May 4, 2011

The House Financial Services Committee’s majority is expected to pass bills to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The bureau has one purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading and deceptive lending. The purpose of the Republican bills is twofold. One is to deprive the agency of the power to fulfill its mission. Another is to attract campaign money. As long as the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, the bills are unlikely to become law. But by advancing them in the House, Republicans can demonstrate how thoroughly they would dismantle reform if they controlled Washington and, in the process, rake in Wall Street donations. What do the banks want in exchange? For starters, they want even stricter constraints on the agency than those that were written into the law last year — and that were expressly included to address banks’ objections to the agency. Under the law, a two-thirds majority of a panel of other financial regulators can veto rules by the consumer bureau — a constraint faced by no other government agency. One of the Republican bills would allow a simple majority of other regulators to veto bureau rules. Worse, the bill would lower the standard for exercising a veto. Under current law, a veto is allowed if other regulators deem consumer bureau rules a threat to system wide stability — a high hurdle. Under the bill, a veto would require only that other regulators find the bureau rules “inconsistent” with safety and soundness. In other words, if a rule might cause banks to be less profitable, say, by curbing tricky and excessive fees, it could be vetoed by bank-friendly regulators. Another of the Republican bills would rewrite the Dodd-Frank law so that the bureau would be managed by a five-member, bipartisan board, rather than one director — a recipe for delay and division. Yet another would block the agency from wielding its full powers until a director is confirmed by the Senate. That’s a way to hold up the agency indefinitely. President Obama and other White House officials have been aloof in the face of Republican rhetoric and bills that call for the demise of the consumer agency. The strategy seems to be to downplay the effort by ignoring it. That doesn’t generally work. In the battle to pass a budget earlier this year, the White House agreed to Republican demands for government and private-sector audits of the consumer bureau. It also agreed to a government study of financial regulation that is clearly intended to emphasize the cost — not the benefits — of regulation. Such audits and studies might seem to be mere annoyances, but as part of a larger effort to derail the consumer agency, they are dangerous steps. Unless the administration offers a quick, full-throated defense, the agency may never fulfill its promise. And the process by which Congress is bought and sold — and consumers and taxpayers are hung out to dry — will be, once again, on full display. Best government money can buy.

May 2, 2011

The international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) compiles the latest science on how climate change has impacted the Arctic in the past six years. Their new assessment of climate change in the Arctic shows the ice in the region is melting faster than previously thought and sharply raises projections of global sea level rise this century. A summary of the key findings shows Arctic temperatures during the past six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880. It said melting Arctic glaciers and ice caps are projected to help raise global sea levels by 35 to 63 inches by 2100. That's up from a 2007 projection of 7 to 23 inches by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

May 1, 2011

Roast in hell, Motherfucker.

April 25, 2011

Utah taps about 1 million acre-feet of Colorado River watershed water a year, with some of that piped to the urban Wasatch Front where nearly everyone in the state lives. Under an interstate compact, Utah has rights to another 400,000 acre-feet, though about half of that is reserved for the Ute and Navajo tribes. A planned pipeline from Lake Powell to St. George would bite into the remainder, as would population growth that’s expected to need another 40,000 acre-feet — each acre-foot being about what it takes to supply a family for a year. According to a U.S. Interior Department report, the Colorado River Basin likely will lose about 9 percent of its annual runoff by mid-century because of a warming climate, further squeezing Utah and its neighbors in a region that already expects to struggle getting water to its growing population. Bureau of Reclamation scientists calculated likely regional temperature and precipitation models based on a range of possible carbon dioxide emissions, then used the mean of the results to predict an 8.5 percent reduction in water supply. The report actually predicts a 2.1 percent increase in precipitation for the Upper Colorado Basin — of which Utah is a part — but temperatures 5 to 7 degrees warmer than today’s are expected bring more rain than snow, and enough more evaporation to sap the supply. In the Lower Colorado Basin, precipitation is expected to decline 1.6 percent. "Water is the lifeblood of our communities, rural and urban economies and our environment," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement, "and small changes in water supplies or the timing of precipitation can have a big impact on all of us." The report, a requirement of the Secure Water Act of 2009, projects wetter conditions in the Northwest and north-central United States, and further drying out in the Southwest. Even where moisture increases, winter rains — in place of snows — may decrease springtime and summer runoff for irrigation. The region’s smaller reservoirs may have to alter operations to keep water available late in the summer. But even in parts of the Interior West, where more rain falls in the future, the increased evaporation is likely to reduce river flows. Drink up.

