Undernews For 26 March 2011

Since 1964, the news while there's still time to do something about it

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Entropy update: OMG, FYI, and LOL enter Oxford English Dictionary

Three Census problems for the Republicans

Interesting analysis by Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post

The country is getting less rural . . .
The country is getting more diverse. . .
The areas that are getting bigger are Democratic. . .

GOP's next target: AARP

The Hill - Newly empowered House Republicans are getting ready to renew their attacks against AARP over its support for the healthcare reform law, The Hill has learned. The Ways and Means health and oversight subcommittees are hauling in the seniors lobby's executives before the panel for an April 1 hearing on how the group stands to benefit from the law, among other topics. Republicans say AARP supported the law's $200 billion in cuts to the Medicare Advantage program because it stands to gain financially as seniors replace their MA plans with Medicare supplemental insurance ¬ or Medigap ¬ policies endorsed by the association. The hearing will cover not only Medigap but "AARP’s organizational structure, management, and financial growth over the last decade."

Recovered history: The real Teddy Roosevelt

Letters of Note: Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt writes to the founder of the Eugenics Record Office, prominent eugenicist Charles Davenport, and offers his views on eugenics; a highly controversial movement whose aim - essentially the eradication of "defective" humans in society by way of selective breeding - gained much attention in the 1930/40s when more than 400'000 Germans were sterilized against their will, and over 70'000 others killed, as part of Adolf Hitler's quest to rid the country of "life unworthy of life."

The Outlook
287 Fourth Avenue
New York Lawrence

January 3rd 1913.

My dear Mr. Davenport:

I am greatly interested in the two memoirs you have sent me. They are very instructive, and, from the standpoint of our country, very ominous. You say that these people are not themselves responsible, that it is "society" that is responsible. I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celebates or have no children or only one or two. Some day we will realize that the prime duty - the inescapable duty - of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. at all.

Faithfully yours,

(Signed, 'Theodore Roosevelt')

Charles B. Davenport, Esq.,
Cold Spring Harbor, L.I.

One poor harvest from chaos

Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute - Today there are three sources of growing demand for food: population growth; rising affluence and the associated jump in meat, milk, and egg consumption; and the use of grain to produce fuel for cars.

In early January, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that its Food Price Index had reached an all-time high in December, exceeding the previous record set during the 2007-08 price surge. Even more alarming, on February 3rd, the FAO announced that the December record had been broken in January as prices climbed an additional 3 percent.

Everything now depends on this year's harvest. Lowering food prices to a more comfortable level will require a bumper grain harvest, one much larger than the record harvest of 2008 that combined with the economic recession to end the 2007-08 grain price climb.

If the world has a poor harvest this year, food prices will rise to previously unimaginable levels. Food riots will multiply, political unrest will spread and governments will fall. The world is now one poor harvest away from chaos in world grain markets.

Some 18 countries have inflated their food production in recent decades by overpumping aquifers to irrigate their crops. Among these are China, India, and the United States, the big three grain producers.

When water-based food bubbles burst in some countries, they will dramatically reduce production. In others, they may only slow production growth. In Saudi Arabia, which was wheat self-sufficient for more than 20 years, the wheat harvest is collapsing and will likely disappear entirely within a year or so as the country's fossil (nonreplenishable) aquifer, is depleted.

In Syria and Iraq, grain harvests are slowly shrinking as irrigation wells dry up. Yemen is a hydrological basket case, where water tables are falling throughout the country and wells are going dry. These bursting food bubbles make the Arab Middle East the first geographic region where aquifer depletion is shrinking the grain harvest.

While these Middle East declines are dramatic, the largest water-based food bubbles are in India and China. A World Bank study indicates that 175 million people in India are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping is feeding 130 million people. Spreading water shortages in both of these population giants are making it more difficult to expand their food supplies.

Beyond irrigation wells going dry, farmers must contend with climate change. Crop ecologists have a rule of thumb that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature during the growing season, grain yields drop 10 percent. Thus it was no surprise that searing temperatures in western Russia last summer shrank the grain harvest by 40 percent.

On the demand side of the food equation, there are now three sources of growth. First is population growth. There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night, many of them with empty plates. Second is rising affluence. Some three billion people are now trying to move up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive meat, milk, and eggs. And third, massive amounts of grain are being converted into oil, i.e. ethanol, to fuel cars. Roughly 120 million tons of the 400-million-ton 2010 U.S. grain harvest are going to ethanol distilleries.

What is needed now is a worldwide effort to raise water productivity, similar to the one launched by the international community a half century ago to raise cropland productivity. This earlier effort tripled the world grain yield per acre between 1950 and 2010.

