June 21, 2011

As reported in the New York Times:
The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view. To some, this could conjure up comparisons to the agents of repressive governments in the Middle East who monitor online protests and exact retribution offline. But the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons. When a freelance photographer, Rich Lam, digested his pictures of the riots in Vancouver, he spotted several shots of a man and a woman, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, in the middle of a like-nobody’s-watching kiss. When the photos were published, a worldwide dragnet of sorts ensued to identify the “kissing couple.” Within a day, the couple’s relatives had tipped off news Web sites to their identities, and there they were, Monday, on the “Today” show: Scott Jones and Alex Thomas, the latest proof that thanks to the Internet, every day could be a day that will be remembered around the world…The “kissing couple” will most likely enjoy just a tweet’s worth of fame, but it is noteworthy that they were tracked down at all. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Experts say that Web sites like Facebook, which require real identities and encourage the sharing of photographs and videos, have hastened this change. “Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.” This growing “publicness,” as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and for ordinary people’s right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems. Technology will play an even greater role in the identification of once-anonymous individuals: Facebook, for instance, is already using facial recognition technology in ways that are alarming to European regulators. Publicity — something normally associated with celebrities — is no longer scarce.

And privacy is a thing of the analog past.

Oh yeah, Happy Summer!

June 19, 2011

I realized some time ago that the two most profound relationships in my life, at least to this point, have been with my father and with my son. I miss them both.

Happy Father’s Day.

June 14, 2011

In a keynote address to the International Labor Organization's (ILO) 100th labor conference, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told delegates at the ILO's headquarters in Geneva that cooperation between governments and global financial and social institutions needs to be strengthened, because social justice is linked to economic development. She cited Germany as an example for the importance of this link, saying that it was key for economic recovery in her country in 2009, when Germany's economy contracted by almost 5 percent. In response, the government introduced a short-term job-sharing scheme in which employers agreed to retain their workers in return for employees accepting shorter working hours and a reduction in wages. "What was very clear was that this bond between both sides of industry, between employers and employees, should not be lost," she said. However, Merkel also pointed out that there was a need for a strong social bond between employers and employees in periods of strong economic performance, not just in times of economic downturn.
"The lesson to the world from the crisis should be more investment in social partnerships during periods of growth in order to establish resilient partnerships that can survive times of crisis," Merkel said. Raymond Torres, the Director of the International Institute for Labor Studies at the ILO, said Merkel drew some interesting parallels between history and today's situation in terms of socio-economic development. "She reminded the conference that social justice and social development are very important, and that labor is not a commodity," Torres said. Merkel ended her speech by turning her attention to the turbulent events in Tunisia, Syria and Yemen. She observed that one of the main triggers of the so-called Arab Spring was the high level of youth unemployment. On the other hand, in the United States, the current unemployment rate is 9.1%. There are 14 million people looking for work. That number does not include the people who want/need work but have given up looking. And the Republicans are insistent that social justice of any kind, especially financial stimulus to curb unemployment, would destroy the economy. Proud to live in what we are incessantly told is the greatest country in the world.

June 12, 2011

More very important information from Paul Krugman:
Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs. The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn’t Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009. But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it’s true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we’ll be forcing them to get private insurance — if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare. By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector. This was supposed to save money; in fact, the program costs taxpayers substantially more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare. And then there’s the international evidence. The United States has the most privatized health care system in the advanced world; it also has, by far, the most expensive care, without gaining any clear advantage in quality for all that spending. Health is one area in which the public sector consistently does a better job than the private sector at controlling costs. Indeed, as the economist (and former Reagan adviser) Bruce Bartlett points out, high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden. So where’s the gain from pushing seniors out of an admittedly expensive system, Medicare, into even more expensive private health insurance?

It’s time everyone realized that Republican proposals to “improve” or “save” anything are really proposals to put more money into the already-bulging pockets of the large corporations that are lining their pockets. Is this a great country, or what?

June 9, 2011

Three paragraphs from an excellent, and highly recommended, article on film, “In Defense of the Slow and the Boring:”

Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears…

So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It’s a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film’s 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can’t literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film’s punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think.

----------------------------

MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Read it and weep.

June 7, 2011

Making progress on the Mary Ann Burnham Freeze book and articles. Hope to have them to publishers by the end of the summer. Here’s where I work:

So, no more fooling around, and back to work.