April 21, 2011

I woke up an old man today.

And the weather reminds me a lot of Minnesota:

Warnings are out.

April 20, 2011

From Salman Rushdie:
Last October the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered the floor [of the Tate Gallery] with his “Sunflower Seeds”: 100 million tiny porcelain objects, each handmade by a master craftsman, no two identical. The installation was a carpet of life, multitudinous, inexplicable and, in the best Surrealist sense, strange. The seeds were intended to be walked on, but further strangeness followed. It was discovered that when trampled they gave off a fine dust that could damage the lungs. These symbolic representations of life could, it appeared, be dangerous to the living. The exhibition was cordoned off and visitors had to walk carefully around the perimeter. Art can be dangerous. Very often artistic fame has proved dangerous to artists themselves. Mr. Ai’s work is not polemical — it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist (he was a design consultant on the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics and was recently ranked No. 13 in Art Review magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful figures in art) has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China’s often inadequate responses to disasters (like the plight of the child victims of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province or those afflicted by deadly apartment fires in Shanghai last November). The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive. On April 4, Mr. Ai was arrested by the Chinese authorities as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. His studio was raided and computers and other items were removed. Since then the regime has allowed hints of his “crimes” — tax evasion, pornography — to be published. These accusations are not credible to those who know him. It seems the regime, irritated by the outspokenness of its most celebrated art export, whose renown has protected him up to now, has decided to silence him in the most brutal fashion. The disappearance is made worse by reports that Mr. Ai has started to “confess.” His release is a matter of extreme urgency and the governments of the free world have a clear duty in this matter. Mr. Ai is not the only Chinese artist in dire straits. The great writer Liao Yiwu has been denied permission to travel to the United States to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, which begins in New York on Monday, and there are fears that he could be the regime’s next target. Among the others are Ye Du, Teng Biao and Liu Xianbin — who was sentenced last month to prison for incitement to subversion, the same charge leveled against the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, now serving an 11-year term. The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime. We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight. Not all writers or artists seek or ably perform a public role, and those who do risk obloquy and derision, even in free societies. Susan Sontag, an outspoken commentator on the Bosnian conflict, was giggled at because she sometimes sounded as if she “owned” the subject of Sarajevo. Harold Pinter’s tirades against American foreign policy and his “Champagne socialism” were much derided. Günter Grass’s visibility as a public intellectual and scourge of Germany’s rulers led to a degree of schadenfreude when it came to light that he had concealed his brief service in the Waffen-SS as a conscript at the tail end of World War II. Gabriel García Márquez’s friendship with Fidel Castro, and Graham Greene’s chumminess with Panama’s Omar Torrijos, made them political targets. When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present. But outside the free world, where criticism of power is at best difficult and at worst all but impossible, creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants. We needed the samizdat truth-tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo.

April 19, 2011

Best use this building has ever been put to:

http://vimeo.com/20625607

Fly like an eagle.

