December 29, 2011

As the curtain greatfully drops on 2011, the year turns out to have been a remarkable exercise in cinematic repetition. So far, the top seven pictures at the domestic box office have been sequels, an alignment that appears unmatched in movie history. In terms of ticket sales the most popular seven films to date have been Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1; The Hangover Part II; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Fast Five; and Cars 2. The strong opening for Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol suggests that it may well join a list that also includes Rise of the Planet of the Apes, from yet another film series, in the ninth position. If Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows or Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked gain some more traction, the year’s entire Top 10 may turn out to have been sequels (and their titles will have exhausted the well of awkward punctuation). Studio executives fed this year’s trend with a flight to financial safety that has been building for a decade. At least 10 of about 30 major studio films released in the spring-summer blockbuster season were sequels or remakes, and another three — Thor, Green Lantern, and Captain America: The First Avenger — were based on comics whose kinship with existing films allowed them to play like parts of a franchise. In 2012, much like this year, the major studios will offer about 10 sequels or “reboots” (wherein a familiar series starts again, from the top), featuring the return of proven draws like Spider-Man and the Bourne spy cycle, this time with Jeremy Renner as a new hero. As a contrast, in 1993, all 10 of the top box office performers, including Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire, and The Fugitive, were freshly conceived films, whether based on an original script or adapted from another medium. There is no place for originality when greed is most important.

December 26, 2011

After the 40-14 Denver Broncos’ loss to the Buffalo Bills Saturday, Bill Maher tweeted, “Wow, Jesus just fucked #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere in hell Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler ‘Hey, Buffalo’s killing them.’” I’m not a fan of Bill Maher, but I was thinking pretty much the same thing about Tebow. As you would expect, the well-deserved dig didn’t go over well with Christians. Fox Business’ “Follow the Money” host Eric Bolling got things rolling with his Twitter response: “Bill Maher is disgusting vile trash. I can’t even repeat what he just tweeted about Tebow...on Christmas Eve. .straighttohellBill.” Others of the overtly devout have even called for a boycott of HBO, the home of Maher’s show, “Real Time.” Though utterly unimportant, this little episode illustrates the two competing worldviews in the contemporary United States. On the one hand, a public figure justifiably satirizes another public figure for the inconsistencies in his very public religiousness. That is, if Tim Tebow is going to claim that Jesus guides him and helps him succeed, as he does every time he prays in public about his performance, then he is open to criticism when he throws 4 interceptions in a game. I guess Jesus was distracted or decided not to help him. But Maher made no mention of stopping Tebow from his public displays, however offensive they may be. On the other hand, you have the fascist approach that believes, and in this case also tweets, that anyone who expresses an opinion different from their own is “vile trash” and should be silenced. Couldn’t be more pleased with the level of public discourse in our great and god-fearing nation.

December 16, 2011

A new survey shows Mormon women outnumber men in the LDS Church — and the gap appears to be widening, especially in Utah. Sociologists Rick Phillips, of the University of North Florida, and Ryan Cragun, of the University of Tampa, suggest it could be because Mormon men in the Beehive State are abandoning their faith at a greater rate than women. But other scholars see an array of possible reasons, including the view that more women than men join the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The report, Mormons in the United States 1990-2008: Socio-Demographic Trends and Regional Differences, relies on data culled from the American Religious Identification Survey, which is built on a large, nationally representative sample of 113,723 respondents in 1990, including 1,742 self-identified Mormons, and 54,461 people with 783 Mormons in 2008. Children were not counted in the survey. It found that 60 percent of Utah Mormons are women, up from 52.5 percent two decades ago. It also showed that the state’s Mormon majority continues to shrink, down to 57 percent, although Utah remains the only state where a religious denomination accounts for more than half the populace. Like most Christian denominations in the United States, Mormonism “has a surplus of women,” Phillips and Cragun write. “In 1990, this surplus was more pronounced among Mormons outside Utah, where 54.9 percent of Latter-day Saints were female, compared to 52.5 percent in Utah. By 2008, a dramatic shift had occurred. While the male-to-female ratio actually narrowed somewhat in most of the nation, it widened significantly in Utah. Females now outnumber males in Utah 3 to 2.” In the past, Mormon men remained tied to the church rather than lose their social standing in the community, argue Phillips and Cragun, both on the board of the Mormon Social Science Association. “However, declining Mormon majorities [in Utah] may have weakened that link, and Mormon men who lack a strong subjective religious commitment to the church are now free to apostatize without incurring sanctions in other social settings.”

