Porkopolis

Global Warming...An Emily Litella Moment...

2012-01-29T15:22:00.003-05:00

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)Met Office releases new figures

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker stil

Scientists Discover New Clue to Chemical Origins of Life

2012-01-25T12:47:00.002-05:00

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012) — Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life.

A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York has re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world.

Working with colleagues at the University of Nottingham, they have made the first step towards showing how simple sugars -- threose and erythrose -- developed. The research is published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry...

On the Origins of Envy

2012-01-22T13:23:00.002-05:00

Readers of this blog are familiar with the oft-quoted observation of biologist/philosopher D'Arcy Thompson's:

[E]verything is the way it is becuase it got that way.

Writer Max Borders explores this dynamic in his excellent essay 'The Origins of Envy' :

...Any human emotion can become destructive by degree. Economist Young Back Choi thinks that envy is particularly destructive because it “is man's desire to eliminate others' relative gains even if he would become absolutely worse off in the process.” We see this in the original Ultimatum game. And we see it in the brutal consequences of Stalin and Mao. "Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group,” writes Natalie Angier in The New York Times, “selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes."
Understood this way, envy, despite its evolutionary rationale, does not seem very sane. Perhaps we should hope that any given person is likely to be a little better off over time, even if some are a lot better off (even if this goes against the emotional grain). Alas, a positive-sum orientation is neither a feature of the egalitarian ethos, nor any politics of envy. And this is just one aspect of the trouble with the Stone Age Trinity as it gets institutionalized. “Envy is appeased only at equality, regardless of the absolute level of consumption,” adds Choi. “’Only those societies that have been able to develop sufficient means to mitigate the destructive forces of envy have been able to build civilizations and prosper. Anthropologists have documented that two of the most distinguishing features of poor societies are the relative free expression of envy and the universal fear of envy on the part of those who come to have above-average gains.”

Envy can creep into both our politics and our personal lives. So also can envy’s sister emotions, guilt and indignation. All three are facets of a brain that was sculpted by millennia in a mostly zero-sum environment. But now we can live in a positive-sum world.

Anton Chekhov and Attribution Theory

2012-01-22T10:43:00.005-05:00

The famed Russian author Anton Chekhov had his writings influenced by science as captured by one memorable quote:

When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean—that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses—that is science.

Both art and science are lenses to look through to understand the human condition.

Another of Chekhov's observations is turning out to be germane to the study of our psychology:

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

The article 'The Effort Effect', in the Standford Magazine, reviews the research of psychologist Carol Dweck in the area of attribution theory - the cognitive dynamic associated with how we attribute causes of events and the motivation/de-motivation it engenders (emphasis added):

...Through more than three decades of systematic research, she [Ms Dweck] has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed...

...Dweck and her assistants ran an experiment on elementary school children whom school personnel had identified as helpless. These kids fit the definition perfectly: if they came across a few math problems they couldn’t solve, for example, they no longer could do problems they had solved before—and some didn’t recover that ability for days.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.

Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use...

It's interesting, that science is now empirically reaffirming an observation on human nature that Checkhov made more than 100 years ago.

Fascinating Research on the Origins of Multicellular Life

2012-01-18T16:07:00.003-05:00

Biologists Replicate Key Evolutionary Step

ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2012) — More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth's surface began forming multicellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists.

But scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences have replicated that key step in the laboratory using natural selection and common brewer's yeast, which are single-celled organisms. The yeast "evolved" into multicellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment -- in essence, precursors to life on Earth as it is today.

Their achievement is published in the January 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

...In essence, here's how the experiments worked. The two chose brewer's yeast or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast used since ancient times to make bread and beer, because it is abundant in nature and grows easily. They added it to a nutrient-rich culture media and allowed the cells to grow for a day in test tubes. Then they used a centrifuge to stratify the contents by weight. As the mixture settled, cell clusters landed on the bottom of the tubes faster because they are heavier. They removed the clusters, transferred them to fresh media, and grew them up again. Sixty cycles later, the clusters -- now hundreds of cells -- looked roughly like spherical snowflakes.

Analysis showed that the clusters were not just groups of random cells that adhered to each other, but related cells that remained attached following cell division. That was significant because it meant they were genetically similar, which promotes cooperation. When the clusters reached a critical size, some cells essentially committed suicide (apoptosis) to allow offspring to separate. The offspring reproduced only after they attained the size of their parents.

"A cluster alone isn't multicellular," Ratcliff said. "But when cells in a cluster cooperate, make sacrifices for the common good, and adapt to change, that's an evolutionary transition to multicellularity."

In order for multicellular organisms to form, most cells need to sacrifice their ability to reproduce, an altruistic action that favors the whole but not the individual, Ratcliff said. For example, all cells in the human body are essentially a support system that allows sperm and eggs to pass DNA along to the next generation. Thus, multicellularity is by its nature extremely cooperative. "Some of the best competitors in nature are those that engage in cooperation, and our experiment bears that out," said Travisano...

America: What a Country!?!?!?...Update

2012-01-17T13:46:00.003-05:00

Here's a follow-up to the jaw-dropping post 'America: What a Country!?!?!?...Welfare Payments Can Be Used to Qualify for a Mortgage' on the policy statement that encourages bank lenders of federally subsidized loans to consider Welfare payments for mortgage applications.

A representative for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has pointed to this specific statue in the U.S. Code as the law allowing for such a policy: United States Code: Title 15, 1691 (From the Equal Credit Opportunity Act):

§ 1691. Scope of prohibition

(a) Activities constituting discrimination

It shall be unlawful for any creditor to discriminate against any applicant, with respect to any aspect of a credit transaction—
(1) on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex or marital status, or age (provided the applicant has the capacity to contract);
(2) because all or part of the applicant’s income derives from any public assistance program; or
(3) because the applicant has in good faith exercised any right under this chapter...

Furthermore, the representative shared, "[A]lthough discrimination based on income from public assistance is still generally prohibited, in the limited case of loan modification/loan forbearance, Fannie Mae announced in servicing guidelines (below) that it will not consider unemployment insurance benefits as part of income when evaluating loans for possible modification."

Borrower Income Eligibility for Mortgage Modifications

Servicing Guide, Part VII, Section 610.03.05: Verifying Borrower Income and Occupancy Status and Announcement SVC-2010-08: Updates to the Requirements for Evaluating Borrowers for Fannie Mae’s Standard Mortgage Modification
Fannie Mae's current guidelines allow for servicers to use unemployment income as a source for qualifying a borrower for a modification, including HAMP modifications. Fannie Mae is eliminating unemployment insurance benefits as an allowable source of income when evaluating a borrower for HAMP or any other modification. The servicer may no longer consider unemployment insurance benefits and any other temporary sources of income related to unemployment, such as severance payments, as part of the monthly gross income for mortgage loans being evaluated for a modification. This new requirement is effective November 1, 2010

Political Juxtaposition: Margaret Thatcher and Chris Christie

2012-01-15T11:34:00.003-05:00

The best political rhetoric has elements of logos, ethos and pathos, all three expertly displayed here by masters of their craft:

Solyndra-gate...More Bankruptcies and Failures

2012-01-14T14:34:00.004-05:00

America: What a Country!?!?!?...Welfare Payments Can Be Used to Qualify for a Mortgage

2012-01-04T19:55:00.013-05:00

The Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff had a famous tag line as part of his routine: "America: What a country!".

The following is not a joking matter, but it will leave you asking "America: what a country!?!?!?"

John Lott's commentary points out this official Federal Reserve policy statement in the regulation guidlines found in {Closing the Gap:} A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending (page 16: emphasis added):

..Sources of Income: In addition to primary employment income, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will accept the following as valid income sources: overtime and part–time work, second jobs (including seasonal work), retirement and Social Security income, alimony, child support, Veterans Administration (VA) benefits, welfare payments, and unemployment benefits...

The Boston Fed's website includes this introduction to the report:

This publication offers a program for financial institutions seeking to apply their mortgage lending standards in accordance with equal opportunity goals and to expand their activity in underserved minority markets. Banks, mortgage companies, and other lenders subject to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) are referred to as “financial institutions” or “lenders.” Specific recommendations are followed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s conclusions with respect to fair lending challenges. The recommendations are geared primarily to mortgage products but they may be modified to address small business, commercial, and consumer lending. A summary of fair lending laws is also provided.

O! The Hypocrisy...Continues

2012-01-02T12:31:00.008-05:00

The hypocrisy on indefinite detention hits just keep on coming from our sanctimonious President (Remember how he scolded the Bush adminstration and his colleagues (both Republicans and Democrats) so derisively as a Senator during a radio interview):

ABC News: With Reservations, Obama Signs Act to Allow Detention of Citizens

In his last official act of business in 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act from his vacation rental in Kailua, Hawaii. In a statement, the president said he did so with reservations about key provisions in the law — including a controversial component that would allow the military to indefinitely detain terror suspects, including American citizens arrested in the United States, without charge.

The legislation has drawn severe criticism from civil liberties groups, many Democrats, along with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who called it “a slip into tyranny.” Recently two retired four-star Marine generals called on the president to veto the bill in a New York Times op-ed, deeming it “misguided and unnecessary.”

