it comes to preserving their own taxpayer-funded lifetime health insurance, it’s a whole different budget issue. Lawmakers were aghast this past legislative session when Rep. John Dougall, R-Highland, altered his HB331 in the Government Operations Standing Committee to put an end to the 100 percent state-funded health benefit lawmakers and their spouses get for life after they reach retirement age and had served in the Legislature for at least 10 years. Some committee members may have swallowed their tongues when Dougall’s substituted bill would have required that anyone in the Legislature after Jan. 1, 2013, would lose the privilege. Only those lawmakers who retired before then would be grandfathered in. In an era when lawmakers have told providers of state programs that everyone must sacrifice in a time of austerity, nobody wanted to vote against imposing their own sacrifice in a public meeting. So, the bill limiting lifetime health benefits passed committee unanimously. Then it passed the House on a 63-0 vote. But then it died in the Senate Rules Committee after a number of House members let their Senate colleagues know they wanted it dead, but only voted for it in public to save their own political hides. So, all those fiscally conservative public servants get to keep their benefits for life while they eliminate jobs and benefits for everyone else. The Legislative Fiscal Analyst estimated the benefit package will cost the state $24 million for the lifetime coverage of all current and retired legislators and their spouses, based on average life expectancies. No hypocrisy here in the state of the gun.

March 20, 2011

Saturday's full moon was a super perigee moon -- the biggest in almost 20 years. This celestial event is far rarer than the famed blue moon, which happens once about every two-and-a-half years. The last full moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993. Full moons look different because of the elliptical shape of the moon's orbit. When it's at perigee, the moon is about 31,000 miles (50,000 km) closer to Earth than when it's at the farthest point of its orbit, also known as apogee. Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the moon's orbit. This full moon rose in the east at sunset and looked especially big at that time because of what's known as the moon illusion. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings, and other foreground objects. Even so, Saturday's full moon was still 211,600 miles (356,577 km) away. The next one occurs in 2029.

March 16, 2011

Check out this troubling and important article about pro football:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15herbert.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

March 15, 2011

       Josh Russell

March 8, 2011

Gavin Russell is one year old today!

March 4, 2011

The IPCC is the leading international scientific body studying climate change. Despite criticism, much of it manufactured by climate-change deniers, the panel has for more than a decade provided rigorous and balanced information to policy makers to help guide their efforts to prevent and mitigate the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. Regrettably, political corruption trumps science among House Republicans, who recently voted to zero out this country’s extremely modest $2.3 million annual commitment to the IPCC. The bill also slashes spending on a half-dozen domestic programs that study the causes and effects of climate change. The budget for the Energy Information Agency, which gathers information on energy production, consumption, and pollution, would be cut by one-sixth. Small but vital Interior Department programs that measure the impact of climate change on animal, plant, and fish species and their habitat were reduced, and in some cases, nearly wiped out. There are already devastating amendments to the budget resolution that, unless reversed by the Senate, will undermine the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The bill would also make it impossible for President Obama to meet his promises to help poor countries save their rainforests and deploy clean energy technologies, also essential for addressing global warming. Mr. Obama asked for $400 million for the World Bank’s clean technology fund, $95 million for the bank’s program to prevent deforestation, and $90 million for its program to help at-risk nations cope with the effects of a warming planet by, for instance, developing drought-resistant crops. The House’s answer in all three cases: zero. An appalling, but predictable, performance. But the worst of it is the House’s cynical attempt to destroy evidence of the world-shattering problem.

January 28, 2011

The edges of historical or geological eras tend to be fuzzy. Humans existed when the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, 11,500 years ago. Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun, called the Anthropocene, a term first used in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on the chemical mechanisms that affect the ozone layer. The Royal Society has devoted a recent issue of its Philosophical Transactions to the Anthropocene. According to one of the papers, the name is “a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth.” It means that human activity has left a “stratigraphic signal” detectable thousands of years from now in ice cores and sedimentary rocks. Those of us alive today may well be able to say we were present when the Anthropocene epoch was formally named. But we will not be able to say we were present at the start of the Anthropocene. There is a strong case that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, in the early 1800s, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere. Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to. Some species, like ammonites and brachiopods, even serve as guides, or index fossils, to the age of the rocks they’re embedded in. But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity, something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction, and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous. Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment — from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.