On the climate front, the goal of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050-the widely accepted goal by governments-is not sufficient. The challenge now is to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020 with a World War II-type mobilization to raise energy efficiency and to shift from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

On the demand side, we need to accelerate the shift to smaller families. There are 215 million women in the world who want to plan their families, but who lack access to family planning services. They and their families represent over a billion of the world's poorest people. While filling the family planning gap, we need to simultaneously launch an all-out effort to eradicate poverty. Once under way, these two trends reinforce each other.

And in an increasingly hungry world, converting grain into fuel for cars is not the way to go. It is time to remove subsidies for converting grain and other crops into automotive fuel. If President Sarkozy can get the G-20 to focus on the causes of rising food prices, and not just the symptoms, then food prices can be stabilized at a more comfortable level.

Shop Talk

Beginning tomorrow, we will no longer provide new links to the New York Times as it has chosen not to fully participate in the Internet and will be living in a private gated community. This doesn't particularly disturb us since the Progressive Review was part of the underground media in the 1960s that helped to change America for the better more effectively than just about any major journalistic trend before or after. One of the things we learned then was that you don't really need the NY Times to make America work right.

Rural divorce rate catches up to urban splits

Rural Blog - The gap between rural and urban divorce rates has all but disappeared, 2010 census data show. "Forty years ago, divorced people were more concentrated in cities and suburbs. But geographic distinctions have all but vanished, and now, for the first time, rural Americans are just as likely to be divorced as city dwellers," Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff of The New York Times report.

Another reason Jamie Gorelick shouldn't be FBI director

Examiner editorial - There was her tenure as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno during President Clinton's first term. Reno described Gorelick as Justice's "chief operating officer" from 1993 to 1997. She was a key Reno adviser during the horrendous events in Waco, Texas, in which David Koresh, 76 of his Branch Davidian followers (including 20 women and children) and four federal agents died in an unbelievably bungled assault intended to end a 50-day siege. The Davidians were immolated in an inferno apparently ignited by pyrotechnic gas grenades used by the government in the assault.

Corrupt GOP governor of the day

Mother Jones - Republican governor Rick Scott's push to privatize Medicaid in Florida is highly controversial¬not least because the health care business Scott handed over to his wife when he took office could reap a major profit if the legislation becomes law. . .Florida Democrats and independent legal experts say this handover hardly absolves Scott of a major conflict of interest. As part of a federally approved pilot program that began in 2005, certain Medicaid patients in Florida were allowed to start using their Medicaid dollars at private clinics like Solantic. The Medicaid bill that Scott is now pushing would expand the pilot privatization program to the entire state of Florida, offering Solantic a huge new business opportunity.

Patriotism interferes with marriage again

Al Kamen, Washington Post - Earlier this month, former House speaker and likely presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that his exhaustion from working so hard for America eventually led him to cheat on his second wife. This week, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said he and his wife, Sandra Torres, are divorcing as a “real sacrifice” for the good of their country.

Seems Torres wants to run to succeed her husband, and Guatemala’s constitution bars relatives of the president from running for that office. So Colom, 59, and Torres, 51, who’ve been married eight years, filed for divorce by “mutual agreement” on March 11 and their union could be over by the end of this month, CNN reported. “We are making a real sacrifice,” Colom told Mexico’s Televisa this week, “and it will be a real divorce, with physical separation.”

Census: blacks move south

NY Times - The percentage of the nation’s black population living in the South has hit its highest point in half a century, according to census data released Thursday, as younger and more educated black residents move out of declining cities in the Northeast and Midwest in search of better opportunities...The five counties with the largest black populations in 2000 ¬ Cook in Illinois, Los Angeles, Wayne in Michigan, Kings in New York and Philadelphia ¬ all lost black population in the last decade. Among the 25 counties with the biggest increase in black population, three-quarters are in the South.

Increasingly blacks are moving to places with small black populations. Just 2 percent of the black population growth in the last decade occurred in counties that have traditionally been black population centers, while 20 percent has occurred in counties where only a tiny fraction of the population had been black. ... Over all, the black population grew by 11 percent in large metropolitan counties, but by 15 percent in adjacent smaller counties in the metropolitan area, suggesting a strong movement of blacks to the suburbs. The top 10 fastest-growing areas were suburbs, census officials said.

GE pays no taxes

NY Times - In January, President Obama named Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, to head the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. “He understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy,” Mr. Obama said. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

Post-racial society update

According to the latest census, if the United States Senate reflected the ethnicity of America there would be:

16 latino senators. There are two.
12 black senators. There are none.
5 senators of Asian ethnicity. There are two.

The record: Regime change efforts are a bust

Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy - Before France, Britain, and the United States stumbled into its current attempt to dislodge Muammar al-Qaddafi from power in Libya -- and let's not kid ourselves, that's what they are trying to do -- did anyone bother to ask what recent social science tells us about the likely results of our intervention?