“Due process would be a thing of the past,” wrote Gens Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar. “Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States – and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.”

The president defended his action, writing that he signed the act, “chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed.”

Senior administration officials, who asked not to be named, told ABC News, “The president strongly believes that to detain American citizens in military custody infinitely without trial, would be a break with our traditions and values as a nation, and wants to make sure that any type of authorization coming from congress, complies with our Constitution, our rules of war and any applicable laws.”...

Pay Attention!

2012-01-02T11:12:00.001-05:00

New York Times: F.D.A. Finds Short Supply of Attention Deficit Drugs:

Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions.

The shortages are a result of a troubled partnership between drug manufacturers and the Drug Enforcement Administration, with companies trying to maximize their profits and drug enforcement agents trying to minimize abuse by people, many of them college students, who use the medications to get high or to stay up all night.

Caught in between are millions of children and adults who rely on the pills to help them stay focused and calm. Shortages, particularly of cheaper generics, have become so endemic that some patients say they worry almost constantly about availability...

The Birth of the Tea Party

2011-12-28T12:42:00.002-05:00

Solyndra and the "Bank of Washington"

2011-12-26T14:19:00.003-05:00

A dog bites man story in the Washington Post detailing the crony capatilism ways of the Solyndra fiasco:

Solyndra: Politics infused Obama energy programs

...Just two days before the visit, Obama fundraiser Steve Westly warned senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett that an appearance could be problematic. Westly, an investment fund manager with stakes in green-energy companies, said he was speaking for a number of Obama supporters in asking the president to postpone the visit because Solyndra’s financial prospects were dim and the company’s failure could generate negative media attention.

“The president should be careful about unrealistic/optimistic forecasts that could haunt him in the next 18 months if Solyndra hits the wall,” Westly wrote. Westly did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.

Similar concerns arose repeatedly among officials inside the White House. One staffer at the Office of Management and Budget suggested to a colleague that the visit could “prove embarrassing to the administration in the not too distant future.” Even Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, acknowledged “risk” in the trip.

But administration officials ultimately waved off the jitters, after assurances from Energy Department officials that their policy was sound and that Solyndra’s troubles would be fleeting. After Obama’s trip, the administration hung a photo from his visit on a wall in the West Wing, to underscore good things to come.

Solyndra’s financial picture did not improve, however, and by year’s end the company was crumbling. Its investors pitched bailout plans, seeking help from what a Solyndra executive referred to as the “Bank of Washington” — his apparent term for U.S. taxpayers...

(ed. Emphasis added)

Senator Sherod Brown is an idiot...

2011-11-29T12:55:00.006-05:00

...for seeking to change the 1st Amendment with his co-sponsorship of S.J.RES.29 -- Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to contributions and expenditures intended to affect elections:

Section 1. Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of
money and in kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including
through setting limits on--
(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office; and
(2) the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition
to such candidates.
Mr. Brown needs to look no further than the most recent gubernatorial election in New Jersey for evidence that money does not necessarily determine the outcome of an election (for your 411 Senator...Corzine lost):

Corzine outspending Christie nearly 3-1, most of it from his own fortune

Gov. Jon Corzine has raised $24.1 million and spent $23.6 million
on the general election campaign so far, according to 11-day pre-election
reports filed with the Election Law Enforcement Commission.

Of Corzine's total raised, $22.6 million is from his own pocket.

Republican gubernatorial Christopher Christie has maxed out on matching funds, raising a
total of $11.7 million and spending $8.8 million, while independent Christopher
Daggett has raised $1.3 million and spent $1.2 million.

Christie has the most cash on hand, at $3.6 million. That sum will not grow,
however, since Christie is bound by a cap on campaign funds that Corzine, who
does not participate in the public financing program, is not. Daggett has
$292,495 on hand and Corzine has $412,410...

Al Gore Call Your Office

2011-11-26T18:38:00.003-05:00

ScienceDaily: Climate Sensitivity to Carbon Dioxide More Limited Than Extreme Projections, Research Shows:

A new study suggests that the rate of global warming from doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less than the most dire estimates of some previous studies -- and, in fact, may be less severe than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.

Authors of the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation's Paleoclimate Program and published online this week in the journal Science, say that global warming is real and that increases in atmospheric CO2 will have multiple serious impacts.

However, the most Draconian projections of temperature increases from the doubling of CO2 are unlikely...

Occupy Wall Street and Freeloading

2011-11-25T11:37:00.010-05:00

All, stress ALL, human behavior can be looked at through the lens of the famed biologist D'Arcy Thompson's (1860-1948) assertion:

[E]verything is the way it is because it got that way.

And so it is with the universal dynamic of freeloading/cheating.

Scientists are now theorizing that the developement of multi-cellular life may have been in part a response to freeloading.

Freeloading exists becuase it has had evolutionary utility, but research is revealing that cooperation and the Golden Rule offer better long-term outcomes.

Unfortunately, because of freeloading's short-term benefits, it persists as a strategy for many as evidenced by the political message shared by this Occupy Wall Street participant (HT: The PJ Tatler):

Note that this is not a casual musing the protestor is expressing. It took thought and effort to produce his sign.

While freeloaders are normally kept in check (must be kept in check for society to function over the long run), we also have to be mindful that they can also be quite obstinate about their freeloading ways:

Wall Street Journal: Revenge of the Freeloaders
Study Finds Culture Influences Reaction To Reward, Rebuke

We all bristle at people who put themselves ahead of the common good, whether it is by evading taxes, shirking military service, cheating on bus fares or littering. Many of us will go out of our way to shame, shun or otherwise punish them, researchers have shown. That's how we foster a community that benefits everyone, even at some cost to ourselves.

Economists analyzing ingredients of the social glue that holds us all together wonder whether that public spirit of rebuke and reward is an innate human value or a byproduct of the particular society in which we live. Until recently, however, they rarely have reached across cultural boundaries to compare how people in disparate communities actually weigh private gain against public good.

In the most sweeping global study yet of cooperation, a team of experimental economists tested university students in 15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to them when they don't. The European research team discovered startling differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out for antisocial behavior.

In some countries, researchers found, almost no good turn went unpunished. "What kept popping up is this element of retaliation," said economist Benedikt Herrmann at the U.K.'s University of Nottingham, who reported the experiment this past March in Science. "It took us by surprise."..

In some countries, researchers found, almost no good turn went unpunished. "What kept popping up is this element of retaliation," said economist Benedikt Herrmann at the U.K.'s University of Nottingham, who reported the experiment this past March in Science. "It took us by surprise."

Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone's benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand.

To explore cooperation across cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in 16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.

The volunteers played in anonymous groups of four. Each player started with 20 tokens that could be redeemed for cash after 10 rounds. Players could contribute tokens to a common account or keep them all to themselves.

After each round, the pooled funds paid a dividend shared equally by all, even those who didn't contribute. Previous research shows that a single selfish individual riding on the generosity of others can so irritate other players that contributions soon drop to nothing.

Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone's benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand.

To explore cooperation across cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in 16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.

The volunteers played in anonymous groups of four. Each player started with 20 tokens that could be redeemed for cash after 10 rounds. Players could contribute tokens to a common account or keep them all to themselves.

After each round, the pooled funds paid a dividend shared equally by all, even those who didn't contribute. Previous research shows that a single selfish individual riding on the generosity of others can so irritate other players that contributions soon drop to nothing.

That changes when players can identify and punish those who don't contribute (in this case, by deducting points that can quickly add up to serious money). Once such peer pressure comes into play, everyone -- including the shamed freeloader -- starts to chip in.

"Freeloaders are disliked everywhere," said study co-author Simon Gachter, who studies economic decision-making at Nottingham. "Cooperation always breaks down if people can't punish."

The students behaved the same way in all 16 cities until given the chance to punish those taking a free ride on the shared investment. Punishment was done anonymously, and it cost one token to discipline another player.

Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players -- and to give up a token themselves to do it.

"They didn't believe they did anything wrong," said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame...

Moral Psychology and Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-21T20:48:00.002-05:00

This presentation by Jonathan Haidt will help put the Occupy Wall Street movement in perspective:

O! The Hypocrisy

2011-10-09T04:21:00.008-05:00

Hypocrisy is the overarching theme found between the lines in the New York Times' Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen:

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document...

...The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat...

This authorization for the killing was done by the same person that scolded the Bush adminstration and his colleagues (both Republicans and Democrats) so derisively as a Senator during a radio interview:

Diane Rehm: ...Earlier this week the President signed into law the Military Commissions Act; the new law that gives the President quite far reaching authority on the war on terror. You voted against the measure. Tell us why.

Sen. Obama: I think it was a sloppy piece of legislation. It was rushed in part to match the election schedule. And had we stepped back and thought this through there was a way of making sure that the military could do it's job in charging and trying those persons who seek to do us harm, but do so in a context was consistent with our core constitutional principles. This wasn't that bill.

One of the most disturbing aspect of the legislation was the elimination for the first time in our history of the principle of Habeas Corpus. And those that are familiar with our jurisprudence know that Habeas Corpus predates the American Revolution; it's a principle going back to the 13th Century.