June 6, 2011

Scientists theorize that at the time of the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, matter and antimatter probably existed in equal quantities. For reasons scientists have yet to figure out, nature developed in a way that it preferred matter, so today our universe is made up mostly of matter, and antimatter has become extremely rare. One of physics' biggest questions is whether matter and antimatter in our observable universe really are asymmetric. We assume that the world is made up of symmetries, but maybe we have to think again. The scientific history of antimatter goes back quite some time, too: Scientists were aware of its existence at the beginning of the previous century, and they managed to prove its existence in the 1930s. Since then, it has been one of physics' big unsolved mysteries, and researchers have been trying to reproduce antimatter to analyze it further. By doing so, they hope to find out if there are places that are almost entirely antimatter, and what would happen on our planet if we could harness it. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland have managed to store anti-hydrogen atoms which they had trapped for 16 minutes. This, they hope, will bring them closer to solving the mysteries of antimatter. While it is not a scientific breakthrough because it always has been known to be possible, albeit very difficult, it certainly is an experimental breakthrough. Normally, particles and anti-particles annihilate each other with a lightning flash when they collide. The team who conducted the experiment at CERN managed to create what the experimenters refers to as a “soft landing” of particles and anti-particles so they didn't annihilate each other. In the study, published in the journal Nature Physics, the researchers report trapping some 300 anti-atoms. Last fall, the researchers managed to trap dozens of antimatter atoms and keep them for less than a second. Nobody had ever achieved this before, but it was not enough to conduct thorough experiments. Using laser and microwave spectroscopy, the research team hopes to be able to compare the particles to their hydrogen counterparts. They can keep the anti-hydrogen atoms trapped for 1,000 seconds, the longest ever, which is long enough to begin to study them, even with the small number that they can catch so far. It will be the first time anybody has interacted with anti-atoms to probe their structure. The researchers will look for discrepancies in something called the charge-parity-time reversal (CPT) symmetry. CPT means that a particle moving forward through time in our universe should be indistinguishable from an antiparticle moving backwards through time in a mirror universe. They have started conducting measurements and want to present first results by the end of the year.

June 4, 2011

A deeply troubling article about the unexpected deline in food production caused by global warming:

It is part of this excellent series of articles called Temperature Rising.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

June 2, 2011

The Obama administration has rightly decided to reject a mean-spirited and dangerous Indiana law banning the use of Medicaid funds at Planned Parenthood clinics, which provide vital health services to low-income women. The law, signed by Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana in May, is just one effort by Republican-led state legislatures around the country to end public financing for Planned Parenthood — a goal the House Republicans failed to achieve in the budget deal in April. The organization is a favorite target because a small percentage of its work involves providing abortion care even though no government money is used for that purpose. Governor Daniels and Republican lawmakers, by depriving Planned Parenthood of about $3 million in government funds, would punish thousands of low-income women on Medicaid, who stand to lose access to affordable contraception, life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Making it harder for women to obtain birth control is certainly a poor strategy for reducing the number of abortions. On Wednesday, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, said the Indiana law, which is already in effect, violates federal Medicaid law by imposing impermissible restrictions on the freedom of Medicaid beneficiaries to choose health care providers. Although Mr. Berwick’s letter to Indiana officials did not say it explicitly, Indiana could lose millions of dollars in Medicaid financing unless it changes its law. In a bulletin to state officials around the country, the Medicaid office warned that states may not exclude doctors, clinics or other providers from Medicaid “because they separately provide abortion services.” So far, Indiana isn’t budging. The issue will be taken up on Monday in federal court in Indiana where Planned Parenthood has filed a suit challenging the state’s action on statutory and constitutional grounds. The organization properly argues that it may not be penalized for engaging in constitutionally protected activities, like providing abortion services with its own money. The Obama administration’s opposition to the Indiana law could help deter other states — including North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Tennessee — from moving forward with similar measures to restrict payments to Planned Parenthood, either under Medicaid or Title X, the main federal family planning program. Kansas, for example, has enacted provisions to block Planned Parenthood from receiving any Title X money. The measures against Planned Parenthood come amid further efforts to limit access to abortion. Just since April, six states — Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas — have enacted laws banning insurance coverage of abortion in the health insurance exchanges created as part of federal health care reform, bringing the total to 14 states. Two states — Arizona and Texas — joined three others in making ultrasounds mandatory for women seeking to terminate pregnancies. Bills expected to be signed soon by Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, contain both types of provisions. Many of these fresh attacks on reproductive rights, not surprisingly, have come in states where the midterm elections left Republicans in charge of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion.

