July 19, 2011

Unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and suicide rates are on the rise. Obsessing about the debt ceiling at a time like this is a lethal fraud. Naomi Klein said this about the debt ceiling charade being performed in Washington: “Using trumped up crisis to raid the public purse and attack the basic rights and benefits is a very old trick - but rarely is the shock doctrine tactic wielded as brazenly as in the pseudo debate about the debt ceiling. This is naked class war, waged by the ultra rich against everyone else, and it's well past time for Americans to draw the line.” The phony debt ceiling crisis is just one more excuse to further shred our already puny social safety net and increase wealth concentration at the top. But more to the point, I thought it was American policy not to negotiate with terrorists. The Republican tactic in Minnesota and Washington, D.C. is the same: do what we want or we’ll blow up the government. And, as we saw in Minnesota, they did just that. Unfortunately, governor Dayton did a Neville Chamberlin and let them get away with it. Appeasement is not the answer with these Republican Nazis just as it was not the answer in 1938. It’s just going to get worse. We are not amused.

July 16, 2011

There is simply no exaggerating the importance of the oceans to earth’s overall ecological balance. Their health affects the health of all terrestrial life. A new report by an international coalition of marine scientists, International Earth system expert workshop on ocean stresses and impacts, concludes that the oceans are approaching irreversible, potentially catastrophic, change. The experts, convened by the International Program on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, found that marine “degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted.” The oceans have warmed and become more acidic as they absorbed human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are also more oxygen-deprived, because of agricultural runoff and other anthropogenic causes. And, according to the report, these three conditions were present in previous mass extinctions. The oceans’ natural resilience has been seriously compromised. Pollution, habitat loss, and overfishing are themselves dangerous threats. But when these factors converge, they destroy marine ecosystems. The severity of human impact was reinforced last week when scientists concluded that seven commercially important species, including marlin, mackerel, and three tuna species, were either vulnerable to extinction, endangered, or critically endangered according to I.U.C.N. standards. The solutions that might help slow further degradation include immediate reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, a system of marine conservation areas, and a way to protect ocean life that goes beyond national jurisdictions. As the new study notes, changes in the oceans, caused by carbon emissions, are perhaps “the most significant to the earth system,” particularly because they will further accelerate climate change.

July 15, 2011

According to a recent study, the widespread use of search engines and online databases has affected the way people remember information. Researchers wondered whether  people were more likely to remember information that could be easily retrieved from a computer, just as students are more likely to recall facts they believe will be on a test. They staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased. The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information when they thought they would not be able to find it later. Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read, according to the study’s authors. A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. For example, If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out? In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder. The experiment explores an aspect of what is known as transactive memory — the notion that we rely on our family, friends, and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us. The researchers conclude that these experiments indicate the Internet has become our primary external storage system, that human memory is adapting to new communications technology. For better or worse…

July 14, 2011

In three new rulings, federal judges in different states have acted to block immediate enforcement of measures that restrict abortion rights and women’s access to affordable contraception, lifesaving cancer screenings, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These rulings are important victories for women’s health and reproductive rights. On June 24, Judge Tanya Pratt of the Federal District Court in Indianapolis issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of a new Indiana law banning the use of Medicaid funds at Planned Parenthood clinics, which provide essential health services to low-income women. The mean-spirited law is part of a Republican-led national campaign to end public financing for Planned Parenthood. The Obama administration promptly told Indiana, and other states weighing similar legislation, that the measure violated federal law by imposing impermissible restrictions on the freedom of Medicaid beneficiaries to choose health care providers. Judge Pratt agreed with that assessment in her decision. In another ruling six days later, a federal trial judge in South Dakota issued a preliminary injunction blocking, on constitutional grounds, a deeply intrusive state law requiring women to wait at least 72 hours after an initial doctor’s visit before terminating a pregnancy — the longest waiting period in the nation. This law also requires that women seeking abortions endure counseling at so-called pregnancy help centers run by antiabortion activists with the aim of discouraging abortions. “Forcing a woman to divulge to a stranger at a pregnancy help center the fact that she has chosen to undergo an abortion humiliates and degrades her as a human being,” Judge Karen Schreier wrote in her decision. On July 1, Judge Carlos Murguia, a federal district judge in Kansas, blocked immediate enforcement of a new Kansas licensing law and health department regulations imposing extensive, medically unnecessary requirements on the state’s three remaining abortion providers — like mandating 50 square feet of storage space for janitorial supplies — with the obvious goal of shutting them down. While these rulings are preliminary, each is a determination that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm and that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail at trial. They do not, however, address other threats to women’s health. Those include the slashing of state support for family-planning services by governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, and attacks from Congress like the bill Republicans pushed through the House in May that would use the nation’s tax system as a weapon to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market, as discussed in the June 2 post. Still, these rulings serve to at least temporarily block the extreme anti-abortion, anti-family-planning movement accelerating in the states and in Washington.