And the basic principle is one that should be so obvious to people that I think all of us take it for granted. That is, if the government grabs you and hauls you into custody they have an obligation to charge you and allow you to answer those charges. And this piece of legislation said for the first time that it is permisible for this adminstration or the military to capture people and not give them that basic hearing in court...

This authorization to kill Anwar al-Awlaki doubles-down on the hypocrisy previously detailed in the New York Times' Obama Upholds Detainee Policy in Afghanistan:

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistanhave no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team...

What's playing out in Obama's policy is the dynamic previously covered in Immune Systems Provide a Framework for Developing Principles on the Use of Interrogation Techniques:

...The science of immune systems, Immunology, and Evolution offer us billions of years of 'best practices' in dealing with deadly threats that can be translated to the moral challenges our society faces in the Global War on Terror.

In principle, an immune system's mechanism works to protect an organism by attacking pathogens that would do it harm. White blood cells or leukocytes are constantly at work defending against harmful microbes in the body. The fevers we experience when our bodies get the flu, a 'high-level attack' and a disease that takes 250,000 to 500,000 humans annually, are part of the overall defenses the immune system utilizes. Because the body doesn't operate properly in a fever's high temperatures, it maintains a normal temperature when it is simply experiencing 'low-level attacks', like the germs that infect a small wound on your hand.

Unfortunately, the immune system's protection comes at a price; it's a two-edged sword with built-in imperfections. Sometimes it attacks the very organism it's trying to defend. This condition is called Autoimmunity. Rheumatology is one branch of medicine that treats one of these imperfections.

Billions of years of Evolution have given us a mechanism that precariously balances aggressive actions with unintended consequences. We must remind ourselves that the attack-and-defend interplay between pathogens and immune systems is not a steady-state system, but is co-evolving. One of the more fascinating adaptations is the process of active immunity and its production of antibodies. With active immunity, an immune system is constantly re-programming itself in response to the diseases/attacks it has survived...

Must See Reality TV

2011-09-28T14:49:00.003-05:00

Tired of Jersey Shore, Real Housewives and want to see a documentary that will move your soul? Then you have until October 27, 2011 to see online the fabulous, heartbreaking story captured in 'Last Train Home':

Watch the full episode. See more POV.

Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year in the world’s largest human migration. Last Train Home takes viewers on a heart-stopping journey with the Zhangs, a couple who left infant children behind for factory jobs 16 years ago, hoping their wages would lift their children to a better life. They return to a family growing distant and a daughter longing to leave school for unskilled work. As the Zhangs navigate their new world, Last Train Home paints a rich, human portrait of China’s rush to economic development. An EyeSteelFilm production in association with ITVS International. A co-presentation with the Center for Asian American Media. An Official Selection of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Winner of Best Feature-Length Documentary Award, 2009 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. (90 minutes)

Boehner's Bone-Headed Move

2011-09-24T11:53:00.002-05:00

Boehner to Rangle then:

Boehner to Rangel: Give Up the Gavel

“...as chairman of the powerful House committee, entrusted with the responsibility of writing the tax laws that affect every law-abiding American citizen, you, along with the Speaker and other leaders of the majority party, have an obligation to help set the pace when it comes to standards of official conduct.”

Boehner to Rangle now:

Censure briefly forgotten as House leaders honor Rep. Charles Rangel

House leaders honored Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y) with an official Capitol portrait Thursday, sweeping aside two years of scandal and a formal rebuke to recognize a man who rose from humble beginnings to become a congressional pioneer.

As a packed committee room full of hometown supporters and congressional allies serenaded Rangel with chants of “Charlie, Charlie,” it seemed as though the ethical firestorm that led to a House censure had been briefly forgotten.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) lauded his “long and highly decorated service,” joking that the two men were “in some ways cut from the same cloth” because they shared “a particular concern about our appearance.” Boehner, who pushed for Rangel to resign as the first African-American chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, described him as a friend and said that despite their differences, they spoke nearly every day on the House floor...

None of Your Business, Literally,....

2011-09-22T22:15:00.006-05:00

...if you're not a shareholder.

This should be the answer to Joseph's snarky questioning of Chevron's profits in this commercial:

'Synthetic' Chromosome Permits Rapid, On-Demand 'Evolution' of Yeast

2011-09-17T11:21:00.000-05:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2011) — In the quest to understand genomes -- how they're built, how they're organized and what makes them work -- a team of Johns Hopkins researchers has engineered from scratch a computer-designed yeast chromosome and incorporated into their creation a new system that lets scientists intentionally rearrange the yeast's genetic material...

Scientists Discover 'Hidden' Code in DNA Evolves More Rapidly Than Genetic Code

2011-09-17T10:56:00.000-05:00

Just when we thought we had it all figured out:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2011) — A "hidden" code linked to the DNA of plants allows them to develop and pass down new biological traits far more rapidly than previously thought, according to the findings of a groundbreaking study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies...

Scientists Take First Step Towards Creating 'Inorganic Life'

2011-09-17T10:31:00.001-05:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2011) — Scientists at the University of Glasgow say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'...

Spectacular Taughannock Falls

2011-09-09T11:36:00.007-05:00

Central New York was hit hard by the recent rains that came through on Wednesday. Even Cornell University, which sits high on a hill, had a rare closing.

Here's some fascinating videos of Taughannock Falls, a few miles north of Ithaca, which normally has a small to medium size cataract (picture is from link above for comparison):

Brent Spence Bridge Referenced in President's Speech to Congress

2011-09-09T10:33:00.002-05:00

President Obama referenced the Brent Spence Bridge while making his rhetorical arguments for the Americans Jobs Act to Congress last night:

...There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America...

As previously noted, $32 billion a year in gasoline taxes are already collected for infrastructure projects like this.

Theoria

2011-09-08T05:14:00.005-05:00

A wild and cunning seahorse, , named Query
Of neural nets she was quite leery

I coaxed her out of the Depths of Eerie
Into the shoals of the Bay of Theory

She put up a fuss that left her bleary
To say nothing of the netter; very weary

No longer dreary, but oh so cheery,
Query is now my little deary

Social Security: Ours is not to reason why...

2011-09-08T04:49:00.004-05:00

...Ours is but to pay and die (i.e., early so as not to topple the inverted pyramid):

Social Security is Not a Ponzi Scheme, Mr. Perry:

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It is much worse.

Here are three reasons why:

One, a Ponzi scheme collects money from new investors and uses it to pay previous investors—minus a fee. But Social Security collects money from new investors, uses some of it to pay previous investors, and spends the surplus on programs for politically favored groups—minus the cost of supporting a massive bureaucracy. Over the years, trillions of dollars have been spent on these groups and bureaucrats.

Two, participation in Ponzi schemes is voluntary. Not so with Social Security. The government automatically withholds payroll taxes and “invests” them for you.

Three: When a Ponzi scheme can’t con new investors in sufficient numbers to pay the previous investors, it collapses. But when Social Security runs low on investors—also called poor working stiffs—it raises taxes. Indeed, Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner points out,

Social Security taxes have been raised some 40 times since the program began. The initial Social Security tax was 2 percent (split between the employer and employee), capped at $3,000 of earnings. That made for a maximum tax of $60. Today, the tax is 12.4 percent, capped at $106,800, for a maximum tax of $13,234. Even adjusting for inflation, that represents more than an 800 percent increase.

And given that the worker-to-retiree ratio is expected to fall from 3-1 today to 2-1 in 2030 (down from 16-1 in 1950) these taxes will only go up unless the government decides to kick retirees in their dentures and slash benefits.

Rick Perry should stop soft-peddling the issue and tell it like it is.

Journalistic Malpractice: Meet the Press conveniently doesn't ask Maxine Waters about "...we're going to tax them out of business."

2011-09-05T10:42:00.005-05:00

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who's being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, was on Meet the Press (transcript) yesterday where she promoted her public policy for " a jobs program of a trillion dollars or more."

Host David Gregory apparently didn't see it fit to ask her about her recently articulated public policy position:

If [banks] don't come up with loan modifications and keep people in their homes that they've worked so hard for, we're going to tax them out of business.

That's right up there with her threat to an oil company executive:

[T]his 'liberal will be all about 'socialize' [sic]...er, ah ... basically, ... about the government taking over and running your companies!"

What Makes for a Good Economist?

2011-09-02T15:57:00.002-05:00

From Fredric Bastiat's (1801-1850) What is Seen and What is not Seen:

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil...

Science News: Biological 'Computer' Destroys Cancer Cells: Diagnostic Network Incorporated Into Human Cells

2011-09-02T10:52:00.002-05:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2011) — Researchers led by ETH professor Yaakov Benenson and MIT professor Ron Weiss have successfully incorporated a diagnostic biological "computer" network in human cells. This network recognizes certain cancer cells using logic combinations of five cancer-specific molecular factors, triggering cancer cells destruction....

Lest We Forget, Beslan's 7th Anniversary

2011-09-01T00:01:00.002-05:00

As 9/11 comes upon us, we should also remember that the town of Beslan suffered an inhumane tragedy as well just 7 years ago.