I doubt it, because recent research suggests that we are likely to be disappointed by the outcome. A 2006 study by Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny found that military intervention by liberal states (i.e., states like Britain, France and the United States) "has only very rarely played a role in democratization since 1945." Similarly, George Downs, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of New York University found that U.S. interventions since World War II led to stable democracies within ten years less than 3 percent of the time, and a separate study by their NYU colleague William Easterly and several associates found that both U.S and Soviet interventions during the Cold War generally led to "significant declines in democracy." Finally, a 2010 article by Goran Piec and Daniel Reiter examines forty-two "foreign imposed regime changes" since 1920 and finds that when interventions "damage state infrastructural power" they also increase the risk of subsequent civil war.

The best and most relevant study I have yet read on this question is an as-yet unpublished working paper by Alexander Downes of Duke University, which you can find on his website here. Using a more sophisticated research design, Downes examined 100 cases of "foreign imposed regime change" going all the way back to 1816. In particular, his analysis takes into account "selection effects" (i.e., the fact that foreign powers are more likely to intervene in states that already have lots of problems, so you would expect these states to have more problems afterwards too). He finds that foreign intervention tends to promote stability when the intervening powers are seeking to restore a previously deposed ruler. But when foreign interveners oust an existing ruler and impose a wholly new government (which is what we are trying to do in Libya), the likelihood of civil war more than triples.

Pocket paradigms

Art is the serendipity that occurs when imagination meets discipline and skill. Every work of art is a challenge to the status quo because it proposes to replace a part of it. - Sam Smith

Census ethnic changes by zip code

Airlines jack baggage ripoff

The GOP platform

Gov. Sean Parnell's appointee for the panel that nominates state judges testified that he would like to see Alaskans prosecuted for having sex outside of marriage.- Anchorage Daily News

ATT/TMobile merger is monopoly gone wild

Tim Karr, Save the Internet - AT&T's plan to take over T-Mobile . . will form a communications colossus to rival Ma Bell. Two companies, AT&T and Verizon, would control close to 80 percent of the mobile marketplace in America - a percentage that could exceed 90 percent, if, as many anticipate, Verizon buys Sprint.

For the hundreds of millions of American people who rely on handheld phones and wireless Internet devices, this equation spells disaster.

The net result for consumers is higher prices for fewer choices. Competitors trying to innovate in this space with open networks and devices will face formidable obstacles to entry put in place by a duopoly that sees openness as anathema to profits.

Wisconsin Republicans destroying their own past

William Cronon, NY Times - Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.

Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.

University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.

But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.

The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive impulse for conservatives in the early 21st century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago.

When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature.

The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party.

Recovered History: A national commissioner recommented pot decriminalization four decades ago

Wikipedia - The Commission recommended decriminalization of simple possession, finding:

[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use. It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only 'with the greatest reluctance.

The Commission found that the constitutionality of marijuana prohibition was suspect, and that the executive and legislative branches had a responsibility to obey the Constitution, even in the absence of a court ruling to do so:

While the judiciary is the governmental institution most directly concerned with the protection of individual liberties, all policy-makers have a responsibility to consider our constitutional heritage when framing public policy. Regardless of whether or not the courts would overturn a prohibition of possession of marihuana for personal use in the home, we are necessarily influenced by the high place traditionally occupied by the value of privacy in our constitutional scheme.

[Note: the Progressive Review has also opposed the criminalization of drug use for four decades]

Religion may become extinct in nine nations

BBC - A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries. The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Word: Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin has become the political equivalent of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. America regrets the one night stand they had with Palin, but now she has broken into our house and is ready to boil our bunny. Sarah Palin is America’s ultimate political stalker. It all makes you wonder where Michael Douglas is when we need him most.- Jason Easley, Politicus USA

Word: Libya

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post - Gaddafi is crazy and evil; obviously, he wasn’t going to listen to our advice about democracy. The world would be fortunate to be rid of him. But war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standard we set for defiant ones. If not, then please spare us all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms. We’ll know this isn’t about justice, it’s about power.

The atomization of America

This is a depressing article even for one who has never been a big phone user. For example, I have always looked upon a surprise call from a friend one of the pleasures of life. As I read this article, however, I thought that I not only don't want to call the writer, I don't even want to know her, because her subtext is that her desires supplant those of all around her. Which is one of the problems with America today.

On Facebook, Matthew Peter Donoghue put it well: There is something a little sad about this trend story; unlike most such trend stories, this one is not just a few anecdotes processed through the feature writer's fertile imagination, this one is true. Yes, we've all found some efficiency in eMail and texting, but at what price? Those microbursts of modern convenience are devoid of nuance. And unless we see each other regularly, we lose touch. . .

Pamela Paul, NY Times - Phone call appointments have become common in the workplace. Without them, there’s no guarantee your call will be returned. . .Whereas people once received and made calls with friends on a regular basis, we now coordinate such events via e-mail or text. When college roommates used to call (at least two reunions ago), I would welcome their vaguely familiar voices. Now, were one of them to call on a Tuesday evening, my first reaction would be alarm. Phone calls from anyone other than immediate family tend to signal bad news. .