April 17, 2011

Six months after voters sent Republicans in large numbers to Congress and many statehouses, it is possible to see the full landscape of destruction that their policies would cause — much of which has already begun. If it was not clear before, it is obvious now that the party is fully engaged in a project to dismantle the foundations of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to liberate business and the rich from the inconveniences of oversight and taxes. At first it seemed that only a few freshmen and noisy followers of the Tea Party would support the new extremism. But on Friday, nearly unanimous House Republicans showed just how far their mainstream has been dragged to the right. They approved on strict party lines the most regressive social legislation in many decades, embodied in a blueprint by the budget chairman, Paul Ryan. The vote, from which only four Republicans (and all Democrats) dissented, would have been unimaginable just eight years ago to a Republican Party that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Mr. Ryan called the vote “our generation’s defining moment,” and indeed, nothing could more clearly define the choice that will face voters next year. His bill would end the guarantee provided by Medicare and Medicaid to the elderly and the poor, which has been provided by the federal government with society’s clear assent since 1965. The elderly, in particular, would be cut adrift by Mr. Ryan. People now under 55 would be required to pay at least $6,400 more for health care when they qualified for Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Fully two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in budget cuts would come from low-income programs. In addition to making “entitlement” a dirty word, the Ryan bulldozer would go much further in knocking down government programs to achieve its goals. It would cut food stamps by $127 billion, or 20 percent, over the next 10 years, almost certainly increasing hunger among the poor. It would cut Pell grants for all 9.4 million student recipients next year, removing as many as one million of them from the program altogether. It would remove more than 100,000 low-income children from Head Start, and slash job-training programs for the unemployed desperate to learn new skills. And it would do all that while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and even expanding them. Regulation of business and the environment would be sharply reduced. The mania for blindly cutting has also spread to statehouses, many with new Republican governors and legislatures. Several states have cut their unemployment benefits below the standard 26 weeks. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has proposed removing 138,000 people from Medicaid. Many recession-battered states, including some led by Democrats, have been forced to cut other services because Republicans have made it so politically difficult to raise taxes. Education, mental health and juvenile justice funds have been particular targets. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Maine, and Florida, Republican governors have used the smokescreen of a poor economy to pursue a long-held conservative goal of destroying public and private unions. This has nothing to do with creating jobs even though that is the smoke screen they are using to justify it. Is this a great country, or what?

April 15, 2011

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the AARP Public Policy Institute found that in March, older job-seekers had been out of work for an average of nearly 52 weeks, up from about 46 weeks in February.

The general employment shortage means seniors who left or lost their jobs probably won’t find another.

April 12, 2011

From Doree Ashcraft, of Logan, Utah:
The ads are effective and intriguing: attractive, energetic, articulate Mormons sharing what makes them so interestingly, so uniquely, and so memorably “a Mormon.” But these ubiquitous ads are also drastically misleading. Come to one of our meetinghouses on any given Sunday and you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of faithful like those represented in the “And I’m a Mormon” advertising blitz. Sadly, as a whole we are far less interesting than what the ads have masterfully conveyed. Generally speaking, we are collectively a boring people. We might try to mix it up — sometimes serving ethnic fare at our ward dinners or altering the tempo of a hymn, but for the most part, as a group, we are steadfast, obedient, charitable, fertile, and a bit dull. In a recent televised behind-the-scenes interview with one of the couples featured in the “I’m a Mormon” spots, the wife mentioned that one of the reasons she and her spouse were chosen to be in an ad was her husband’s penchant for growing unusual facial hair. Well, that’s nifty; I’m all for hairstyle freedom of expression. But imagine my confusion at hearing that this man’s facial hair was one reason he was chosen to be a global representative of my religion when the young men in my area are being told by local leadership that they must cut their hair to a short, conservative style or they can’t administer the sacrament or receive the Melchizedek priesthood. Why is funky hair being lauded in one arena and frowned upon in another? The disparity between the image my church is trying so hard to convey to the world and the image local members are being told they must adhere to within their small ward boundaries is a bit unnerving. Shouldn’t the celebrated attributes belonging to the “I’m a Mormon” Mormons also be praised (or at least accepted) on a smaller scale, even if the world is not looking? Why are individual congregants sometimes reprimanded for doing the exact same things our church public relations department would like the rest of the world to view as charming and alluring. Surely, the stated spiritual beliefs of the people in the “I’m a Mormon” ads are authentic and heart-felt. And not too different from the testimonies universally shared and oft-repeated by the less attractive and less eloquent members of my faith. But is the whole “Hey! Look at us! We’re just regular folks; not as odd or strict as you think we are! In fact, we’re pretty cool!” just like any other smoke-and-mirrors advertising campaign where good lighting and superb editing are essential when a sale is to be made? There’s no denying that the feel-good response to these ads has fueled a bigger and broader campaign. With “Mormon Messages” DVDs now taking shelf space in stores throughout Utah and the “I’m a Mormon” Mormons now featured on the pass-along cards that LDS church members are encouraged to use as missionary tools, it would appear that this campaign has been a rousing success. But really, is there much difference between people joining my religious ranks because of these well-crafted advertisements and those who join because they had a little crush on the cute and kind missionary who taught them [or because they thought they were joining a baseball team]? Shouldn’t a commitment to a way of worship be based on something or someone more substantial?