All Hat, No Cattle

2011-08-25T11:00:00.001-05:00

Journalist, 'Heel' Thyself

2011-08-17T12:04:00.028-05:00

It’s encouraging that the host of the eponymously named Diane Rehm Show will now be applying a tough journalistic standard to politicans.

On her August 15, 2011 show entitled Emerging Field of GOP Presidential Candidates (transcript and audio at link), Ms. Rehm shared her thoughts on how the press (and presumably, she includes herself) should challenge politicians “to make sure that people hear the full story and not just what candidates tell us.”

Consider the following from the transcript where Ms. Rehm and her guests were discussing the recently announced candidacy of Rick Perry (emphasis added):

...DUNHAM 10:34:23
So, again, there are a lot reasons why Texas has boomed that don't directly have to do with Rick Perry.

REHM 10:34:29
There is another question -- 23.8 percent of Texans did not have health insurance in 2009. Has that percentage changed?

DUNHAM 10:34:44
I think it's gone up slightly. But Texas is close to the bottom or the top for uninsured people. It was before Perry became governor. It is now. It's a fair question to raise.

REHM 10:34:56
Texas has the second highest percentage of children without health insurance.

DUNHAM 10:35:05
That's correct. And health insurance is a big issue for him, Obamacare.

REHM 10:35:09
Texas also lags the rest to the nation badly in high school graduation rates?

DUNHAM 10:35:18
Yeah, I think you could have your list where Texas is at the top of all the good things and the bad things. You're absolutely right.

WALTER 10:35:24
You know, the other issue, though, is when you think about where the economy is right now and how people feel about the economy. When only 8 percent of Americans right now in Gallup polling say they feel that the economy is excellent or good, when only 17 percent think -- they think the economy is getting better, some of those issues that you raise, Diane, don't necessary go to the top of the concern list for a lot of voters.

WALTER 10:35:45
All they're going to hear at some point is, this guy created jobs in Texas. And they want to hear about jobs, and they want to hear about the economy. And if Perry does his job right, he finds a way to keep that focus unrelenting on that.

REHM 10:36:00
But that's where I feel the press needs to make the point clearly, that, for example, the average wage of those Texas' jobs is around $7 an hour. I don't think the press can simply go along with what Gov. Perry has to say and swallow it whole, David Keene.

KEENE 10:36:29
Well, the press should always do that, but the narrative...

REHM 10:36:31
Yeah, right.

KEENE10:36:32
The narrative that is -- that surrounds Rick Perry's persona as being the governor of the state that's producing a lot of jobs, and -- partly worth a mention -- but jobs are being driven there by places like California. But no matter where you're governor of, you can find negative things and positive things. All in all, he's got a pretty good narrative.

KEENE 10:36:52
But when you look at the discussion that we're now having and the questions of the last few minutes and with what's happened in Iowa, you get down to what the general election is going to be about. It's going to be about these issues, about the size and the role of the government, whether we should be worried about the deficit or whether we should be spending more money.

KEENE 10:37:11
And it's really a race in which both parties are all in because both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have staked out a very clear position on the issue of most -- of concern to most Americans. And that's going to determine how this race ultimately ends.

REHM 10:37:27
I just want to make sure that people hear the full story and not just what candidates tell us. David Keene is former chair of The American Conservative Union...

Ms. Rehm must have learned her lesson after the debacle that is now known as the press coverage of then candidate Barack Obama and her role (or as will be seen shortly, roll) in it. Here’s some background for those that haven’t been privy to Ms. Rehm’s transformation.

On October 20, 2006, Ms. Rehm fawningly interviewed then Senator Obama (link to audio) on his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ and asked the following question (emphasis added) (Link to original blog post...Obama wasn't a declared candidate on October 20, 2006 (he declares Februrary 10, 2007), but the Time Magazine cover story for that week (note: cover date is one week ahead) shows the MSM were pushing the "Why-Barack-Obama-Could-Be-The-Next-President" meme well before that time.):

Diane Rehm:

...Earlier this week the President [Bush] signed into law the Military Commissions Act; the new law that gives the President quite far reaching authority on the war on terror. You voted against the measure. Tell us why.

Sen. Obama:

I think it was a sloppy piece of legislation. It was rushed in part to match the election schedule. And had we stepped back and thought this through there was a way of making sure that the military could do it's job in charging and trying those persons who seek to do us harm, but do so in a context that was consistent with our core constitutional principles. This wasn't that bill.

One of the most disturbing aspect of the legislation was the elimination for the first time in our history of the principle of Habeas Corpus. And those that are familiar with our jurisprudence know that Habeas Corpus predates the American Revolution; it's a principle going back to the 13th Century.

And the basic principle is one that should be so obvious to people that I think all of us take it for granted. That is, if the government grabs you and hauls you into custody they have an obligation to charge you and allow you to answer those charges. And this piece of legislation said for the first time that it is permisible for this adminstration or the military to capture people and not give them that basic hearing in court...

Ms. Rehm could have challenged the Harvard Law School grad at that time and pointed out that none other than the Civil War President that came from the same state then Senator Obama was representing, Abraham Lincoln, suspended Habeas Corpus. Certainly, with her new found zeal for questioning political candidates, and given the chance again, Ms. Rehm would not "simply go along with what [Obama] has to say and swallow it whole".

What really must have shocked Ms. Rehm and turned her into a reformed ‘question what the candidate is telling us with critical thinking’ journalist was the February 21, 2009 New York Times article entitled ‘Obama Upholds Detainee Policy in Afghanistan’. From the article:

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistanhave no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.

In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by prisoners at the United States Air Force base at Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital. The Obama team determined that the Bush policy was correct: such prisoners cannot sue for their release.

“Having considered the matter, the government adheres to its previously articulated position,” wrote Michael F. Hertz, acting assistant attorney general.

The closely watched case is a habeas corpus lawsuit on behalf of several prisoners who have been indefinitely detained for years without trial. The detainees argue that they are not enemy combatants, and they want a judge to review the evidence against them and order the military to release them.

The Bush administration had argued that federal courts have no jurisdiction to hear such a case because the prisoners are noncitizens being held in the course of military operations outside the United States.

The Obama team was required to take a stand on whether those arguments were correct because a federal district judge, John D. Bates, asked the new government whether it wanted to alter that position.

The Obama administration’s decision was generally expected among legal specialists. But it was a blow to human rights lawyers who have challenged the Bush administration’s policy of indefinitely detaining “enemy combatants” without trials…

Let’s ‘audaciously hope’ that Ms. Rehm applies her ‘better-late-than-never’, ‘get tough journalistic analysis’ philosophy consistenly from here on out.

Senator Brown Wants New Infrastructure Bank...

2011-08-10T11:52:00.004-05:00

...for road projects like the Brent Spence Bridge. Isn't that what the $32 Billion in federal gasoline taxes collected every year was supposed to be used for?

Bumper Sticker

2011-08-09T10:13:00.003-05:00

Speaking Truth to Power

2011-08-07T10:45:00.003-05:00

The Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule

2011-07-04T00:01:00.007-05:00

It is self-interest and cooperation reconciled by the Golden Rule that assure Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; not unalienable rights endowed by a super-natural creator.

This July 4th holiday marks the 235th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and relied on “the Laws of Nature” to make the now famous and familiar philosophical assertion for the founding of our nation:

...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

Jefferson was strongly influenced by the Age of Enlightenment and critical thinking is a byproduct of that time frame. Questioning assumptions serves as a lantern in the confusing darkness. Our ancestors may have accurately navigated by the moving stars in the night sky, but their safe arrival at a destination did not make the assumption of the geocentric model of the Universe correct.

History is full of examples of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is a philosophy that advocates the right thing, but for the wrong reason as scientific critical thinking is now revealing.

A declaration and philosophy that appeals to “the Laws of Nature” must be bound to what is learned about those laws when reasoning is applied. One can’t have it both ways; i.e., make the argument on natural and supernatural reasoning.

The Big Bang Theory explanation of the Universe was derived through naturalistic reasoning. Foundational to the theory is that ever-so-slight differences (anisotropy) in the early Universe resulted, through both cosmological and biological Evolution, in the variety we now experience in our lives. Biological Evolution resulted in both self-interest and cooperative survival strategies which in turn gave us the differences between and within species. The Evolutionary process of differentiation is so fundamental that it even manifests itself at the simple molecular level.

Contrary to Jefferson's assertion, individual humans are not equal. Our use of the adjective 'individual' supports this in our language. Moreover, from a biological persepective, they are unique; their genes molded by the billions of years of interplay with their environment utilizing both self-interest and cooperative strategies; at the multi-cellular and multi-organism levels. Even identical twins are different when one looks at them through the lens of epigenetics.

Complex, multi-human organizations (tribes, religion, government, friendships, clubs, gangs, coalitions, Democrats, Republicans, Code Pink, Tea party,…) have at their foundation the reconciling of self-interest strategies with cooperative strategies. Nature has an organizational principle that maximizes the self-interest and cooperative in all of us. It’s the Golden Rule; a principle that can be analyzed and verified using the mathematics provided by Game Theory.

It is this simple natural dynamic, treat others as you want to be treated, that offers “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. As our forefathers knew, and is captured in the image of Lady Justice with her sword at the ready to assure fairness, it is sometimes not enough to assert life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It must ultimately be defended by force from those that would deny it.