Food groups sue over government's aproval of genetically engineered alfalfa

The Center for Food Safety and Earth Justice have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, arguing that the agency’s recent unrestricted approval of genetically engineered, “Roundup Ready” Alfalfa was unlawful. The GE crop is engineered to be immune to the herbicide glyphosate, which Monsanto markets as Roundup. USDA data show that 93% of all the alfalfa planted by farmers in the U.S. is grown without the use of any herbicides. With the full deregulation of GE alfalfa, USDA estimates that up to 23 million more pounds of toxic herbicides will be released into the environment each year.

“USDA has once again failed to provide adequate oversight of a biotech crop,” said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety. “This reckless approval flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that GE alfalfa threatens the rights of farmers and consumers, as well as significant harm to the environment.”

Earth Justice attorney Paul Achitoff commented: “We expect Monsanto to force-feed people genetically engineered crops¬that’s its business model. We hoped for better from the USDA, which has much broader responsibilities. GE alfalfa will greatly increase use of toxic chemicals from coast to coast, threatens the organic dairy industry, and will have farmers going back to Monsanto every year to buy its patented seed and Roundup.”

Known as the “queen of forages,” alfalfa is the key feedstock for the dairy industry. Organic dairies stand to lose their source of organic feed, a requirement for organic dairy, including milk and yogurt products. The organic sector is a 26 billion dollar a year industry and growing 20% annually.

Because alfalfa is pollinated by bees that can fly and cross-pollinate between fields and feral sources many miles apart, the engineered crop will contaminate natural alfalfa varieties. Roundup Ready alfalfa is the first engineered perennial crop, meaning it remains in the ground for 3-6 years and is widely prevalent in wild or feral form throughout America, further increasing the likelihood and extent of transgenic contamination.

How the Cuban story might have been different

From an article that appeared in the Washington Monthly and republished in the DC Gazette by the recently deceased Jon Rowe. Rowe was a frequent contributor and adviser to the Progressive Review (then the DC Gazette) and we shall, over the next few days be running clips from his work

Jonathan Rowe, Washington Monthly, 1984 - A photograph in the October 14,1959 edition of The Sporting News shows a beaming Fidel Castro shaking hands with a crew-cut gringo named Ted Wieand. Wieand was about to pitch the seventh and final game of the Junior World Series for the Triple-A Havana Sugar Kings against the Minneapolis Millers, whose second baseman was a fellow named Carl Yastrzemski.

Havana won that game, and the series; and though it had been in the league only a few years, the team seemed to have a promising future. It was not to be. Castro became our devil, we became his, and the Sugar Kings became the Jersey City Jerseys. But baseball resides in a zone that is beyond such matters as ideology and the Cold War. Despite 20 years of CIA plots, Cuban adventurism, and harangues on both sides, those Cuban players and fans still want to play ball.

"We all await the day when we can play against the North American Great Leaguers," Wilfredo Sanchez, Cuba's leading lifetime hitter (.332 lifetime average) told Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post. We should give Wilfredo Sanchez and his countrymen their wish. Specifically, we should admit Havana into the American League. It would be great for the game, and great for our relations in the hemisphere to boot.

The Soviets would be shut out cold. As Don Miguel Cuevas, Cuba's native Joe DiMaggio, put it, The Russians have yet to come up with a good left-handed hitter." Cubans are nuts about baseball. "Even Brooklyn couldn't match Cuban 'fanaticos,'" wrote a sports- writer for the Toronto Daily Star after the Sugar King/Miller series.

A Havana journalist said of Cuevas: "In a baseball crowd, even Fidel would not receive the recognition of Don Miguel." Among the Cuban baseball nuts is Fidel Castro himself, who, as a pitcher for the University of Havana, was scouted by the old Washington. Senators. ("Good stuff," the reports said.) Fidel attended all five games of the '59 series that were played in Havana, once calling off a cabinet meeting and dragging the ministers off to the park.

If only we could get Castro and Reagan, the former sportscaster, together, just think how they could reminisce about the golden days of Williams and Mantle, Snider and Mays. Sorry, Chemenko. So there is ample precedent for bringing Havana into the upper reaches of the sport. The benefits could be enormous. . .

The Sporting News after the '59 series an "incident" at the Cuban ballpark upon which every American president should reflect. "As the Cuban national anthem was played," the paper reported, "the overflow crowd sang. Then it was The Star Spangled Banner,' and near the end a loud voice interrupted. Immediately after the last strains of our national anthem had died away, the crowd roared, 'Afuera, afuera (Throw him out, throw him out].' The culprit was .promptly ejected."