February 25, 2011

From Paul Krugman:
Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.
As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”
The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.
Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.
In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.
What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.
For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.
And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”
What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”
If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone. Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?
The good news from Wisconsin is that the upsurge of public outrage — aided by the maneuvering of Democrats in the State Senate, who absented themselves to deny Republicans a quorum — has slowed the bum’s rush. If Mr. Walker’s plan was to push his bill through before anyone had a chance to realize his true goals, that plan has been foiled. And events in Wisconsin may have given pause to other Republican governors, who seem to be backing off similar moves.
But don’t expect either Mr. Walker or the rest of his party to change those goals. Union-busting and privatization remain G.O.P. priorities, and the party will continue its efforts to smuggle those priorities through in the name of balanced budgets.

February 20, 2011

The Federal Reserve is projecting unemployment to continue at or near 9 percent for the rest of this year. That is 13.9 million people out of work who want to work. In addition, there is a new barrier to employment for jobless workers. As the Fed updated its forecast last week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held a forum on discrimination against unemployed job seekers. Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and staffing agencies refused to consider the unemployed for openings. The message — “the unemployed need not apply” — has at times been explicitly stated in job announcements. In other cases, unemployed job seekers have reported verbal rejections after a recruiter or employer learned they were not currently working. God bless America.

February 8, 2011

Check out these two interesting and deeply-troubling blog posts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07krugman.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/30/egyptian-tunisian-riots-food-prices-extreme-weather-and-high-oil-prices/

Already starting to look like a horror show out there.

February 7, 2011

Not that long ago, the possibility of finding planets outside our solar system, exoplanets, was merely theoretical. In 1995, astronomers began to be able to detect Jupiter-sized planets by their gravitational effect on the stars they orbit. And with the launch of the Kepler telescope in March 2009, and the release last week of the data it has so far gathered, astronomy has crossed a major threshold. The Kepler has discovered 1,235 potential planets. Kepler detects possible planets by measuring the light of 156,000 stars in its field of view and looking for slight dips in brightness when a planet crosses in front of a star. All of these planets will have to be validated using telescopes. That will take years, given the limited number of astronomers and powerful telescopes on this planet. What makes this so striking is the satellite’s instruments always point at the same tiny arc of the Milky Way near the constellation called the Northern Cross — only one four-hundredth of the sky. The Kepler team leader, William Borucki, at the Ames Research Center in Northern California, says that if Kepler could see the whole sky, it would have found some 400,000 planets. Are any of the Kepler’s planets another Earth? Fifty-four of them look as if they might be the right size and the right distance from their stars to be in a habitable zone, where liquid water can exist. Makes you wonder…

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.

December 24, 2010

I hope your Christmas is filled with wonder and joy.

A tree near my apartment. Merry Christmas!

December 22, 2010

On this date in 1864, in the last year of the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, for whom I am named, sent a message from Georgia to President Lincoln that said, "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah."

December 18, 2010

The legal affiliate of a designated “hate group” provided assistance for Rep. Stephen Sandstrom’s enforcement-only Arizona-style immigration bill for Utah. The Immigration Reform Law Institute is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, commonly referred to as FAIR. FAIR is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the strength of writings, quotes, and correspondence by FAIR’s founder and board member, John Tanton. For example, in one of his letters from 1996, housed in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Tanton states that “for American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that”, and asks “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California ... can run an advanced society?” Rep. Sandstrom met with the law institute’s general counsel, Michael Hethmon, on at least two occasions last spring. But, of course, the Orem Republican claims he has never heard of Tanton, never heard anything racist coming from Hethmon in their conversations, and said he knew nothing of FAIR’s hate-group designation. “I have to look at my own personal motivations, and I think they’re good and sound and they’re based on rule of law. They’re not in any way racist in any way shape or form,” Sandstrom said. “Anything that is based on hate or exclusionary issues for Hispanic people I would absolutely denounce.” You mean like the law you sponsored? Of all the groups he could have chosen to get advice from, why that one? I’ve read a lot of history about the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and the more I hear the rhetoric of anti-immigration groups like FAIR and The Minutemen Project, the more it sounds like the Nazis. They were preoccupied with a “final solution to the Jewish question”, just like the immigration groups are preoccupied with finding a solution to the immigration problem. The ethnic hatred they espouse, and that is codified in these laws, makes me sick and is very dangerous.