PBS NewsHour report on 'Reckless Endagerment'

2011-07-01T21:27:00.003-05:00

Protecting Its Fannie: How Mortgage Giant Primed the Bubble, Covered Its Assets:

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

...In the early '90s, when Congress was writing the legislation that would have a bearing on Fannie Mae's regulator, Barney Frank was really very aggressively on the attack.

Whenever anyone would walk onto Capitol Hill and say, we should be careful about safety and soundness, let's make sure the regulator is tough, let's make sure that capital requirements are high, Barney Frank would be in there hectoring, shouting, "We don't have a safety and soundness problem. We should care more about housing."...

Senator Brown Supported Wasteful Coin Dollar Program

2011-06-28T09:34:00.004-05:00

NPR's story, $1 Billion That Nobody Wants, details a ill-conceived program voted on by Senator Brown that has to date resulted in $300 million of waste.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation should have, "decrease[d] direct spending by $34 million over the 2006-2015 period", but for the small detail that noone wants to carry around heavy dollar coins to conduct their transactions with. Adding injury to insult, the legislation was written in a way that requires the U.S. Mint to keep manufacturing the coins even though there's no demand for them.

How's this for an idea, we ship the $1 billion in coins over to China and reduce our debt of almost $900 billion.

What’s in it for U.S.?: The Limited Government Case against Gay Marriage

2011-06-25T08:16:00.002-05:00

(Reposted in light of the recent vote in New York State.)

While many cite cultural and religious reasons to oppose gay marriage, one doesn't need to resort to pathos and ethos-based arguments when formulating our public policy on marriage in general. A simple limited government philosophy offers the appropriate perspective.

The human condition is analog not digital. As in the non-human animal world, human sexuality is found along a spectrum of relationships. From a biological perspective and without scientific intervention, procreation in humans requires an individual male and an individual female.

Before considering the question of gay marriage, a more fundamental question should be considered: Why marriage at all? In the United States, marriage is a tri-party legal agreement. The first two parties, husband and wife, are obvious. The third party is the state/community that acknowledges a marriage. Male and female couples petition the state –and more generally, their community– to recognize their marriage. If it was just a simple relationship amongst consenting adults, the community would have no need –and more importantly no business– acknowledging the relationship.

However, marriage is a relationship that imposes responsibilities on the community and that’s why the state is involved in its recognition and definition; as in detailing that only two (not more) individuals of the opposite sex will be recognized in a marriage. Married couples get legal tax and inheritance status. Male-female couples asking the state to recognize their marriage are also asking the state to address the care of their biological children if the couples are incapable of doing so.

What does the community get in return for consideration of this ‘special’ status? It is rejuvenated –by the only relationship that can procreate: a male-female relationship– and benefits from responsibly raised children in a marriage. Because of the corrosive effects to the community of infidelity, the community acknowledges only monogamous marriages. This shared responsibility amongst all the parties (husband, wife, community) is the limited government rationale for marriage as a legal construct.

Gay couples asking the community to recognize their relationships have a responsibility to address the question: ‘In return for the community’s recognition, what will you do for the state that justifies more government?’. They may counter that some gay couples have children and that their care benefits the community. But these children are not, and can not be, the natural offspring of a gay marriage. They are the shared responsibility of the biological parents and the state. The existing legal constructs are sufficient to address the children’s and community’s interests.

The state/community will be a party to any marriage and therefore has every right to say which marriages it will recognize. The gay couples seeking recognition must make their case for community involvement in their relationship when the sine qua non condition of biological procreation does not exist and there are sufficient laws to deal with any children in a gay relationship. Until the argument for an expansion of government is made, the basic principle of limited government, the minimal amount of laws our society needs to function, should prevail.

ScienceDaily: Physicists Store Antimatter Atoms for 1,000 Seconds -- And Still Counting

2011-06-06T13:49:00.002-05:00

How cool is this?

ScienceDaily (June 5, 2011) — The ALPHA Collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has created and stored a total of 309 antihydrogen atoms, some for up to 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes), with an indication of much longer storage time as well.

ALPHA announced in November, 2010, that they had succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for the first time ever, having captured 38 atoms of antihydrogen and storing each for a sixth of a second. In the weeks following, ALPHA continued to collect anti-atoms and hold them for longer and longer times.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, including Joel Fajans and Jonathan Wurtele of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD), both UC Berkeley physics professors, are members of the ALPHA Collaboration.

Says Fajans, "Perhaps the most important aspect of this result is that after just one second these antihydrogen atoms had surely already decayed to ground state. These were likely the first ground state anti-atoms ever made." Since almost all precision measurements require atoms in the ground state, ALPHA's achievement opens a path to new experiments with antimatter.

How long before we see a new energy source, ala an antimatter engine?

Everything You Need to Know About How NOT to be Charitarble You can Learn from Sesame Street

2011-06-04T12:28:00.008-05:00

Here's a documented example of misplaced charity propaganda and unintentional irony produced by none other than 'Seasame Street'. Unfortunately, insult is added to intellectual injury because our taxes, in part, fund 'Seasame Street'.

Last night, the PBS News Hour showcased a report by economics correspondent Paul Solman entitled, 'Sesame Street' Tells You How to Get to Sunnier Days Financially.

Mr. Solman does a good job of covering the science and psychology of delayed gratification using a lesson Elmo is learning on savings as a backdrop. Elmo sets out to save $5 for a 'stupendous ball' and eventually meets his goal. But at the very moment when his dream is to be realized, along comes Cookie Monster 'belly aching' that he's hungry for a cookie. ("Me no have cookie. Me really want cookie.")

Having just heard all about the virtues of savings one would expect Elmo to turn to his friend and say, 'Oh Cookie, I just learned a lesson...If you really want something you can save your money and get what you want. Maybe you can do the same thing.'

Instead, Elmo gives Cookie Monster one of his hard earned dollars so that he can go off and get his cookie. (BTW Sesame Street, cookies aren't on the new food circle...just saying.) Moreover, the adult in the scene that just witnessed Elmo's 'charity' comes over and says, "Hey, Elmo, that was really a nice thing you did." A heavy, psychologically infused message from an authority figure ironically juxtaposed with all the 'science of the mind' investigations covered in the report.

'Seasame Street' missed a huge opportunity to promote responsible charity (help those that are in the process of helping themselves...ala the social safety net) instead of charity that might be abused and turned into a hammock by freeloaders in our society.

In Memoriam

2011-05-30T11:49:00.003-05:00

Keith Matthew "Matt" Maupin, thank you for your service.

Powerful Meme

2011-05-30T11:44:00.002-05:00

HT: The PJ Tatler

Senator Brown, you should be "ashamed" of yourself...

2011-04-27T09:31:00.007-05:00

...unless you're prepared to call out your fellow Democrats in Massachusetts.

During the consideration of Senate Bill 5 in Ohio, our senior Senator Brown called out the "conservative politicians in Columbus" for the policy approach to fiscal responsibility (via WKBN.com in Youngstown, Ohio (emphasis added)):

Brown: Lawmakers Behind SB5 'Should Be Ashamed'

Twice this week, the Statehouse in Columbus has been filled with supporters on both sides of Senate Bill 5, which would eliminate collective bargaining for public employees.

Many Republicans and Tea Party people are for the bill, while the unions are against it.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-OH, doesn't think it's right that every time something goes wrong the workers are blamed. If governor, Brown said he'd veto the bill.

"I just can't believe all these conservative politicians in Columbus that all get state health insurance and all get these benefits that they're taking collective bargaining rights from policemen and women, from firefighters from teachers from nurses," said Brown. "They should be ashamed of themselves."

Brown added that the reason there's a strong middle class in the United State is because of the to right unionize and bargain collectively.

It should lead one to wonder what Senator Brown will have to say now that Democrats in Massachusetts, whom he is simpatico with, are taking the exact same policy approach to their fiscal challenges (via the Boston Globe):

House votes to restrict unions
Measure would curb bargaining on health care

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

Unions fought hard to stop the bill, launching a radio ad that assailed the plan and warning legislators that if they voted for the measure, they could lose their union backing in the next election. After the vote, labor leaders accused House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo and other Democrats of turning their backs on public employees...

Perspective on the President's Current Budget

2011-04-14T09:56:00.003-05:00

Via a Wall Street Journal Editorial analyzing the President's Speech yesterday (strong emphasis added):

...Under the Obama tax plan, the Bush rates would be repealed for the top brackets. Yet the "cost" of extending all the Bush rates in 2011 over 10 years was about $3.7 trillion. Some $3 trillion of that was for everything but the top brackets—and Mr. Obama says he wants to extend those rates forever. According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn't cover Mr. Obama's deficit for this year...

Juxtaposition 'Backfire'

2011-01-29T13:15:00.009-05:00

Yeah, yeah 'Backfire' is not PC these days but it's in keeping with the theme (click on images to enlarge):

HT: Wizbang

Repost: What’s in it for U.S.?: The Limited Government Case against Gay Marriage

2010-08-04T20:09:00.004-05:00

With the recent ruling in California on Proposition 8, this post from last Fall is appropriate to re-vist:

Yesterday evening, President Obama vowed repeal –again– of the Defense of Marriage Act. While many cite cultural and religious reasons to oppose gay marriage, one doesn't need to resort to pathos and ethos-based arguments when formulating our public policy on marriage in general. A simple limited government philosophy offers the appropriate perspective.