This, don't forget, was after Castro's revolution, when we still had an opportunity to establish some form of ties with the country. . .

An aide to the Persian King Manionious, upon hearing that the rival Greeks competed among one another for mere olive wreaths, said plaintively to his master, "Woe unto us, Mardonious. Against what manner of men are you leading us, since they do not compete for gold, but for honor alone."

Study: Aid to the poor helps

NY Times - Without a flood of food stamps and tax benefits for low-income families, about 250,000 more New Yorkers would have slipped into poverty at the height of the recession, according to calculations to be released by city officials.

“To a large degree, economic stimulus programs and policy initiatives aimed at bolstering family income succeeded in preventing a rise in poverty in New York City,” according to the report by the mayor’s Center for Economic Opportunity.

“Not every antipoverty program meets its goals and deserves to be protected,” the report by Dr. Mark Levitan, the center’s director of poverty research, says, “but calls for across-the-board cutbacks to programs that help low-income families cannot be justified by the assertion that when it comes to poverty, ‘nothing works.’ ”

NCLB bad for preschoolers, too

Alison Gopnik, Slate - Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law¬the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? . . . Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition¬one from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley¬suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

Drug war madness

Radar - The Las Vegas chief deputy district attorney, who prosecuted celebs Paris Hilton and Bruno Mars in their drug cases last year, was arrested during the weekend in connection with possession of cocaine, RadarOnline.com has learned. David Charles Schubert, 47, is also a member of a federal drug task force.

Word

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. - John Steinbeck

Obama wants to make sharing files a felony with prison up to 20 years

Moses Supposes - The Obama administration is going to make torrent streaming, also known as P2P (peer to peer) sharing of music, a felony. This means, according to the Administration’s white paper, recommending an upgrade to the act of illegal streaming of music to one of “financial espionage,” carrying prison time of up to 20 years.

The white paper, which makes the recommendations to Congress, includes as part of its focus, websites that “provide access to infringing products,” and would give local authorities “wiretap rights” in order to gather evidence. In other words, sites promoting the P2P lifestyle¬in any way, would be investigated the same way as street gangs and the Mafia.

In theory, copyright laws have always provided that infringement is a Federal crime for which you could go to jail, but so far, no one has, at least not unless they were running a factory that made 1000s of bootleg CDs. As for the casual infringement by students or grandmothers, our government has always given the taxpayer a rest allowing copyright laws to be sorted out in civil court.

In a review of the current state of intellectual property the administration is recommending that Congress upgrade existing laws to make illegal streaming of content and providing access to “infringing products,” a felony.

Note: The Obama administration has added at least five former recording industry to lawyers to high posts. This move is not only unfair, it is deeply corrupt. TPR

Red light scam exposed

Oakland Tribune - At the request of a red-light camera opponent, Caltrans last November studied vehicle speeds approaching the south Fremont intersection of Mission and Mohave boulevards, which is part of a state highway. Based on the evidence collected, Caltrans extended yellow-light times from the minimum-allowed 4.3 seconds to 5 seconds. The switch likely was made with safety in mind, but the most measurable change thus far has been the sudden 62 percent drop in red-light tickets at the approach, which last year accounted for nearly one in five of all camera-enforced tickets in Fremont.

Pocket paradigm

While it may take only a whole village to raise the average child, in my case it required three counties, two bioregions and an unincorporated territory, and I still don't have it quite straight - Sam Smith

Top Brits call drug war a disaster

Telegraph, UK - Leading peers – including prominent Tories – say that despite governments worldwide drawing up tough laws against dealers and users over the past 50 years, illegal drugs have become more accessible. . .

The MPs and members of the House of Lords, who have formed a new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform, are calling for new policies to be drawn up on the basis of scientific evidence.

It could lead to calls for the British government to decriminalise drugs, or at least for the police and Crown Prosecution Service not to jail people for possession of small amounts of banned substances. . .

Lord Lawson, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1983 and 1989, said: “I have no doubt that the present policy is a disaster. . ..

Other high-profile figures in the group include Baroness Manningham-Buller, who served as Director General of MI5, the security service, between 2002 and 2007; Lord Birt, the former Director-General of the BBC who went on to become a “blue-sky thinker” for Tony Blair; Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, until recently the Director of Public Prosecutions; and Lord Walton of Detchant, a former president of the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council.

Copyright monopoly really an attack on property rights

Torrent Freak - The copyright monopoly is not a property right. It is a limitation of property rights. Copyright is a government-sanctioned private monopoly that limits what people may do with things they have legitimately bought.

All too often, we hear the copyright lobby talk about theft, about property, about how they are robbed of something when someone makes a copy. This is, well, factually incorrect. It is a use of words that are carefully chosen to communicate that the copyright monopoly is property, or at the very least comparable to property rights...

Personal to doctors etc.

Medical Response to a Major Radiologic Emergency: A Primer for Medical and Public Health Practitioners. Radiology journal.