December 6, 2010

The LDS Church's position on the “sanctity of marriage” is outlined in its 2008 document, "The Divine Institution of Marriage." So, it is not surprising that the Church joined a diversity of faiths in signing "The Protection of Marriage: A Shared Commitment," an open letter affirming a commitment to preserve marriage as the union between one man and one woman. The document has 26 signatures of leaders representing a wide range of major religions and faith communities in the United States, from Catholic to Jewish, from Anglican to Lutheran, from Pentecostal to Evangelical, and from Sikh to Southern Baptist. Signing on behalf of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was Presiding Bishop H. David Burton. The three-paragraph text reads:
”Marriage is the permanent and faithful union of one man and one woman. As such, marriage is the natural basis of the family. Marriage is an institution fundamental to the well-being of all society, not just religious communities. As religious leaders across different faith communities, we join together and affirm our shared commitment to promote and protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman. We honor the unique love between husbands and wives; the indispensable place of fathers and mothers; and the corresponding rights and dignity of all children. Marriage thus defined is a great good in itself, and it also serves the good of others and society in innumerable ways. The preservation of the unique meaning of marriage is not a special or limited interest but serves the good of all. Therefore, we invite and encourage all people, both within and beyond our faith communities, to stand with us in promoting and protecting marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” The letter comes from discussions among religious leaders who, in the face of judicial and legislative attempts to redefine marriage, look to publicize the shared commitment in defending traditional marriage as a fundamental institution of society. Too bad none of these “leaders” understands the history of marriage, that it has always been merely a mechanism of political maneuvering and social status that has traditionally treated women as chattel. But then, maybe that’s what they really want to preserve.

December 4, 2010

The Salt Lake Valley is again suffering with a dirty, smelly, gray shroud of aerial gunk — air deemed bad enough that the Utah Division of Environmental Quality (DEQ) issued red or “unhealthy” air warnings for Saturday through Sunday because of another winter air inversion and the automobile and industrial emissions it is trapping over the region’s valleys. Until possibly early Monday, when the National Weather Service predicts a low pressure front from the Pacific via California and Nevada may bring rain and snow, we will just have to hold our breath and live with it.

Usually you can see the mountains.

DEQ officials cautioned people with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children to shun prolonged or heavy outdoors exertion. In fact, those with breathing ailments should just stay indoors, and motorists were urged to avoid adding to the pollution by putting off unnecessary travel altogether. Only Utah County, which had a “green” or moderate rating for Saturday and Sunday, seemed to be escaping the worst of the airborne, health-comprising effects of the inversion. Undoubtedly because that’s where all the really righteous people live. Just ask them.

December 2, 2010

BMI 6' 0", 250 lb
Computed by Wolfram|Alpha
Input Interpretation

Body mass index
33.9

International weight classification

BMI prime

BMI map

Comparison to USA population

Half way there, but still a very long way to go to 175.

November 28, 2010

Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate. The thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere. Total carbon storage here is like all the rain forests of our planet put together. Global warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed. Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases, and the extinction of species. Studies indicate that cold-country dynamics on climate change are complex. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a scientific body set up by the eight Arctic rim countries, says overall the Arctic is absorbing more carbon dioxide than it releases. But Methane is a different story according to their 2009 report. The Arctic is responsible for up to 9 percent of global methane emissions. Other methane sources include landfills, livestock, and fossil fuel production. In some places, so much methane is leaking from holes in the sediment at the bottom of one lake that “on some days it looked like the lake is boiling," according to Katey Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska Fairbanks who has been measuring methane seeps in Arctic lakes in Alaska, Canada, and Russia for 10 years. More than 50 billion tons could be unleashed from Siberian lakes alone, more than 10 times the amount now in the atmosphere.

November 21, 2010

An analysis by the Salt Lake Tribune of campaign-disclosure forms shows that 33 of the 100 incoming legislators who reported raising money this year (four did not report any donations) did not collect any money from their local constituents. Instead, it all came from corporations, PACs, lobbyists, other politicians, parties, or people outside their districts. An additional 17 lawmakers received less than 1 percent of their money from constituents, essentially a pittance. The most that any lawmaker received from constituents was 22 percent, meaning that 78 percent of contributions still came from outside interests.

