Undernews For 26 March
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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. . .
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.”
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.
In early Everything now depends on this year’s harvest. If the Some 18 countries have inflated their food When In Syria and Iraq, grain harvests are slowly While these Middle East declines are Beyond irrigation wells going dry, On the demand side of the food equation, there What is needed now is a worldwide effort to On the climate On the demand side, we And in an increasingly hungry world,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Seems Torres wants to run to
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.
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.”
Increasingly blacks are
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.
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.
Its American tax Its extraordinary success is based on an
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.
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.
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.
16 latino senators. There are two.
According to the latest census, if
the United States Senate reflected the ethnicity of America
there would be:
12
black senators. There are none.
5 senators of Asian
ethnicity. There are two.
The record: Regime change efforts are a
bust
I doubt it, because The best and
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?
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.
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.
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
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
For the hundreds of millions of American people The net result for
Tim Karr, Save the Internet
- ATT’s plan to take over T-Mobile . . will form a
communications colossus to rival Ma Bell. Two companies,
ATT 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.
who rely on handheld phones and wireless Internet devices,
this equation spells disaster.
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
Wisconsin was University But while Americans are aware of this The When Gov. Gaylord A. The policies that the current governor, Scott
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 [T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to
recommended decriminalization of simple possession,
finding:
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.
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.
opposed the criminalization of drug use for four decades]
Religion may become extinct in nine
nations
BBC – A study using The result, reported at the American Physical
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.
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.
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
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.
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
“USDA has once again failed to provide adequate Earth Justice attorney Paul Achitoff Known Because alfalfa is pollinated by bees that can
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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. . .
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
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
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.”
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
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:
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:
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.
Department of Hmm. .
Department of Five books on the Modragon cooperatives: The Coffee Party
Department of Bad General Electric, the folks that brought
Good Stuff
A review
Stuff
you the Japanese nuke plants
ENDS
Article source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1103/S00272/undernews-for-26-march-2011.htm