The human condition is analog not digital. As in the non-human animal world, human sexuality is found along a spectrum of relationships. From a biological perspective and without scientific intervention, procreation in humans requires an individual male and an individual female.

Before considering the question of gay marriage, a more fundamental question should be considered: Why marriage at all? In the United States, marriage is a tri-party legal agreement. The first two parties, husband and wife, are obvious. The third party is the state/community that acknowledges a marriage. Male and female couples petition the state –and more generally, their community– to recognize their marriage. If it was just a simple relationship amongst consenting adults, the community would have no need –and more importantly no business– acknowledging the relationship.

However, marriage is a relationship that imposes responsibilities on the community and that’s why the state is involved in its recognition and definition; as in detailing that only two (not more) individuals of the opposite sex will be recognized in a marriage. Married couples get legal tax and inheritance status. Male-female couples asking the state to recognize their marriage are also asking the state to address the care of their biological children if the couples are incapable of doing so.

What does the community get in return for consideration of this ‘special’ status? It is rejuvenated –by the only relationship that can procreate: a male-female relationship– and benefits from responsibly raised children in a marriage. Because of the corrosive effects to the community of infidelity, the community acknowledges only monogamous marriages. This shared responsibility amongst all the parties (husband, wife, community) is the limited government rationale for marriage as a legal construct.

Gay couples asking the community to recognize their relationships have a responsibility to address the question: ‘In return for the community’s recognition, what will you do for the state that justifies more government?’. They may counter that some gay couples have children and that their care benefits the community. But these children are not, and can not be, the natural offspring of a gay marriage. They are the shared responsibility of the biological parents and the state. The existing legal constructs are sufficient to address the children’s and community’s interests.

The state/community will be a party to any marriage and therefore has every right to say which marriages it will recognize. The gay couples seeking recognition must make their case for community involvement in their relationship when the sine qua non condition of biological procreation does not exist and there are sufficient laws to deal with any children in a gay relationship. Until the argument for an expansion of government is made, the basic principle of limited government, the minimal amount of laws our society needs to function, should prevail.

Science News: Peptides May Hold 'Missing Link' to Life

2010-05-07T15:29:00.002-05:00

ScienceDaily (May 7, 2010) — Emory scientists have discovered that simple peptides can organize into bi-layer membranes. The finding suggests a "missing link" between the pre-biotic Earth's chemical inventory and the organizational scaffolding essential to life.

"We've shown that peptides can form the kind of membranes needed to create long-range order," says chemistry graduate student Seth Childers, lead author of the paper recently published by the German Chemical Society's Angewandte Chemie. "What's also interesting is that these peptide membranes may have the potential to function in a complex way, like a protein."...

Related:

Science Sunday Bonus: Research on possible origins of primitive cells
Structure of 450 million year old protein reveals evolution's steps details new research from the August 17th, 2007 journal Science.
Discover Magazine (Nov. 1995): First Cell:

How Sweet It Is

2010-03-21T16:36:00.002-05:00

Cornell is now the lowest-seeded team remaining in the tournament.

Science News: Biology May Not Be So Complex After All, Physicist Finds

2010-03-21T14:41:00.002-05:00

ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2010) :

Centuries ago, scientists began reducing the physics of the universe into a few, key laws described by a handful of parameters. Such simple descriptions have remained elusive for complex biological systems -- until now.

Emory biophysicist Ilya Nemenman has identified parameters for several biochemical networks that distill the entire behavior of these systems into simple equivalent dynamics. The discovery may hold the potential to streamline the development of drugs and diagnostic tools, by simplifying the research models.

The resulting paper, now available online, will be published in the March issue of Physical Biology.

"It appears that the details of the complexity of these biological systems don't matter, as long as some aggregate property, which we've calculated, remains the same," says Nemenman, associate professor of physics and biology. He conducted the analysis with Golan Bel and Brian Munsky of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The simplicity of the discovery makes it "a beautiful result," Nemenman says. "We hope that this theoretical finding will also have practical applications."

He cites the air molecules moving about his office: "All of the crazy interactions of these molecules hitting each other boils down to a simple behavior: An ideal gas law. You could take the painstaking route of studying the dynamics of every molecule, or you could simply measure the temperature, volume and pressure of the air in the room. The second method is clearly easier, and it gives you just as much information."

Nemenman wanted to find similar parameters for the incredibly complex dynamics of cellular networks, involving hundreds, or even thousands, of variables among different interacting molecules. Among the key questions: What determines which features in these networks are relevant? And if they have simple equivalent dynamics, did nature choose to make them so complex in order to fulfill a specific biological function? Or is the unnecessary complexity a "fossil record" of the evolutionary heritage?

For the Physical Biology paper, Nemenman and co-authors investigated these questions in the context of a kinetic proofreading (KPR) scheme.

KPR is the mechanism a cell uses for optimal quality control as it makes protein. KPR was predicted during the 1970s and it applies to most cellular assembly processes. It involves hundreds of steps, and each step may have different parameters.

Nemenman and his colleagues wondered if the KPR scheme could be described more simply. "Our calculations confirmed that there is, in fact, a key aggregate rate," he says. "The whole behavior of the system boils down to just one parameter."..

Sign of the Times

2010-02-18T19:55:00.002-05:00

When is the last time you saw an Obama bumper sticker?

Senator Sherrod Brown: Hypocrisy Writ Large Part 2: For Wall Street Bonuses Before He was Against Them

2010-02-16T11:30:00.003-05:00

Last year, Senator Brown was called out for his hypocrisy on Wall Street Bonuses; being for the bonuses before he was against them.

A recent press release shows that the Brown is playing 'the populist' and doubling down on the the deceit:

Brown Announces Bill to Tax Wall Street Bonuses to Help Main Street Businesses

Bill Would Tax Bonuses at Companies Receiving TARP Funds from Taxpayers to Help Fund Small Business Lending Program

February 11, 2010

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced a new bill today that would tax bonuses given to executives at firms that received help from U.S. taxpayers in order to fund loans for small businesses. Brown’s bill would use revenues generated from taxing bonuses at firms who received assistance through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help small businesses expand operations and hire new workers.

“It’s time for Wall Street to return the favor to Main Street,” Brown said. “While big banks have rebounded thanks to the help of American taxpayers, small businesses are still struggling. If a big firm that received taxpayer help is now paying out massive bonuses, they should be able to help American small businesses expand operations and hire new workers. Small business growth will create jobs and get our economy back on track.”

News on Fusion...McCain Missed an Opportunity

2010-01-29T18:15:00.005-05:00

This week brings us news of a major development on the Fusion front:

Science News Share Blog Cite Print Email BookmarkExperiments Meet Requirements for Fusion Ignition; New Physics Effect Achieves Symmetrical Target Compression:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2010) — The first experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) have demonstrated a unique physics effect that bodes well for NIF's success in generating a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction.

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments on NIF, the energy of 192 powerful laser beams is fired into a pencil-eraser-sized cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a tiny spherical target filled with deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. Rocket-like compression of the fuel capsule forces the hydrogen nuclei to combine, or fuse, releasing many times more energy than the laser energy that was required to spark the reaction. Fusion energy is what powers the sun and stars.

As recommended during the campaign, Senator McCain should have promoted Fusion research in his energy policy. The public would have seen him as a visionary.

Evolution May be a Process that is Indpendent of Genetic Material

2010-01-03T13:27:00.002-05:00

'Lifeless' Prions Capable of Evolutionary Change and Adaptation:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2010) — Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have determined for the first time that prions, bits of infectious protein devoid of DNA or RNA that can cause fatal neurodegenerative disease, are capable of Darwinian evolution.

The study from Scripps Florida in Jupiter shows that prions can develop large numbers of mutations at the protein level and, through natural selection, these mutations can eventually bring about such evolutionary adaptations as drug resistance, a phenomenon previously known to occur only in bacteria and viruses. These breakthrough findings also suggest that the normal prion protein -- which occurs naturally in human cells -- may prove to be a more effective therapeutic target than its abnormal toxic relation.

The study was published in the December 31, 2009 issue of the journal Science Express, an advance, online edition of the journal Science.

"On the face of it, you have exactly the same process of mutation and adaptive change in prions as you see in viruses," said Charles Weissmann, M.D., Ph.D., the head of Scripps Florida's Department of Infectology, who led the study. "This means that this pattern of Darwinian evolution appears to be universally active. In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down -- to prions and protein folding -- and it's clear that you do not need nucleic acid for the process of evolution."

Infectious prions (short for proteinaceous infectious particles) are associated with some 20 different diseases in humans and animals, including mad cow disease and a rare human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. All these diseases are untreatable and eventually fatal. Prions, which are composed solely of protein, are classified by distinct strains, originally characterized by their incubation time and the disease they cause. Prions have the ability to reproduce, despite the fact that they contain no nucleic acid genome.