No question about who is really being represented. I wonder why I didn’t vote.

November 20, 2010

There’s been a big stink out here in true and only Family Land about the “nude scene” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. But, as usual, it has been blown way out of proportion. Imagine that. Turns out the nudity is implied. Daniel Radcliffe is shirtless, and Emma Watson wears a strapless bra. Both also wear silver paint to create a nightmare effect for Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint). They are seen in this state for about 3 seconds, with enough mist, smoke, and special-effects additions that any flashes of skin are obscured. And, while the movie is rated PG-13, "for some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sensuality", Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also received that same rating. Those films, however, earned their ratings for violence and frightening images, so you couldn’t really get all in a lather to proclaim your self-righteousness for that. Too bad. Can’t have too many opportunities to show how righteous you are.

November 19, 2010

Former president W. came to a suburb of Salt Lake City today to sign copies of his “memoirs.” He didn’t appear at a bookstore, but at a Costco. About 60 of us got together in Pioneer Park in downtown Salt Lake City, about two blocks from my apartment and 15 miles from where he appeared, to protest the visit of the war criminal. Utah is very much a police state, and there’s no way any protesters would have been allowed within blocks of the signing. So, he didn’t get to see the signs saying "Torture Stains Everyone", "Worst President Ever", and "Arrest Bush." Some of the cars heading for the freeway honked. Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake, was the main speaker. He said, among other things, that we and the entire world know that George Bush is a war criminal, that the stench of his presidency will hang over the country, wondered how soldiers can get prosecuted for torture while Bush can be warmly received in Sandy bragging about having said "damn right" when asked if he authorized torture, and said that since Obama has not acted to prosecute Bush, all Americans are complicit in his crimes. I’m not much for chanting and fist pumping, but I agree with all these things. However, no one mentioned his equally horrific crimes of destroying the American middle class, funneling tax dollars to his rich friends, creating the largest budget deficits in history, and enlarging the American security state to a size that will never be reduced. Makes me sick to even think about the damage his presidency has done. And it was depressing to see the pathetically small group of us.

November 18, 2010

It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper. But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Ernest Hemingway
”A False Spring”

November 12, 2010

In 1991, Goldman Sachs decided that food might make an excellent investment. By then, nearly everything else had been recast as a financial abstraction that could generate wealth without risk, so the analysts transformed food. They selected eighteen commodifiable ingredients and contrived a financial elixir that included cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs, and a variety or two of wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation known as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, and began to offer shares. This was a new form of commodities investment that eliminated the complexities of the commodities themselves. It allowed investors to park a great deal of money somewhere, then sit back and watch it grow, without any of the risk that the bankers themselves had introduced into the market. In fact, the mechanism of long and short selling, that had been created to stabilize food prices, now had been reassembled into a mechanism to inflate those prices. If the price of a commodity went up, Goldman made money, not only from management fees, but from the profits the bank pulled down by investing 95% of its clients money in less risky ventures. They even made money from the roll into each new contract, every instance of which required clients to pay a new set of transaction costs. As a result, the prices of all these “elements”, cattle, coffee, corn, wheat, etc., began to rise. And because it was successful, other bankers created their own food indexes as well. So, by the first quarter of 2008 transnational wheat giant Cargill attributed its 86% jump in annual profits to commodity trading. In fact, this global speculative frenzy in food commodities raised prices of food so dramatically that it sparked riots in more than thirty countries and drove the number of the world’s “food insecure” to more than a billion people. The ranks of the hungry had increased by more than 250 million in a single year, the most in all of human history. In reality, more than a billion people could no longer afford bread. The worldwide price of food had risen by 80 percent between 2005 and 2008, and unlike other food catastrophes of the past half century or so, even the United States was not insulated from it as 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table. Across the country, demand for food stamps reached an all-time high, and one in five children came to depend on food kitchens. In Los Angeles, nearly a million people went hungry. In Detroit, armed guards stood watch over grocery stores. Even the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets admitted that rising food prices had, “played a role” in the catastrophe. And this year, the hedge fund manager of AIS Capital Management wrote that “the fundamentals argue strongly” that commodity prices could advance “460% above the mid-2008 price peaks.” That would put the price of a pound of ground beef at $20. When asked if he thought that were true, the chairman of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange responded, “absolutely.” This is what it means to leave “the market” unfettered: most of us are starved so 1% of the world’s population can become immeasurably more wealthy.