May 30, 2011

Congress has reliably defeated efforts to end the Afghan War on the back of strong support from a number of Representatives who have never seen a war they didn’t like. The highly anticipated vote in the House of Representatives on May 26 was assumed to be a defeat before it began, but turned out extremely close. Indeed, though the amendment was defeated, it lost only 204-215, and carried more than 90% of the sitting Democratic representatives. With the bipartisan bill also carrying a number of freshmen Republicans’ support, a couple of shifts here or there could have actually swung the vote the other way, and left President Obama’s ambition to keep the war going beyond 2014 in an awful mess. The amendment would’ve called on the administration to begin wrapping up the war and negotiating a settlement that would allow for a pullout. A much more aggressive version sponsored by Rep. Chaffetz (R – UT) was also voted on, falling 123-294. The Chaffetz Amendment was far more ambitious and would’ve required a full withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan within 60 days. The closer amendment, sponsored by Jim McGovern (D – MA) did not set any explicit dates. The loss is still surely a disappointment, but when one considers that the 2010 vote on materially the same amendment got only 138 yes votes, there is no doubt which side the momentum is on. It also means the 2012 vote, and surely there will be one, will not be presumed to be a “slam dunk” for the administration going in. The combination of the two votes also shows that the antiwar sentiment is surprisingly deep. The Chaffetz amendment still managed to carry a solid majority of President Obama’s own party, and the McGovern amendment came within a hair’s breadth of passing. Polls have long showed the American public squarely against the already decade-long war. Today’s vote suggests that while Congress has still not caught up with public opinion, they are coming around slowly but surely. Assuming that the war continues to grow less popular throughout the year, both amendments can probably count on picking up additional support among representatives ahead of the 2012 election. Not only that, but the votes show Republican opposition growing largely on the basis of incoming freshmen. This suggests that while the “old-hand” politicians can be stubbornly reluctant to abandon an unpopular conflict they voted for at one point, as they get filtered out this lingering support eventually crumbles. Despite administration claims to the contrary, public opposition can eventually end America’s wars. Let’s hope it does. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now.

May 28, 2011

Carbon emissions from energy use reached a record level last year, up 5% from the previous record in 2008, the International Energy Agency said. The Paris-based agency called the findings a "serious setback" to limit global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), which was set at the U.N. climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico, last year. The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020. Carbon emissions climbed to a record 30.6 gigatons in 2010. For the 2-degree goal to remain attainable, emissions in 2020 can't be greater than 32 gigatonnes. And for that to happen, carbon dioxide emissions over the next 10 years have to rise less than they did between 2009 and 2010, the agency says. This raises the prospect of dangerous temperature increases later in the century. If the predictions hold, sea levels could rise two meters by the end of the century, displacing around 2.5% of the world's population over the course of the century. Furthermore, rainforests will be at risk of retreat in eastern Amazonia, Central America, and some parts of Africa. But not to worry, the rainforests only produce the vast majority of the oxygen humans use to breathe. None of this is really a problem for me. I’m old and won’t live more than 20 years at the most. But my grandson, Gavin Russell, is going to be living on a planet unfit for humans. But it’s alright because the top 1% of humans will have had far more money than they could ever use. Greed is strangling us all.

May 24, 2011

I have loved books since I can remember, and since I was a teenager, I’ve had a personal library. It was just a few mass-market paperbacks then, but I can still see them on the shelves that separated my desk from my brother’s in the room we grew up in. Very gradually, as the years went by, I accumulated more books. I remember filling the two tiny shelves of my room in the dorm the year before my mission, having hauled them up there in a trunk. I didn’t make that mistake again, and as the years went by, and I moved repeatedly, I became an expert at boxing and moving my books, which now number in the thousands.

With the recent moves from Minneapolis to Salt Lake City and now from SLC down to American Fork, coupled with my advancing age, the burden of carrying all these books around with me has become just that; a burden. And now that we can purchase devices that can store “up to 3,500 books”, a capacity that will no doubt rapidly increase, there are alternatives to the traditional physical book. Faced with the certainty of moving them all again in 18 months when I will be even more decrepit than I am now, I have, for the first time in my life, begun to question keeping a library.

Just a few of them

On the other hand, the need for a personal library recently has become glaringly apparent as I have needed books for research that are unavailable in local libraries or bookstores. And, since I am at the bottom of my finances, I can no longer afford to purchase them even when they are available in a store, brick and mortar or online. This makes the book download, which is less expensive than a physical book, increasingly attractive.