But a sale is a sale, and all sales are final. I wonder what spirit motivates such a deception. Spirit of Truth?

April 11, 2011

The federal government survived the hostage crisis created by House Republicans, but emerged staggering from the deal struck Friday night. The compromises were damaging, the amount of money cut from a sickly economy was severe, and the image of Washington as a back-alley dog fighting garage will not soon fade. The Republicans set the terms of the debate at every point, and learned that they can push the fumbling and fearful Democrats far to the right. Within hours, they began revving up to create the next crisis. Although much of the final deal has not yet been made public, it is clear it could have been far worse. The White House refused to accept many of the most radical cuts in the original House bill, including deep reductions to Head Start, AmeriCorps, Pell grants, public broadcasting and competitive education programs. Financial and health care reform will continue but with reduced money. The worst right-wing demands were dropped, including a cutoff of funds to providers of abortion and family planning, and an end to regulation of greenhouse gases. And nearly half the cuts came from a side of the budget that will do less harm to the economy and the most vulnerable. Nonetheless, the Republicans did far better than they could possibly have imagined when the process began, winning $38.5 billion in cuts, more than even the House leadership had proposed. That’s on top of the $40 billion in additional spending that President Obama had originally proposed for this fiscal year, which was dropped. About $13 billion will be cut from the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services. The State Department and foreign assistance will lose $8 billion. Key investments in roads, rails and other vital public works will again have to wait, and because these cuts will change the spending baseline for future budgets, may never be restored to their proper levels. (Defense spending will go up by only $5 billion over the next six months, not the $7 billion Republicans wanted.) Democrats also agreed to the ideological demand of House conservatives that the District of Columbia be banned from spending any money for abortions, a cruel blow to the poor and largely African-American women who need those services. The ban was lifted in 2009. The worst aspect of the deal, however, was the momentum it gave to Republicans who have hoodwinked many Americans into believing that short-term cuts in spending will be good for the economy. After the agreement was reached, President Obama actually patted himself on the back for agreeing to the “largest annual spending cut in our history.” He should have used the moment to explain to Americans what irresponsible cuts the G.O.P. demanded just to keep the government open. Now, having won the philosophical terms of this debate, the House is eagerly anticipating the next and far more serious showdown: the need to raise the federal debt ceiling by May 16. If it is not raised, the government will go into default, which could have a disastrous effect on the credit markets and the economy. House Speaker John Boehner said after the budget deal that there was “not a chance” the Republicans, who like to pretend they are the fiscally responsible party, would agree to raise the ceiling “without something really, really big attached to it.” He may be pandering to his Tea Party members, but the threat is real. Mr. Obama will speak this week about a plan to reduce the long-term deficit, and aides are already making it clear he will finally demand that taxes for the rich must go up. The fight next time will be rougher and the principles need to be stronger. And I thought we didn’t negotiate with terrorists. Makes me sick.

April 8, 2011

If the federal government shuts down at midnight tonight — which seems likely unless negotiations take a sudden turn toward rationality — it will not be because of disagreements over spending. It will be because Republicans are refusing to budge on these ideological demands:

• No federal financing for Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions. Instead, state administration of federal family planning funds, which means that Republican governors and legislatures will not spend them.

• No local financing for abortion services in the District of Columbia.