July 13, 2011

Men are at higher risk than women of developing cancer within their lifetime, and a recent study shows they are also more likely to die from it. The analysis, published in the journal Cancer, Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, examined 36 types of cancer by gender, using almost 30 years of data, from 1977 and 2006. It found that for the vast majority of cancers, men have higher mortality rates than women, with the highest disparities for conditions such as lip, throat, and the rare hypopharyngeal cancer, which affects the area where the larynx and esophagus meet. Men were found to be about five times more likely to die from these diseases. Cancers with the highest mortality rates — such as leukemia and lung, colon, and pancreatic cancers — were also found to pose a greater risk of death for men. Men were found to be almost twice as likely than women to die from leukemia. Cancers of the colon and rectum, pancreas, and liver killed about one and a half to two times as many men as women in the U.S. over a 30-year period. In addition, lung cancer killed nearly two and a half times as many men during that time. The American Cancer Society estimates that men have about a 1 in 2 chance of developing cancer at some point in their lives, compared with women, who have a 1 in 3 chance. In general, women have earlier-stage cancers at diagnosis, though this isn't true for all types of cancer. It's not clear why there is a disparity, but men may be exposed to more carcinogens, have hormonal or metabolism differences, or be less protected from antioxidants than women.

July 9, 2011

Wars launched by the U. S. since the attacks of September 11, 2001 have left 225,000 dead and cost up to $4.4 trillion, according to a new study published by Brown University. It focused on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and counter-terrorism campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, which came in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The authors argue that governments almost always go to war underestimating the potential duration and costs of a conflict while overestimating "the political objectives that can be accomplished by the use of brute force." "An extremely conservative estimate" of the casualty toll is about 225,000 people killed and 365,000 wounded in the wars so far. The number of soldiers killed comes to 31,741, including about 6,000 Americans, 1,200 allied troops, 9,900 Iraqis, 8,800 Afghans, 3,500 Pakistanis as well as 2,300 US private security contractors. The civilian toll was much higher, with an estimated 172,000 dead, including about 125,000 Iraqis, 35,000 Pakistanis and 12,000 Afghans. The study acknowledged that estimating the number of dead was difficult, particularly the toll for insurgents, putting the number at between 20,000 to 51,000 insurgents killed. The report found that 168 reporters and 266 humanitarian workers were among the dead in the period of the U. S. “war on terror.” The wars also have triggered a massive flow of refugees and displaced persons, with more than 7.8 million displaced, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The study estimated the financial cost of the wars at a minimum of $3.7 trillion and up to $4.4 trillion, which represents about a quarter of the current U. S. debt. The researchers arrived at a much larger figure than the Pentagon's previous estimates, as they included spending by the Department of Homeland Security to counter terrorist threats, government projections for spending on wounded veterans through 2051 and war-related funds from the State Department and the U. S. Agency for International Development. "Wars always cost more than what the Pentagon spends for the duration of the combat operation", said the study.

July 5, 2011

How far will Republican lawmakers go to protect millionaires? Those who think a default on the federal government’s credit seems implausible should take a sobering look at the “closed” signs dotting Minnesota. The Republican Party there readily shut down the state’s government on Friday by refusing to raise taxes on the 7,700 Minnesotans who make more than $1 million a year. Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, campaigned for office last year promising to raise taxes on high earners, so it was no surprise when he proposed a tax increase on families making more than $150,000 a year to help close a $5 billion budget gap. In negotiations with the Republican majority in the Legislature, he compromised and reduced the increase to those making $1 million or more, but Republicans are refusing to consider any income tax increase. Like Republicans in Washington, they have the delusion that they can balance the budget entirely from cuts. The governor proposed more than $2 billion in cuts but refused to slash billions more from education, health care, and public safety programs. The Legislature also wanted new abortion restrictions and a voter ID law that Mr. Dayton had already vetoed. When he said no, lawmakers allowed the fiscal year to end without a budget, and state government officially shut on July 1. More than 40 state agencies have closed, including the state parks over the July Fourth holiday. Courts and public safety agencies are operating, but essential services for the poor, like food pantries and child care subsidies, have evaporated. Many parents say they may have to quit their jobs if state-subsidized child care does not resume quickly. The shutdown will actually cost the state money, since many of the 22,000 laid-off workers will receive unemployment benefits and health insurance, while the treasury is unable to collect on tax audits, lottery tickets, and park fees. As painful as the closure may become, Dayton is right not to yield to the extremist ideology the Republicans are pursuing in St. Paul, Washington, and across the country. President Obama has done so twice and faces an emboldened opposition willing to create chaos in the credit markets rather than agree to modest revenue increases from the richest people. Republican anti-tax radicalism, maintained at any cost, is doing enormous damage at all levels and may soon engulf the economy if the standoff in Washington does not end. In Minnesota, there is now a chance to draw a line and say, no further. Time to stop giving in to the threats and vote these guys out.