Polls

Only 39 percent of Californians consider the state "one of the best places to live," compared with 1985, when 78 percent gave the state the highest rating.

The GOP platform

Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all. - Fight Back News

More policies of the most radical major party in American history

Pocket paradigms

The drug Soma, obstacle golf, Feelie movies and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy were used in Huxley's Brave New World to placate the masses. These have been supplanted by a enormous variety of political tranquilizers ranging from actual drugs to distractions such as video games and even substitute elections such as American Idol and Survivor. Never have Americans in their off-work hours had so many ways to avoid what is really going on. Never have so many Americans been deactivated in imagination, creativity and energy by drugs prescribed by medicine rather than by taking those of their own choice. - Sam Smith

University provost resigns for having quoted Marx in a scholarly paper

Bud Goodall, Op Ed News - This week saw the withdrawal of Dr. Timothy Chandler from a Provost's job he had just won at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. The cause? A reference to Karl Marx in a published paper he wrote back in 1998. It seems that a local newspaper discharged investigative reporters to the library to dig up what they could find about Dr. Chandler and published a red-hot, red-baiting, no-holes-barred and mostly ridiculous account that claimed that anyone who quoted Marx was a Commie, and did we want that kind of person heading a local university? I add only that Dr. Chandler is a well-regarded scholar in the field of Sport Science. You know, that field full of leftists bent on indoctrinating youth?

Washington Post's university misleads students

Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education - Type the words "registered dietitian" into the Google search engine, and you're likely to see an advertisement at the top of the Web page directing you to Kaplan University's degree in nutrition science. The problem: You can't become a registered dietitian just by earning that degree at Kaplan Inc., a for-profit institution owned by the Washington Post Company.

More troublesome, say some students who have enrolled in Kaplan's program, is that they don't find that out until they've spent or borrowed thousands of dollars to take courses. In fact, the online college is not accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Dietetics Education. Without that accreditation, students who earn the degree from Kaplan can't get a dietetic internship or take the commission's exam, which is required in many states to become a licensed dietitian. The issue has led the American Dietetic Association, the parent organization of the commission, to take the unusual step of warning students on its Web site that degrees from Kaplan and 11 other colleges are not approved by the commission.

List of countries bombed by the United States

Political Inquirer - This is a non-official list of countries that are reported to have been bombed by the United States over the years (as of a few years ago)

Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003. . .
Afghanistan 2001. . .

Pocket Paradigms

Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the dangerous frustrations and failures involved in having one's contrary myth constantly butt up against reality like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home. Instead of defending the non-existent we could turn our energies instead towards devising a new and saner existence. - Sam Smith

Meet the former Barack Obama

Glenn Greenwald, Salon - I will simply never understand the view that the Constitution allows the President unilaterally to commit the nation to prolonged military conflict in another country -- especially in non-emergency matters having little to do with self-defense -- but just consider what candidate Barack Obama said about this matter when -- during the campaign -- he responded in writing to a series of questions regarding executive power from Charlie Savage, then of The Boston Globe:

Q. In what circumstances, if any, would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress? (Specifically, what about the strategic bombing of suspected nuclear sites -- a situation that does not involve stopping an imminent threat?)

OBAMA: The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent.

The GOP platform: restricting those poverty stricken no-gooders

Fight Back News - Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] - and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid - could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.

Police commissioner on why cops lie

Jacob Sullum, Reason - In response to a scandal involving fabricated and unconstitutional drug searches by plainclothes San Francisco police officers, Golden Gate University law professor Peter Keane explains "Why Cops Lie":

Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.

Keane, a former San Francisco police commissioner, cites three reasons for this state of affairs: judges who bend over backward to admit evidence except when the evidence of falsification (such as the surveillance footage feeding the current scandal) is impossible to ignore, unsympathetic suspects, and the incentives created by the war on drugs:
It is simply additional collateral damage from using the American criminal justice system as the battlefield of that war. It stands alongside the wasteful wreckage of hundreds of thousands of imprisoned Americans locked up for drug use, and the destruction of Mexico as a functioning state because of criminal cartels enriched through outlawed American drug use. The corruption of America's police officers as the most identifiable group of perjurers in the courts is one more item on that list.

Teacher wants kids to learn how to add, while evaluator obsesses over definitions

I once toured a DC high school and the lasting memory was that in every classroom, students were learning definitions. In one class, students were learning the different categories of conjunctions. How, I wondered, did I ever get to be a writer and an author and never even know that there were different categories of conjunctions? And now, in this fascinating account by Stephanie McCrummen, an elementary school teacher is chastised for not properly teaching children the definition of a commutative property. How did I ever get to be a Coast Guard navigator and not know about commutative properties? Would Obama send me back to fourth grade if he knew?