December 15, 2011

Almost nine years after the first American tanks began the illegal invasion, today the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission in Iraq, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics, bankrupt both countries, and leave a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta marked the occasion with a speech in a fortified concrete courtyard at the Baghdad airport. The Bush administration began the war in 2003 to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. When that pretext was shown to be a conscious lie, the war was re-cast as an effort to bring democracy to the Middle East, another pretext that rang hollow. Iraq still has the second largest oil reserves in the world. All along, the war was about stealing Iraq’s oil. The ceremony today marked an uneasy moment of closure for the United States, with no clear sense of what has been won. But it is clear what has, so far, been lost: according to Pentagon statistics, as of last Friday, the war had claimed 4,487 American lives, with 32,226 Americans wounded in action. The number of Iraqi deaths is unclear, but it is in the hundreds of thousands, and all indications are, that number will continue to grow. Is this a great country, or what?

December 14, 2011

The world is even smaller than you thought. Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported recently that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74. The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb. The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings have been posted on Facebook’s site. The experiment took one month. The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users.  They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37. However, a Microsoft study in 2008, using a more conservative definition of friend, found an average chain of 6.6 people in a group of 240 million who exchanged chat messages. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who led the study in 2008, said that network was based on people who exchanged messages, rather than those who identified as “buddies.” “When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest,” the company wrote on its blog, “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.” The caveat there is “Facebook user” — like the Milgram study, the cohort was a self-selected group, in this case people with online access who use a particular Web site. Though the study was by far the largest of its kind, it raised questions about definitions of terms like “friend” on Facebook. Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell and a faculty adviser to an author of the new study, said some links might be more meaningful than others. Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said. The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data and how it has drawn people more tightly together, for better or worse.

December 13, 2011

The notebooks in which Sir Isaac Newton worked out the theories on which much classical science is based have been put online by Cambridge University. More than 4,000 pages have been scanned, including his annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, containing Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newton wrote mainly in Latin and Greek, the scientific language of his time, and was reluctant to publish. The university plans to put almost all of its Newton collection online. The papers mark the launch of the Cambridge Digital Library project to digitize its collections. Check out this video. Really, really cool.

December 11, 2011

The past decade has been the hottest on record, according to a report released in November. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN's weather agency, blamed rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for a trend which has seen 13 of the 15 warmest years on record occur since 1997. According to WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud "Concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have reached new highs. Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and this warming is due to human activities." The WMO said 2011 would likely end as the 10th warmest year since record-keeping began in 1850. 2011 was influenced by an especially strong La Nina event, a phenomenon driven by cooler than average sea temperatures in the Pacific and frequently tied to extreme conditions in Asia, Africa and South America. A La Nina – the opposite of an El Nino event – tends to have a cooling effect on average global temperatures. 2011 has been the hottest year in which a La Nina occurred. This year's La Nina was linked to flooding in Thailand, drought in eastern Africa and the southern United States, and recent incedibly high winds that damaged much of the west coast and intermountain west. Elsewhere, Arctic sea ice shrunk to its lowest volume on record this year– some 4,200 cubic kilometers. By surface area, ice dropped about 35 percent below the 1979-2000 average to arrive at its second-lowest point. The record-low was set in 2007. According to the report, “We are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2-2.4 degree Centigrade rise in average global temperatures which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our Earth, biosphere and oceans." Concentrations of the main greenhouse gasses blamed for climate change were growing more rapidly than during the 1990s. Carbon dioxide rose by 2.3 parts per million (ppm) in the sapce of a year to reach 389 ppm in 2010. That compares to an annual average rise of 1.5 ppm during the 1990s.

