March 28, 2011

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

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

Be afraid, be very afraid.

March 27, 2011

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

March 24, 2011

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

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

March 23, 2011

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

March 20, 2011

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

March 16, 2011

Check out this troubling and important article about pro football:

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

March 15, 2011

       Josh Russell

March 8, 2011

Gavin Russell is one year old today!

March 4, 2011

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

January 28, 2011

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

February 25, 2011

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

February 20, 2011

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

February 8, 2011

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

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

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

Already starting to look like a horror show out there.

February 7, 2011

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

January 26, 2011

Here in Salt Lake City, the State Legislature is considering a bill to honor the Browning M1911 pistol by making it the official state firearm. That’s right, a committee in the Utah House of Representatives voted 9 to 2 this week to approve a bill that would add the Browning pistol to the pantheon of official state things, along with the bird (seagull), rock (coal), dance (square), and official state cooking pot (Dutch oven). “This firearm is Utah,” Representative Carl Wimmer, the Browning bill’s sponsor, told The Salt Lake Tribune. Capitol observers say the Browning bill has an excellent chance of becoming law. Last Monday, the Utah State Capitol celebrated Browning Day, honoring John Moses Browning, native son and maker of the nominee for Official State Firearm. There were speeches, a proclamation, a flyover by a National Guard helicopter, and, of course, a rotunda full of guns. “We recognize his efforts to preserve the Constitution,” Gov. Gary Herbert said, in keeping with what appears to be a new Republican regulation requiring all party members to mention the Constitution at least once in every three sentences. It is generally not a good idea to dwell on the strange behavior of the state legislature since it leads to bottomless despair. For example, Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator, tried to improve upon the Browning Day celebrations by suggesting they be scheduled to coincide with Martin Luther King Day since “both made tremendous contributions to individual freedom and individual liberty.” But it’s a symptom of a new streak of craziness abroad in the land, which wants to introduce guns into every conceivable part of American life: National parks, schools, bars, airports. Especially in Utah, where the second-least amount of money is spent on education per child of all the states, but one legislator wants to make gun training mandatory in schools. “There is abundant research suggesting in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, goes down,” Utah’s new United States senator, Mike Lee, told CNN. Actually, there’s a ton of debate about this, which is hard to resolve given the fact that, as Michael Luo reported in The New York Times, the N.R.A.’s crack lobbyists have managed to stop almost all federal financing for scientific research on gun-related questions. But Lee has definitely made the list of most creative commentators on these matters, ever since he dismissed calls for a calmer political rhetoric after the Tucson massacre by arguing that “the shooter wins if we, who’ve been elected, change what we do just because of what he did.” And, Jason Chaffetz, the congressman from Utah County’s response to the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was that he was going to start wearing his gun more. Obviously, God dwells here. And he’s carrying a gun.

January 23, 2011

Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.

Edmund Husserl

January 21, 2011

Happily, we continue to learn more about our human ancestral past. With every, mostly fragmentary, addition to the physical evidence, the picture changes. The mysteries, and the fascination, seem only to keep growing. A case in point is the recent discovery at Denisova Cave, in Siberia, of a finger bone, 50,000 years old. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, based in Leipzig, Germany, have extracted the entire genome from the finger bone and found that it belongs to a previously unknown hominid they have called Denisovans. Researchers will need more skeletal samples before they can say what the Denisovans looked like. But they are believed to have emerged from Africa at roughly the same time as Neanderthals — 500,000 years ago — and settled much farther east. The scientists reached this conclusion by comparing Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes with the genomes of modern humans. In Nature last month, they reported that as much as 4.8 percent of Denisovan DNA turned up in the DNA of people living in Papua New Guinea and the nearby island of Bougainville. Given the distance between Siberia and Papua New Guinea, there’s every possibility the Denisovans were as successful and wide ranging as Neanderthals, who settled in Europe and the Near East. The story that needs updating in our minds isn’t just the existence of another hominid. It’s the fact that humans overlapped and interbred with both Neanderthals and with Denisovans. We carry the traces of these cousins in our genes. What is still unanswered is why we humans survived and prospered, while the Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared. After all, Neanderthals and Denisovans had already prospered for 200,000 or 300,000 years by the time they faded away.

January 13, 2011

New figures for the global climate show that 2010 was the wettest year in the historical record, and it tied 2005 as the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The figures confirm that 2010 will go down as one of the more remarkable years in the annals of climatology. It featured prodigious snowstorms that broke seasonal records in the United States and Europe; a record-shattering summer heat wave that scorched Russia; strong floods that drove people from their homes in places like Pakistan, Australia, California, and Tennessee; a severe die-off of coral reefs; and a continuation in the global trend of a warming climate. Two agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reported that the global average surface temperature for 2010 had tied the record set in 2005. The analyses differ slightly; in the NOAA version, the 2010 temperature was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 20th century, which is 57 degrees. It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001. The earth has been warming in fits and starts for decades, and a large majority of climatologists say that is because humans are releasing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Maybe that’s because the carbon dioxide level has increased about 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

January 10, 2011

Check out this excellent article from the Atlantic, “The Tyranny of Defense,Inc.” (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342/). The author, Andrew Bacevitch, is retired military, a good writer, and very perceptive. I really enjoyed his book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, as well.  Sad but true.

January 6, 2011

John Boehner, the new speaker, promised the incoming House members of the 112th Congress to “give the government back to the American people.” But away from the camera, the chamber’s new Republican leadership is busy doing the opposite. Darrell Issa of California, the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has sent out letters to 150 businesses and trade groups, asking them for suggestions on loosening what he called “job-killing” corporate regulations. This, of course, has nothing to do with Mr. Boehner’s tearful populism and everything to do with the tens of millions in corporate dollars that helped propel the Republicans to power in the House. Businesses have complained about the Obama administration’s expanded, and necessary, oversight of finance, health care, and food production, among other areas. Now they have helped elect a House leadership that is eager to do their bidding. Mr. Issa did not have to wait long for answers to his query. To cite just a few: Financial companies have protested the new controls on debit-card fees, which were enacted to save small businesses billions of dollars and to lower prices. Manufacturers said they did not like the proposed E.P.A. limits on greenhouse gas emissions, intended to begin addressing global warming. There were even complaints about the cost to business of proposed federal limits on how long truck drivers can be behind the wheel, which would save lives on the highway. None of this should be surprising, especially coming from Mr. Issa, who has already made clear his intention to harass the Obama administration with “seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks.” One of his targets, he has said, would be the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is intended to curb some of the financial industry’s worst practices and help head off another meltdown. Apparently he required no hearings or the slightest smidgen of evidence to declare that President Obama is “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” even if he now claims that corrupt does not mean criminal. The new Republican leaders love to insert the phrase “job-killing” in front of everything they oppose, hoping it might mask their true intentions. Mr. Boehner has been speaker for just one day. But it is already clear that the Republicans’ plan is to serve their corporate donors, above all else.