• No foreign aid to countries that might use the money for abortion or family planning. And no aid to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports family-planning services.

• No regulation of greenhouse gases by the Environmental Protection Agency.

• No funds for health care reform or the new consumer protection bureau established in the wake of the financial collapse.

Abortion. Environmental protection. Health care. Nothing to do with jobs or the economy; instead, all the late greatest hits of the Republican Party and the right-wing radicals who control it, only this time it has the power to wreak national havoc: furloughing 800,000 federal workers, suspending paychecks for soldiers and punishing millions of Americans who will have to wait for tax refunds, Social Security applications, small-business loans, and even most city services in Washington. The damage to a brittle economy will be substantial. Democrats have already gone much too far in giving in to the House demands for spending cuts. The $33 billion that they have agreed to cut will pull an enormous amount of money from the economy at exactly the wrong time, and will damage dozens of vital programs. But it turns out that all those excessive cuts they volunteered were worth far less to the Republicans than the policy riders that are the real holdup to a deal. After President Obama appeared on television late Wednesday night to urge the two sides to keep talking, negotiators say, the issue of the spending cuts barely even came up. All the talk was about the abortion demands and the other issues. Democrats in the White House and the Senate say they will not give in to this policy extortion. Let’s hope they don’t weaken. These issues have no place in a stopgap spending bill a few minutes from midnight. A measure to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions came up for a Senate vote on Wednesday and failed. If Republicans want to have yet another legislative debate about abortion and family planning, let them try to pass a separate bill containing their restrictions. But that bill would fail, too, and they know it, so they have chosen extortion. The lack of seriousness in the House is reflected in the taunting bill it passed on Thursday to keep the government open for another week at an absurdly high cost of $12 billion in cuts and the ban on District of Columbia abortion financing. The Senate and the White House said it was a nonstarter. Many of the same House members who earlier had said they would refuse to approve another short-term spending bill voted for this one, clearly hoping they could use its inevitable failure in the Senate to blame the Democrats for the shutdown. What could be more cynical, except perhaps the Utah legislature? I hope people are not fooled by what the Republicans, pushed by Tea Party members, were really holding out for, though they fell for it when they elected these fools. Things are really bad.

April 6, 2011

Mormon History Association Conference
St. George, Utah May 25-29, 2011

Session 6D. Women and Families in Southern Utah
Chair: Linda Thatcher, Salt Lake City, UT

“‘Determined to Make a Success of It’:  Ann Cannon Woodbury and Dixie’s Silkworm Industry”
Kim Woodbury, Bountiful, Utah

“‘It Was Awful in Its Majesty’:  Mary Ann Freeze’s 1892 Mission to the San Juan Stake”
Robin Russell, Salt Lake City, UT

“Erastus Snow’s Life and Families from their Personal Letters”
Donald R. Snow and Diane M. Snow, Brigham Young University

Commentator: Lisa Tait, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

Really looking forward to it. Wish it weren’t the last session on the last day, though. Oh well.

April 5, 2011

Young Gavin Russell has joined a long line of Russell Cowboys:

His father:

His grandfather:

And his great grandfather (on the left):

Yippee-kai-yay.

April 4, 2011

My dad would have been 90 today. He died nearly ten years ago.

  

I still miss him.

April 1, 2011

The U.S. added 216,000 jobs in March causing the unemployment rate to fall to 8.8%. That is a very modest recovery. The unemployment rate was 8.9 percent in February. Overall, the number of jobs created last month was greater than the forecast of 193,000. I’ve noticed that the fast food places are fully employed. The number follows the decline in the weekly unemployment claims, which have fallen steadily, from the mid-400,000s to the neighborhood of 385,000. Even so, the latter is a grim number indeed. But in this slowest and most sluggish of recoveries, it is a sign of somewhat fewer layoffs. Still, threats to a more robust recovery remain, including a surge in energy and food prices, with the possibility of disruptions in oil production in the Middle East continuing to weigh on the financial markets. State and local governments have also been shedding jobs as they grapple with budget woes. I wish it were an April fool.

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.