Mammalian cells normally produce cellular prion protein or PrPC. During infection, abnormal or misfolded protein -- known as PrPSc -- converts the normal host prion protein into its toxic form by changing its conformation or shape. The end-stage consists of large assemblies (polymers) of these misfolded proteins, which cause massive tissue and cell damage.

"It was generally thought that once cellular prion protein was converted into the abnormal form, there was no further change," Weissmann said. "But there have been hints that something was happening. When you transmit prions from sheep to mice, they become more virulent over time. Now we know that the abnormal prions replicate, and create variants, perhaps at a low level initially. But once they are transferred to a new host, natural selection will eventually choose the more virulent and aggressive variants."...

Will We See a Review of Presidential Daily Briefings as a Result of the Recent Terrorist Attack

2009-12-27T11:17:00.006-05:00

Update (1/3/2010): This is noteworthy:

White House Adviser Briefed in October on Underwear Bomb Technique By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan was briefed in October on an assassination attempt by Al Qaeda that investigators now believe used the same underwear bombing technique as the Nigerian suspect who tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, U.S. intelligence and administration officials tell NEWSWEEK.

The briefing to Brennan was delivered at the White House by Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official. In late August, Nayef had survived an assassination attempt by an operative dispatched by the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda who was pretending to turn himself in. The operative had tried to kill the Saudi prince by detonating a bomb on his body, but stumbled on his way into the prince's palace and blew himself up...

In the wake of the recent terrorist attack, will we see a review of Obama's daily briefings in the same way that this memo during the Bush adminstration was 'reviewed'?:

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."...

Detroit: A Strait to Our Tomorrow?

2009-12-22T10:12:00.007-05:00

In French, the word détroit translates to strait in English. Détroit was used to describe the geography of a navigation passage between Lakes Huron and Erie. Eventually, Detroit was used for the name of the city founded on the banks of the Detroit River.

Looking at the following report from Steve Crowder will leave you wondering if the City of Detroit is a strait to our country's tomorrow.

Related: From the Detroit Free Press: Driving Detroit: 1 City. 2,100 streets. 2,700 miles. What we saw. The videos, pictures and stories reinforce Steve Crowder's findings as does this excellent map highlighting areas that are 'Well-maintained', 'New construction', 'Mixed', 'Much abandonment' and 'Prairie'.

More Evidence That Nature Has A Lot to Teach Us About Defense Strategies

2009-12-13T14:36:00.004-05:00

In mid-April of this year, the essay Torture Memos: Food for Thought was posted making the following arguments with regard to public policy and the use of torture as a last resort defense mechanism:

...Assume for the moment that torture was used on terrorists like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) ("principal architect" of the 9/11 attacks). The science of immune systems (Immunology), Evolution and an analysis informed by Game Theory offer us billions of years of 'best practices' in dealing with deadly threats that can be translated to the moral challenges our society faces in the Global War on Terror.

...Eons of evolution have given us an immune system that precariously balances aggressive actions, like high fevers, with unintended consequences. We must remind ourselves that the attack-and-defend interplay between pathogens and immune systems is not a steady-state system, but is co-evolving. One of the more fascinating adaptations is the process of active immunity and its production of antibodies. With active immunity, an immune system is constantly re-programming itself in response to the diseases/attacks it has survived.

Much like the immune system uses a potentially deadly fever as a last resort defense mechanism, our society should keep waterboarding as a legitimate, but rarely used, tool to protect the greater good. Particularly against individuals like KSM who are determined to destroy our society....

New developments in science reinforce the recommendation that we look towards the strategies Nature has figured out over billions of years for guidance with difficult decisions (emphasis added):

[Students of the Bible might recognize the bacteria's 'spore' survival strategy detailed below to a similar strategy utilized in the mythological story of Noah's Ark.]

Bacteria Provide New Insights Into Human Decision Making:
ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2009) — Scientists studying how bacteria under stress collectively weigh and initiate different survival strategies say they have gained new insights into how humans make strategic decisions that affect their health, wealth and the fate of others in society.

Their study, recently published in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was accomplished when the scientists applied the mathematical techniques used in physics to describe the complex interplay of genes and proteins that colonies of bacteria rely upon to initiate different survival strategies during times of environmental stress. Using the mathematical tools of theoretical physics and chemistry to describe complex biological systems is becoming more commonplace in the emerging field of theoretical biological physics.

The authors of the new study are theoretical physicists and chemists at the University of California, San Diego's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, the nation's center for this activity funded by the National Science Foundation, and Tel Aviv University in Israel. They say that how genes are turned on and off in bacteria living under conditions of stress not only shed light on how complex biological systems interact, but provide insights for economists and political scientists applying mathematical models to describe complex human decision making.

"Everyone knows the need to try to postpone important decisions until the last moment but apparently there are simple creatures that do it well and therefore can really teach us -- the bacteria," said Eshel Ben Jacob, a physics professor at Tel Aviv University and a fellow of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. He co-authored the study with three other scientists at the center: José Onuchic, a professor of physics at UCSD and a co-director of the center, Peter Wolynes, a professor of physics and chemistry at UCSD and Daniel Schultz, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSD.

In nature, bacteria live in large colonies whose numbers may reach up to 100 times the number of people on earth. Many bacteria respond to extreme stress -- such as starvation, poisoning and irradiation -- by creating spores, dormant states that are highly resistant to the outside environment and that can germinate into fully functioning bacteria once the environment improves. The response involves more than 500 genes and takes about 10 hours in Bacillus subtilis, the bacterium used by the scientists in their study.

Each bacterium in the colony communicates via chemical messages and performs a sophisticated decision making process using a specialized network of genes and proteins. Modeling this complex interplay of genes and proteins by the bacteria enabled the scientists to assess the pros and cons of different choices in game theory, a branch of mathematics that attempts to model decision making by humans, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

When bacteria form spores, the mother cell dies, but not before it stores a copy of its DNA in a special capsule called the spore. The mother cell then breaks open and its DNA and remaining proteins are released to the environment. The bacteria on the road to spore formation don't always form spores. They can change their fate and escape into a different state called "competence."

In this state, the bacteria change their membranes to allow the easy absorption of material from the dying cells. This allows for the creation of a "competence intermediate state," in which the bacteria hope to survive even under these unfriendly conditions. When normal conditions are restored, bacteria return to normal life without having to make a spore. The advantage of this situation is the ability of quickly returning to normality, but there is also a disadvantage: Likely death if the conditions get even worse. As a result, each bacterium has a dilemma.

"It pays for the individual cell to take the risk and escape into competence only if it notices that the majority of the cells decide to sporulate," explained Onuchic. "But if this is the case, it should not take this chance because most of the other cells might reach the same conclusion and escape from sporulation. Observations have shown that indeed only about 10 percent of the bacteria enter into competence. But how they make this decision and which cells take this chance have been a mystery."

The researchers discovered in their study that the bacteria's game theory decision making process is far more advanced than the well-known game theory problem known as the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Classic Prisoner's Dilemma, when applied to two prisoners, gives them the following offer: If only one prisoner pleads guilty, the one that cooperates gets two years in jail while the other one gets six years. If both of them admit guilt, then they will be imprisoned for four years. However, if none of them pleads guilty, they go free with no punishment. The temptation is not to admit anything, but the prisoners never know whether or not the other prisoner cooperated and pled guilty.

Because the number of participants in a bacterial colony can be up to 100 times the number of people on earth, the bacteria need to construct a more complex form of game theory. The rapidly changing environmental conditions they face means also bacteria have limited time to decide.

"Prisoner's Dilemma for bacteria is more complex," said Ben Jacob. "Each bacterium must decide whether to become a spore; that is, to cooperate, or escape into competence, or take advantage of the others, while it has a limited time to decide while a clock is ticking. We discovered that each cell has an internal timer whose pace changes according to the stress it experiences -- the pace goes up for higher stress decisions such as in humans. Our internal clock speeds up under danger because of the secretion of adrenaline and therefore we have the sensation of time slowing down. In addition to internal stress, each bacterium adjusts the pace of its timer accordingly to the stress of its peers and their intention to sporulate or to go into competence."

According to Onuchic, bacteria usually do not cheat their friends and inform them by sending chemical messages about their true intensions.

"We have developed for the first time a system level model of a large gene network to decipher the underlying principles of the bacteria game theory and how an internal network of genes and proteins is used to calculate risks in this complicated situation," he said.

This has applications to human society because many people encounter similar dilemmas during their own lives. For example, should people ignore side effects and vaccinate against a new potentially lethal virus or should they not vaccinate and take the risk of being infected with the possible consequences? If the majority of the population is going to get vaccinated, then it is better for each individual not to get vaccinated. However, if most people will not be vaccinated then it is better to be vaccinated.

"What each bacterium is doing is the equivalent if each individual on earth was able receive the exact information about the rate of spread of this new virus, the exact information about the intensions, to be vaccinated or not, by each person on the planet, and in addition the exact information about the health risks of side effects or being infected," said Ben Jacob. "A decision is then made in the context of this vast amount of information."

"We have shown how the bacteria do this complex calculation according to well-defined principles," added Onuchic. "We learned a simple rule: Anyone who needs to make a decision under pressure in life, especially if it is a possible death decision, will take its time. She or he will review the trends of change, will render all possible chances and risks, and only then react."