June 30, 2011

The ethical judgments of the Supreme Court justices became an important issue in the just completed term. The court cannot maintain its legitimacy as guardian of the rule of law when justices behave like politicians. Yet, in several instances, justices acted in ways that weakened the court’s reputation for being independent and impartial. Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr., for example, appeared at political events. That kind of activity makes it less likely that the court’s decisions will be accepted as nonpartisan judgments. Part of the problem is that the justices are not bound by an ethics code. At the very least, the court should make itself subject to the code of conduct that applies to the rest of the federal judiciary. Among the court’s 82 rulings this term, 16 were 5-to-4 decisions. Of those, 10 were split along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy supplying the fifth conservative vote. These rulings reveal the court’s fundamental inclination to the right, with the conservative majority further expanding the ability of the wealthy to prevail in electoral politics and the prerogatives of businesses against the interests of consumers and workers:

· It struck down public matching funds in Arizona’s campaign finance system, showing again a contempt for laws that provide some balance to the unlimited amounts of money flooding the political system.

· It made it much harder for private lawsuits to succeed against mutual fund malefactors, even when they have admitted to lying and cheating.

· It tore down the ability of citizens to hold prosecutors’ offices accountable for failing to train their lawyers, even when prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence and send innocent people to prison.

· It issued a devastating blow to consumer rights by upholding the arbitration clause in AT&T’s customer agreement, which required the signer to waive the right to take part in a class action.

· In the complex Wal-Mart case, the conservative majority, going beyond the particular issues in that case, made it substantially more difficult for class-action suits in all manner of cases to move forward.

These and other decisions raise the question of whether there is still a line between the court and politics, an issue since the Republican-led Rehnquist court decided Bush v. Gore in 2000, though the federal judiciary’s shift to the right has been happening since the administration of Ronald Reagan. The framers of the Constitution envisioned law as having authority apart from politics. They gave justices life tenure so they would be free to upset the powerful and have no need to cultivate political support. Our legal system was designed to set law apart from politics. But this court has become illegitimate by crossing the line into politics and refusing to be accountable to any code of conduct. The conservatives on the court are the ultimate activist judges, and their recent rulings are unconvincing as law.

June 29, 2011

Utah’s tax burden is fairly high compared to other states. State and local government finances data show Utah’s tax burden, including mandatory fees, ranks 16th highest in the country and fourth highest among western states. Even so, a recent Utah Foundation report says Utah’s education funding effort has fallen significantly since 1995, placing it 26th in the nation for the amount of tax revenue public education received for every $1,000 in personal income in 2009. “It’s a big deal because we’re a people that has chosen to value family and to have a lot of kids, and when we survey Utah voters about the issues, they really care about education,” said Steve Kroes, president of the Utah Foundation. “It’s always in the top one or two issues on their minds, and funding is one of the aspects of education that they are most concerned about, and yet, through the political process, we’re not seeing that funding receive the priority that voters seem to want.” Over the years, the foundation has published a number of reports explaining what it has called “Utah’s education paradox” — the fact that while Utah has long had the lowest per-pupil spending in the country, it also spent a high proportion of personal income on schools. Kroes said people often still use that education paradox notion as an excuse for why the state doesn’t put more money into education, but “the excuse doesn’t hold water any more.” The report says Utah has the lowest per-pupil spending in the nation partly because of the state’s high proportion of children, but it also notes the decline in the education funding effort. In 2009, Utah’s education funding effort was nearly $48 per $1,000 in personal income, meaning about 4.8 percent of all income earned in the state went toward public education, the report says, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That was down from $56.44 in 1992, when Utah ranked eighth in the nation for its education funding effort. The report attributes the decline in education funding effort to a number of things, including changes in how much of their incomes Utahns have spent, in general, on state and local government. It also attributes the decline to a shift in spending from education to other areas, including health and human services, transportation, and law and order. Kroes said it’s clear policymakers, over the past two decades, have placed a higher priority on other programs or on reducing taxes than on education funding. Another good example of how the corporate-controlled legislature is actually harming the people of the state. And as Hugh Nibley once said, education is the only thing Mormons are willing to pay for and not get. Now, they’re not even willing to pay for it. Nice values.