November 2, 2010

Today is election day. I have voted in every election since 1974, the first for which I was eligible (in those days when 18-year-old guys were being drafted to die in Vietnam, you had to be 21 years old to vote). I could have voted in 1972, but I was out of the country and had no concept of absentee balloting. Also, since I was a Mormon missionary at the time, I expect voting was against mission rules, at least for the people I would have voted for. So, today is really a first for me: I’m not voting. There are two primary reasons for my decision not to vote. First is that the political system has become so corrupt, politicians are owned completely by large donors, mainly large corporations, that voting has become meaningless. As Noam Chomsky has said, it is just Kabuki theatre to keep the people distracted. And second, there is no one even remotely close to my political views running. Minnesota is the State of Hockey, and Utah is the State of Conservative Posturing and Hypocrisy. Even the very few “Democrats” here are so conservative I get a rash just thinking about them. So, this is a sad and troubling day for me, and a sad and dangerous day for what the American political system has become. Is this a great country, or what?

November 1, 2010

Lewis Lapham on reading history and writing:
I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear about what might happen tomorrow. On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I'm reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 B.C., and I don't have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.

The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to "draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth." It isn't with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they've learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true. What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.

Acknowledgment of the fact lightens the burden of mournful prophecy currently making the rounds of the media trade fairs. I listen to anguished publishers tell sad stories about the disappearance of books and the death of Western civilization, about bookstores selling cat toys and teddy bears, but I don't find myself moved to tears. On the sorrows of Grub Street the sun never sets, but it is an agony of Mammon, not a hymn to Apollo. The renders of garments mistake the container for the thing contained, the book for the words, the iPod for the music. The questions in hand have to do with where the profit, not the meaning, is to be found, who collects what tolls from which streams of revenue or consciousness. The same questions accompanied the loss of the typewriter and the Linotype machine, underwrote the digging of the Erie Canal and the building of Commodore Vanderbilt's railroads, the rigging of the nation's television networks and telephone poles, and I expect them to be answered by one or more corporate facilitators with both the wit and the bankroll to float the pretense that monopoly is an upgraded synonym for a free press, "prioritized" and "context sensitive," offering "quicker access to valued customers."

The more interesting questions are epistemological. How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the "innovative delivery strategies" the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne's or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

October 28, 2010

Now that Favre is injured, here’s the new Vikings starting quarterback, Gavin Russell:

October 25, 2010

It’s a cool day in the neighborhood. First snow in SLC:

October 21, 2010

Top Corporations are helping the U.S. Chamber of Commerce  influence election campaigns. Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic re-write of the nation's financial regulations.  Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed new rules to tighten security requirements on chemical facilities. And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation seeking to limit the ability of trial lawyers to sue businesses. These large donations, none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, offer a glimpse of the chamber's money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall's Congressional elections. And, since the activist judges on the Supreme Court have made it legal for corporations to give as much as they want, money rules! Is this a great country, or what?

October 6, 2010

                       Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love...

                                                            Rainer Maria Rilke
                                                            "The Ninth Elegy"

October 4, 2010

 
            Josh and Sarah two years!