As McCrummen notes, "The idea, aggressively embraced by the Obama administration, is as straightforward as it is controversial: that teachers are the main factor in student growth ¬ more than poverty, parents, curriculum, principals or other circumstance. Improve the quality of instruction, the logic goes, and you will improve the public schools, a conviction that has led districts to adopt more-rigorous ways of evaluating teachers.

"The District’s system¬called IMPACT, now in its second year¬is becoming a national model, even as unions and some experts question the wisdom of staking careers on it. Last year, then-Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee fired 75 teachers who received poor evaluations.

The truth is that teaching - and testing - definitions is much easier than teaching someone how to add or write. And another reason why the Obama-Duncan-Rhee assault on true education is such a failure. - Sam Smith

Washington Post - Bethel’s most serious concern involved how Harris had taught his lesson on the commutative property, the math law that says 3 + 5 is the same as 5 + 3.

Bethel described what he had observed: Harris had written on the whiteboard: 855 + 319 = 1,174. Underneath, he had written four problems, such as 855+300+19+1 and 800+50+5+150+150+19.

Students were supposed to work the four problems and discover the underlying math law. But had the students done that, Bethel said, they would have discovered a different concept.

“So basically you showed them decomposition,” Bethel said. “That was the discovery, not so much that order doesn’t matter,” which was the objective.

Harris sat up. He raised his eyebrows, and in slightly exasperated tones, began offering his critique of the critique.

The problems on the board, Harris said, were just a warm-up to review the concept of place value. But it soon became clear that the students were struggling simply to add. And in that moment, Harris said, he decided to scrap the objective and rehash place value.

“It seems like I’m getting penalized possibly because I didn’t do that exact lesson I set out to do,” Harris said, explaining that many of his students were three grade levels behind. “I’m trying to get the kids up to a speed where they could learn that lesson. A lot of our kids, they fundamentally don’t know.”

Bookshelf: The Master Switch

The internet is under threat. At risk is what's known as "net neutrality", or the principle of free access for each user to every online site, regardless of content. That's the view of the man who coined the above term, Tim Wu, whose new book, The Master Switch, . . . argues the internet now runs the risk of not just political censorship – as seen in Libya and Egypt, and in the American reaction to WikiLeaks – but that of commercial censorship, too. Monopolies such as Google and Apple may soon decide to choose which parts of the internet to give us – or switch off – and in some cases have already started to do so...
Warns Wu, "the question everyone has is whether one day Google will have its Heart of Darkness moment."

Using the example of the online news industry, Wu suggests that if newspapers were to follow the example of Rupert Murdoch's new iPad-based "paper", The Daily, and "become exclusive partners with Apple, it may be easier for them to make money, but we may also end up with a media on the internet that is significantly more closed than it is now." This is because, he says, "You can imagine a future where blogs don't really have a meaningful future, because the content provided on a platform [such as Apple] doesn't create any room for anyone other than its exclusive media partners." So, Wu concludes: "The internet as a forum for speech, as a place where an individual with a talent can compete with a major newspaper – I'm suggesting that model may be passing."

Nuke plants faked repair reports

Among the factors that science - even nuclear science - has not learned to control is laziness, mendacity and fraud

Bloomberg - The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.

Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.

Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”

Recovered History: What pushed the north in the civil war?

Sam Smith - A few days ago, I raised a question about how important the competition of the southern slave trade - worth twice as much as the nation's railroads at the time of the Civil War - was in driving the Union's persistence in the war. Here are some of the interesting responses:

Peter Blum - I think Sam is onto something when he refers to capital and labor. The Civil War was one of those rare instances when Northern capital and labor were aligned. That is why the North managed to stick with the war through four extremely bloody years.

But while both were aligned in supporting the war, I wonder if they supported the war for the same reasons. Northern labor and farmers were pretty clearly against slavery because of both moral reasons and economic self-interest. For Northern capital, the picture is more complicated. Some capitalists were probably against slavery because the nascent wage-labor and mass-consumption economy was ultimately better for their bottom line. Other Northern capitalists and financiers profited from slavery and probably did not support the war because of a desire to end slavery; they probably supported the war to save the union, so that they could keep profiting from slavery without interruption.

Dave - Once Fort Sumter was attacked the war was started and there was no option but to fight. I don't think anyone except perhaps Lincoln cared much about preserving the union per se. That was just putting a positive face on a negative situation. Most northerners considered the Confederacy to be intolerable as a neighbor.

Those in the north who profited from slavery would expect and intend to do so whether or not the union was preserved.

I just can't see that northern financial interests came into it in terms of war aims, because the war aim was to destroy the south's capacity to wage war, not to free slaves or preserve the union. There was no union to preserve until and unless the war was won. The rhetoric in the north made no more sense than "the cause" in the south.