June 24, 2011

June 23, 2011

Unfortunately, the President's idea of a substantial drawdown of troops in Afghanistan is not even close to enough. I urge you to vote "NO" on the Defense Appropriation Bill. The only money that should go to Afghanistan is for the significant drawdown of troops. I support Rep. Barbara Lee’s Responsible End to the War in Afghanistan Act and her amendment to limit funding in Afghanistan to the safe, and orderly withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Afghanistan. I also support limiting the president’s war powers, as defined in the amendment sponsored by Representatives Amash, Lee, Conyers, Jones, Nadler, and Paul, by striking Section 1034 from the National Defense Authorization Act. Between the human costs and the financial costs of this unsuccessful war, the only recourse is to withdraw more troops. Get out of Afghanistan and Iraq now. We are wasting an unconscionable amount of money there to harm people. Use that money here to help people.

June 22, 2011

The Utah Department of Community and Culture on Tuesday laid off the state archaeologist and two assistants, leaving the Antiquities section with just two employees: those responsible for maintaining a database necessary for development of roads, railways, buildings, and other projects. Officials say the measures were budget-driven, but skeptics suspect it is related to opposition to a proposed Utah Transit Authority (UTA) station. Department acting Director Mike Hansen said he was simply carrying out budget cuts ordered by the Legislature. Assistant state archaeologist Ronald Rood, who was among those dismissed, said that no other programs in the state Division of History had been cut and suggested there may have been a political motive behind the change: to eliminate employees who sought to protect archaeological sites threatened by development, that Utah “showed its disdain for archaeology and Utah’s vast cultural heritage”, and that he, along with state archaeologist Kevin Jones and physical anthropologist Derinna Kopp, who also lost their jobs Tuesday, stepped into the view of Gov. Gary Herbert, lawmakers, and the UTA in recent years when they raised concerns about a proposed commuter rail station planned in Draper. UTA proposed the train stop and mixed-use development on the footprint of an ancient American Indian village, the earliest known location of corn farming in the Great Basin. “We always have tried to stand up for archaeology,” Rood said. “We were pretty vocal over the issue of the [rail] station down in Draper that was going to be placed over a 3,000-year-old archaeological site.” The archeology team is part of the state Historic Preservation office, which was responsible, among other tasks, for reviewing archaeological sites in development zones, cataloging human remains found on state and private lands for repatriation to American Indian tribes in accordance with state and federal law, namely the U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The team also conducted educational programs for Utah’s fourth- and seventh-graders and during an annual Archaeology Week with field trips and lecturers. When they were asked to leave the building, the three archaeologists walked away from partly-written reports and forensic evaluations of about 100 sets of skeletal remains. About three were under active review in the laboratory. The proposed Draper rail station had political tendrils reaching onto the UTA board — where trustee and developer Terry Diehl had an interest in development plans around the station — and the Legislature, where attorney and then-House Speaker Greg Curtis had pushed the Department of Natural Resources to delay a conservation easement planned for the site because a client wanted to trade for the land to develop the station. Governor Gary Herbert is a former president of the Utah Association of Realtors. Also The archaeologists’ dismissals comes at a time when lawmakers have ordered the Department of Community and Culture to consider eliminating itself. The bill specifying that was sponsored by Rep. Wayne Harper, a West Jordan Republican and developer. Forrest Cuch, former longtime Utah Indian Affairs director, charged Tuesday that Utah will be in violation of state and federal law because of the firings. He added that he is convinced the archaeology professionals were snared in the Draper FrontRunner station controversy, just as he was. Cuch was fired in February for what the governor characterized as “insubordination.” Cuch, who disputed the official reason for his termination, also said a federal investigation is in order in the archaeology shakeup. “It’s time this stopped, this violation of federal law,” Cuch said. “Some of these people need to be put in jail.” Utahns, in the words of Edward Abbey, remain committed to putting green portapotties in their living rooms if they can make a buck. Greed is strangling even the past, not just our future.

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.