But, there are so many things about books that I love, I find it hard to believe that I will ever be able to do without them. As John Updike put it:

a book is beautiful in its relation to the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the human spirit.

There are far worse things to love.

May 23, 2011

The basic tenets of geometry as most people know them were laid out first by the Greek mathematician Euclid about 2,300 years ago. This Euclidean Geometry includes familiar propositions such as the fact that a line can connect two points, that the angles of a triangle always add up to the same total, or that two parallel lines never cross. The ideas are profoundly ingrained in formal education, but what remains a matter of debate is whether the capacity, or intuition, for geometry is present in all peoples regardless of their language or level of education. To that end, Pierre Pica of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France and his colleagues studied an Amazon tribe known as the Mundurucu to investigate their intuitions about geometry. Tests given to the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate. Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and U.S. schoolchildren. The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces. Dr Pica and his colleagues engaged 22 adults and eight children among the Mundurucu in a series of dialogues, presenting situations that built up to questions on geometry. Rather than abstract points on a plane, the team suggested two villages on a notional map, for instance. Similar questions were posed to 30 adults and children in France and the U.S., some as young as five years old. The Mundurucu people's responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and U.S. respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words. Most surprisingly, the Mundurucu actually outperformed their western counterparts when the tests were moved from a flat surface to that of a sphere (the Mundurucu were presented with a calabash to demonstrate). For example, on a sphere, seemingly parallel lines can in fact cross - a proposition which the Mundurucu guessed far more reliably than the French or U.S. respondents. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

May 12, 2011

Got great help moving down to Marlene and Jim’s in American Fork last Saturday from Steve and Tyler Lindsay and Dave. They were fantastic!

Young McKay Lindsay was a big help moving things down into the basement once we arrived from SLC.

Here’s the view out the back of their place:

Not much going on down here in Utah Valley, other than all the righteousness, of course. But it’s a big help to me to be able to stay here, and I am very grateful.

May 10, 2011

62 years ago, on May 10, 1949, Marlene Kay Russell was born in Provo, Utah:

 

You’ve come a long way, baby.

 

And, almost as important, on this day in 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.

May 9, 2011

With the help of 16 Democrats, one of whom is now my “representative”, House Republicans passed a bill the other day with the narrow-seeming title of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. The measure, which came just weeks after the furor over failed Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, is a slightly modified version of a terrible bill proposed last year by Representative Christopher Smith, a Republican of New Jersey. It is far more sweeping than its title suggests. In fact, the bill is not really about federal financing for abortion or even preventing insurers from offering any abortion coverage on the insurance exchanges created as part of federal health care reform. The federal Hyde Amendment has long barred federal financing of abortion, and the burdensome rules for segregating an individual’s premium payments from government subsidies already seems destined to discourage insurers from offering abortion coverage on the exchanges. The Smith bill imposes new limitations on abortion access by driving to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market using the nation’s tax system as a weapon. A provision would deny tax credits to small businesses that offer private health plans that cover abortion services, as some 87 percent of private plans now do. The bill imposes no such restrictions on large corporations. The measure also eliminates the medical-expense deduction for most abortions and ends the availability of reimbursement for abortion costs from medical savings accounts — changes that could invite intrusive inquiries from I.R.S. auditors trying to confirm whether an abortion procedure fell within exceptions for rape, incest, or when the life of the woman is endangered. Over all, the bill treats tax benefits as the equivalent of public expenditures for abortion. This equivalency is at odds with a reality in which individuals can deduct donations to religious institutions without running afoul of the constitutional bar of government support of religion. The bill also would eliminate the yearly renewal of the Hyde Amendment’s denial of abortion services for poor women and others who rely on the federal government for their health care. It’s great to be an American.

May 8, 2011

From Paul Krugman:
The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. How did it all go so wrong? What I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness. So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong. The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes. These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000? The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs. So who was responsible for these budget busters? It wasn’t the man in the street. President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority. Similarly, Mr. Bush chose to invade Iraq because that was something he and his advisers wanted to do, not because Americans were clamoring for war against a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite. Finally, the Great Recession was brought on by a runaway financial sector, empowered by reckless deregulation. And who was responsible for that deregulation? Powerful people in Washington with close ties to the financial industry, that’s who. Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit. So it was the bad judgment of the elite, not the greediness of the common man, that caused America’s deficit. Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public? One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government. But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.

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.