December 10, 2011

2010 census data show that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which is termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That is, one in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it. As for all of that inspirational, up-by-their-bootstrap talk you hear on the Republican campaign trail, over half of the near poor in the new tally actually fell into that group from higher income levels as their resources were sapped by medical expenses, taxes, work-related costs, and other unavoidable outlays. The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy. Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann have called for taxing the poor and near poor more heavily, on the false grounds that they have been getting a free ride. In fact, low-income workers do pay up, if not in federal income taxes, then in payroll taxes and state and local taxes. Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation says that the “emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.” Heritage has its own, very different ranking system, based on households’ “amenities.” According to that, the typical poor household has roughly 14 of 30 amenities. In other words, how hard can things be if you have a refrigerator, air-conditioner, coffee maker, cellphone, and other stuff? The rankings ignore the fact that many of these are requisites of modern life and that things increasingly out of reach for the poor and near poor — education, health care, child care, housing and utilities — are the true determinants of a good, upwardly mobile life, what “the American Dream” was supposed to be. Government surveys analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicate that in 2010, just over half of the country’s nearly 17 million poor children, lived in households that reported at least one of four major hardships: hunger, overcrowding, failure to pay the rent or mortgage on time, or failure to seek needed medical care. A good education is also increasingly out of reach. A study by Martha Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, showed that the difference in college-graduation rates between the rich and poor has widened by more than 50 percent just since the 1990s. Yeah, this really is the greatest country in the world.

December 8, 2011

Most of us don’t know much about our great-grandparents. Mormons probably know more than most people because of the emphasis on genealogy. But even Mormons don’t have access to much information about them. I’m doing some research on my great-grandfather Russell and his aunt, and even though they were both public figures for a while, there isn’t a lot of information about them, especially personal information. What there is consists of a few photographs, what they wrote, and what a few others wrote about them. But that absence of information is something that will be forever changed as a result of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital content the average person can now produce in a lifetime. Our descendants will have at their fingertips a deep digital archive of information that we created ourselves. That's one of the things the social media revolution means: most of us can easily produce, are producing, a digital legacy whether we intend to or not. The quantity of content we're producing, and technology's ability to make sense of it, continue to expand exponentially, so that, it will inevitably become possible to much more fully recreate our lives. For example, the average Facebook user shares 90 pieces of information per month, ranging from status updates, to photos, to videos, to links to a trail of the places they've been. Over the course of a lifetime, that's a tremendous amount of personal information and insight into how a person thinks, how they act, and whom they interact with, while all of that data is being indexed in the cloud. And social media, still just a decade old, will continue to evolve and offer far more robust ways of interacting and projecting ourselves digitally. If we take advantage of the digital tools that are blossoming all around us, our descendants can come to know us far better than we have been able to know our ancestors. I, for one, think that is wonderful.

December 6, 2011

December 6, 2011

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President,
We write to express our strong support for your recent decision to bring our troops home from Iraq by year’s end. We were relieved to learn that our service men and women will be home from Iraq for the holidays.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan, by contrast, threatens to stretch our commitment into another decade. In August you announced the gradual removal of the “surge” troops, and yet over 70,000 troops will remain in Afghanistan at this time next year. This is unsustainable and counterproductive. There is unanimous agreement that the future of Afghanistan depends on Afghans and their regional allies implementing a political solution. There is simply no military solution to the current challenges in Afghanistan and maintaining an American military presence only delays the inevitable political process while putting our brave men and women in uniform in harms’ way.

Furthermore, it is crucial that Congress plays its proper Constitutional role in any decision to leave U.S. troops in a potential combat zone. While the United States is currently scheduled to hand over full control over security and remove all combat troops by the end of 2014, a new agreement could result in an indefinite military commitment and significant financial costs, all without further Congressional approval. Dating back to 2009, eleven acts authorizing and funding troop presence in Afghanistan have included a provision specifically prohibiting the establishment of permanent bases in Afghanistan. Any agreement that obliges the U.S. to a security commitment in Afghanistan must be bound by the Constitution, and be specifically authorized by an Act of Congress, or with the advice and consent of the Senate.

While reports indicate that President Karzai plans on requiring any future strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. to be approved by the Afghan Parliament, a traditional tribal gathering, or both, there is no plan to have similar Congressional input. It is unconscionable that America could make new, lasting military commitments of tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars without express approval from Congress.

Rebuilding America must remain our top priority, and this should be reflected in our budgetary priorities. We need to end the wars and invest the savings in job creation for our future.

Sincerely,
Congressmembers Barbara Lee and Walter Jones
now with 30 other congressmember co-signers