October 3, 2010

In a qualitative escalation, the Obama administration has for the first time used the “war on terror” against socialists in the United States. On September 24, the FBI conducted a series of coordinated early-morning raids at homes and offices in Minneapolis, Chicago, Michigan, and North Carolina. The political police seized computers, passports, books, documents, cell phones, photos, financial records, diaries, maps, and other materials. In one case, children’s artwork was confiscated. The warrants were issued under a 1996 statute signed into law by President Clinton making it a crime for U.S. citizens to provide “material assistance” to any organization designated by the government as “terrorist.” The raids centered on members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fightback). The warrant for one of those targeted, Michael Kelly, authorized seizure of materials related to “Kelly’s travel to and from and presence and activities in Minnesota, and other foreign [sic] countries to which Kelly has traveled as part of his work in FRSO; Kelly’s ability to pay for his own travel from the United States to Palestine and Colombia, and for travel within the United States from 2000 until present, including all materials related to Kelly’s personal finances and finances of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (“FRSO”). When one of those targeted didn’t open the door fast enough to suit the FBI thugs, they smashed the door down so violently it flew across the room and broke an aquarium. The designation of any group as “terrorist” by the State Department is completely arbitrary, made without public explanation and without any recourse by any U.S. citizen. In the past the African National Congress, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Irish Sein Fein were so designated, and then un-designated when that suited the U.S.  “Providing material assistance” is also a completely arbitrary term and can be interpreted in any way the government wants. The nine robed reactionaries of the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that merely talking to designated groups equals providing material support, in a case where pacifists wanted to persuade such groups to adopt non-violence. Those whose homes were raided have been active in many groups, including the Twin Cities [Minneapolis and St, Paul] Antiwar Committee, whose offices also were raided. This committee participated in a national antiwar conference in July, attended by 800 activists, which formed the United National Antiwar Committee and called for antiwar demonstrations next spring. Some of those targeted helped organize demonstrations at the Republican national convention in 2008 in Saint Paul, and were among many arrested in a police riot against the demonstrators. Charges were later dropped, but these new attacks give the authorities another bite at the apple. By targeting socialists, the Obama administration hopes to intimidate wider circles. Tom Burke, one of those whose home was raided, said, “The goal of these raids is to harass and try to intimidate the movement against U.S. wars and occupations, and those who oppose U.S. support for repressive regimes. They are designed to suppress dissent and free speech, to divide the antiwar movement, and pave the way for more U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and Latin America.” Things are just getting better and better. Guess I won’t be wearing my Obama t-shirts any time soon.

September 22-30, 2010

Drove out to Rockford, Illinois for the annual John Whitmer Historical Association conference. Had a good drive out and really enjoyed the conference. Met some great people, connected with a good friend, and learned interesting things.

Then drove up to Stillwater (no, not Backwater), Minnesota to visit my son and family, and meet my new grandson. When I drove up, Josh came out and gave me a hug, which meant a lot to me. It was really nice to see him.  I went in and met Gavin. I loved holding him and watching him move about and unintentionally headbutt things now and then. He’s beautiful and advanced physically and intellectually for his age. He’s very interested in what’s going on around him. He loved it when I walked around the back yard with him. We got along well, and I loved being able to hold him and get to know him a little. The whole time, I was enjoying holding Gavin and talking to them and just being together. They have made a great life together. It’s hard work having a new child with both of them working, but they are doing a great job. Here’s a brief video of Gavin and Josh:

And another of Gavin:

The trip was absolutely great for the things it was intended for, the conference and especially seeing Josh and Gavin. Really glad I did it.

September 17, 2010

A planet orbiting a star causes a slight disturbance in the star’s rotation, the effect of the gravitational tug between the star and the planet. Astronomers have been studying the wobbling of stars for a couple of decades, in hopes of finding a planet outside our solar system (exoplanet) that might offer the possibility of sustaining human life. Now, after 11 years of searching with specialized instruments in Chile and Hawaii, a team of American astronomers has announced in the Astrophysical Journal that it has found the first likely candidate. The planet is called Gliese 581g after its sun, Gliese 581, a red dwarf vastly dimmer than our sun and about 20 light-years from Earth. Potentially habitable does not mean Earthlike. It means that Gliese 581g is the right distance from its sun to be in the habitable zone, able to sustain liquid water and with enough gravity to retain an atmosphere. Gliese 581g orbits its sun in a bit more than 36 days and is almost certainly tidally locked, meaning the same side of the planet always faces the sun. That probably means wide extremes in temperature and a permanent twilight zone between night and day where the climates are more moderate. What makes this discovery so important is that it happened so early in the search for exoplanets and after examining only a tiny sample of small candidate stars as close to Earth as Gliese 581. In the paper reporting their discovery, the astronomers discuss the probable implications with carefully calibrated language that still doesn’t hide their excitement. “If the local stellar neighborhood,” they write, “is a representative sample of the galaxy as a whole, our Milky Way could be teeming with potentially habitable planets.” Way cool.