Anonymous - Consider also the history of anti-slavery in British terms. By using the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade while colonizing large parts of Africa and Asia, the British were destroying the commercial viability of their European rivals. When you re-examine history in terms of cash-flow, politics and conflict finally start to make sense.

Another reader send this clip from a recently published article:

Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research - The Civil War served several purposes. First of all, the immediate economic considerations: the Civil War sought to create a single economic system for America, driven by the Eastern capitalists in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, uniting with the West against the slave-labor South. The aim was not freedom for black slaves, but rather to end a system which had become antiquated and unprofitable. With the Industrial Revolution driving people into cities and mechanizing production, the notion of slavery lost its appeal: it was simply too expensive and time consuming to raise, feed, house, clothe and maintain slaves; it was thought more logical and profitable (in an era obsessed with efficiency) to simply pay people for the time they engage in labour. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the clock, and thus time itself became a commodity.

As slavery was indicative of human beings being treated as commodities to be bought and sold, owned and used, the Industrial Revolution did not liberate people from servitude and slavery, it simply updated the notions and made more efficient the system of slavery: instead of purchasing people, they would lease them for the time they can be 'productive.'

D. Shannon - During 1861, there was the realistic possibility that the Union might split into three different parts: north, south, and west. The north-south rivalry had prevented the construction of a transcontinental railroad and a telegraph to the Pacific. Many Californians were getting fed up with the bickering, and believed they would be better off as an independent nation, joining with Oregon and some western territories to form a Pacific Republic. If that were the case, or even if the threat were there, the north and south might actually agree on where those physical connections to California ought to be located.

If the south could leave the union, then the west could also leave -- and the west would take its valuable mineral deposits along with it. This would not be a good thing for the north, as the Union's silver and gold were out west. The Confederacy realized this, which is one reason why it decided to invade New Mexico. Once New Mexico fell, the CSA would continue on into Colorado, thus severing the north's links to the mountain and Pacific west.

Furthermore, during 1860 and early 1861, some southerners even made financial contributions to the Californian independence movement, aiming to split the west apart from the Union. There was a Confederate faction that hoped California, after leaving the Union, would join the CSA; a substantial minority of Californians also had this aim. However, the fact that the Confederate Constitution prohibited states from banning slavery, and that California was a free state, made it unlikely that California would ever join a southern nation.

Most histories don't mention the California secessionists. Of course, since the West remained part of the Union, the Civil War was remembered as a two-sided affair between the North and the South. However, from 1860 to the middle of 1862, there were essentially three sides, with California and Oregon remaining neutral for the time being, and retaining the possibility of becoming independent to retain that neutrality. The North, busy as it was fighting the South, would have been in no position to fight against an independent West.

The North's desire to save the union becomes much more understandable when we remember the North-South-West disagreements of the time. If the North wanted to ensure that the West remained in the Union -- and economic self-interest was part of the reason -- it had to engage in war against the Confederacy.

Another factor in the North's emotional involvement is that, during the 1850s and 1860, many white northerners saw the slave owners -- the "Slave Power" -- as a threat to their own individual liberties.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 permitted Federal marshals to take white men and conscript them into temporary service in order to look for escaped slaves. When a constitution was being written for Kansas, slave owners from Missouri rushed into the territory to cast illegal votes on the issues, and the resulting votes made it a crime to advocate for abolition. In 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks (SC) beat Sen. Charles Sumner (MA) into unconsciousness within the Senate chamber itself , while Rep. Laurence Keitt (SC) stood by with a pistol to prevent other Senators from coming to Sumner's defense.

In response to Brooks' crime, William Cullen Bryant wrote, "The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder. Has it come to this, that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? ... Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?"

The first seven states to secede did so because Lincoln was merely elected President; they didn't even wait for him to take office before leaving the union. Those northerners who subscribed to the "Slave Power" belief saw this as an effort by Southern slaveowners to blackmail the north into repealing the result of an election, and forcing an elected official to serve the interests of those who had refused to let people in their states even vote for him.

These actions on the part of Southerners were widely viewed in the North as restrictions on the liberty of free white men. Many white northerners could accept slavery. But when slave owners infringed on the freedoms of free whites, that was unacceptable to those same white northerners.

Charles Andrews - You can't run factories with outright slave labor. You need the incentive of wage slavery.

Southern planters were determined for various reasons on territorial expansion as well as continued control of Congress. They were happy to sell cotton to England and buy industrial goods from England.

Northern industrial capitalists finally had to confront the slave system. Free farmers saw the fight over land early on, and wage workers saw that the threat of outright enslavement outranked fears of a labor market swamped by ex-slaves.

Dave - You can't run factories with outright slave labor? I'm sure that the chained slaves on the job at the Tredegar iron works would have been interested to hear it. The worst form of widespread industrial slavery was the lumber industry. I think that something even worse would have inevitably followed eventually--migrant slavery. It didn't happen, but it would have, sure as death.

Meanwhile. . .

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