"Another interesting fact is that the same cells in the same environment, in this case, bacteria in the colony, can actually in a statistical matter choose two different outcomes: sporulation or competence. This leads us to speculate whether similar ideas can be extrapolated to explain the decisions of cells to develop cancer: Can a similar cell in a tissue make the decision to duplicate normally or to modify into a cancer cell? How does this stochastic process affect life, biology, evolution and disease is an interesting challenge that will be at the center of questions answered at the interface of the physical and life sciences."

The Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial

2009-12-12T07:01:00.003-05:00

Architect Helm Roberts gave a lecture yesterday at Miami University's End of Semester Open House on his award-winning design for The Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The memorial is a sun-dial that casts its shadow on the names of veterans on the anniversary of their death.

Mr. Roberts has accomplished what all architects should strive for; a design that is long lasting and transformational. If you're ever near Kentucky's State Capitol, make time to visit the memorial.

CBS Should Also Look In-House for the Roots of Climategate

2009-11-26T10:04:00.006-05:00

While CBS' Declan McUllagh is keeping tabs on Climategate across the pond, he should also take a look at his own network's reporting over the years.

The misleading 60 Minutes report this site extensively reported on back in 2006 would be a start:

Related:

What’s in it for U.S.?: The Limited Government Case against Gay Marriage

2009-10-11T13:30:00.009-05:00

Yesterday evening, President Obama vowed repeal –again– of the Defense of Marriage Act. While many cite cultural and religious reasons to oppose gay marriage, one needs not resort to pathos and ethos-based arguments when formulating our public policy on marriage in general. A simple limited government philosophy offers the appropriate perspective.

The human condition is analog not digital. As in the non-human animal world, human sexuality is found along a spectrum of relationships. From a biological perspective and without scientific intervention, procreation in humans requires an individual male and an individual female.

Before considering the question of gay marriage, a more fundamental question should be considered: Why marriage at all? In the United States, marriage is a tri-party legal agreement. The first two parties, husband and wife, are obvious. The third party is the state/community that acknowledges a marriage. Male and female couples petition the state –and more generally, their community– to recognize their marriage. If it was just a simple relationship amongst consenting adults, the community would have no need –and more importantly no business– acknowledging the relationship.

However, marriage is a relationship that imposes responsibilities on the community and that’s why the state is involved in its recognition and definition; as in detailing that only two (not more) individuals of the opposite sex will be recognized in a marriage. Married couples get legal tax and inheritance status. Male-female couples asking the state to recognize their marriage are also asking the state to address the care of their biological children if the couples are incapable of doing so.

What does the community get in return for consideration of this ‘special’ status? It is rejuvenated –by the only relationship that can procreate: a male-female relationship– and benefits from responsibly raised children in a marriage. Because of the corrosive effects to the community of infidelity, the community acknowledges only monogamous marriages. This shared responsibility amongst all the parties (husband, wife, community) is the limited government rationale for marriage as a legal construct.

Gay couples asking the community to recognize their relationships have a responsibility to address the question: ‘In return for the community’s recognition, what will you do for the state that justifies more government?’. They may counter that some gay couples have children and that their care benefits the community. But these children are not, and can not be, the offspring of a gay marriage. They are the shared responsibility of the biological parents and the state. The existing legal constructs are sufficient to address the children’s and community’s interests.

The state/community will be a party to any marriage and therefore has every right to say what marriages it will recognize. The gay couples seeking recognition must make their case for community involvement in their relationship when the sine qua non condition of biological procreation does not exist and there are sufficient laws to deal with any children in a gay relationship. Until the argument for an expansion of government is made, the basic principle of limited government, the minimal amount of laws our society needs to function, should prevail.

Meanwhile in a just, parallel universe...

2009-10-09T11:55:00.004-05:00

...the brave Iranian protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Either way, you're guaranteed 'free' healthcare

2009-09-26T06:58:00.001-05:00

Via Politico (emphasis added):

Ensign receives handwritten confirmation

This doesn't happen often enough.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

The note was a follow-up to Ensign's questioning at the markup.

Must C-TV: CSPAN hearing on Bernie Madoff SEC Investigation

2009-09-12T12:19:00.002-05:00

The Senate Banking Cmte. heard from key players in the Security & Exchange Cmsn.’s (SEC) investigation of a Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff, the recently convicted financier. David Kotz, the SEC Inspector Gen., described the agency’s failure to adequately respond to whistleblowers like investor Harry Markopolos, another witness.

9/11: Garden of Reflection

2009-09-11T09:43:00.003-05:00

The Garden of Reflection

A Little Help for New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman

2009-09-07T07:39:00.002-05:00

Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman generally has a good eye for trends. However, his recent commentary on Meet the Press berating parents' concern over the potential politicalization of the President's speech to school students was, to use his own word, stupid:

...But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm. And we live in the age of firestorms. You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school. What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK? That's flat out stupid what you're talking about. The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy. And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know. It's flat out stupid...

Two recent reports in the New York Times are worth reflecting on when considering Mr. Friedman's punditry.

The electronic ink is barely dry on the August 17, 2009 report entitled 'White House Cans Its ‘Fishy’ E-Mail Box' which detailed a reversal on a Kafkaesque policy:

The White House has apparently shut down the e-mail address it was using to track what it called “fishy” information about its efforts to overhaul the health care system.
E-mails sent to flag@whitehouse.gov now bounce back, with the reply reading, “The e-mail address you just sent a message to is no longer in service. We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via: http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck.”

Macon Phillips, director of new media at the White House, had rolled out the e-mail address in an Aug. 4 blog post, writing, “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end-of-life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

The White House maintained that it was not collecting the names of those criticizing its reform push.

But the effort got almost immediate pushback from Republican and conservative critics, many of them citing privacy concerns. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, charged that the administration was creating an enemies list, writing in a letter to President Obama, “I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.”...

On the heels of this debacle, the Department of Education deemed it appropriate to suggest a lesson plan as an accompaniment to the President's speech. As reported in the New York Times, the plan would have students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president":

...The Department of Education sent out a list of suggested classroom activities that teachers could use to accompany the speech. One among dozens suggested that teachers could have students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”

Some conservatives focused on the letter-writing activity as an effort by the administration to use classrooms to build political support for the president. Department officials on Wednesday replaced that initial suggested activity with one in which students would “write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term educational goals.”

The original activity, [Secretary of Education] Mr. Duncan said Sunday, “wasn’t worded quite correctly.”...

Mr. Friedman would benefit from directing his über-trend-spotting-acumen on these two reports in his own paper of record before discounting the parents' concerns.

So we're to believe that...

2009-09-04T11:01:00.001-05:00

...the vetting process with a 7 page questionaire with questions like:

13) Electronic comunications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you...

didn't catch this?:

A top environmental official of the Obama administration issued a statement Thursday apologizing for past incendiary statement and denying that he ever agreed with a 2004 petition on which his name appears, a petition calling for congressional hearings and an investigation by the New York Attorney General into "evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur." [Ed. see: Green jobs czar signed 'truther' statement in 2004 for confirmation of petition signature.]

Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is Number 46 of the petitioners from the so-called "Truther" movement which suggests that people in the administration of President George W. Bush "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of "the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever."...

Lest We Forget: Beslan 5th Anniversary

2009-09-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

As 9/11 comes upon us, we should also remember that the town of Beslan suffered an inhumane tragedy as well just 5 short years ago.

Must C TV: C-SPAN's Q&A Interviews Dr. John Garrett

2009-08-31T10:23:00.003-05:00

C-SPAN just continues to blow away the MSM with the type of programming and interviews only they can produce. Last night's broadcast (podcast available here) of the interview with Dr. John Garrett, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Virginia Hospital Center, with Brian Lamb is an example of this and brings much to the citizens that wants to educate themselves about the healthcare debate:

This week on Q&A, our guest is Dr. John Garrett of the Virginia Hospital Center. Dr. Garrett has been at the Virginia Hospital Center for 20 years. Previously he was on the faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Auburn University, and Georgetown University Medical Center. As Congress debates health care reform, we are interviewing Dr. Garrett to talk about his life in medicine, the workings of a hospital, and how government and non-government programs impact medicine.

The Strange Beast of Health-Care Technology

2009-08-19T12:03:00.002-05:00

From an essay entitled How American Health Care Killed My Father:

...One of the most widely held pieces of conventional wisdom about health care is that new technology is relentlessly driving up costs. Yet over the past 20 years, I’ve bought several generations of microwave ovens, personal computers, DVD players, GPS devices, mobile phones, and flat-screen TVs. I bank mostly at ATMs, check out my own goods at self-serve supermarket scanners, and attend company meetings by videoconference. Technology has transformed much of our daily lives, in almost all cases by adding quantity, speed, and quality while lowering costs. So why is health care different?

Well, for the most part, it isn’t. Whether it’s new drugs to control previously untreatable conditions, diagnostic equipment that enhances physician productivity, or minimally invasive techniques that speed patient recovery, technology-driven innovation has been transforming care at least as greatly as it has transformed the rest of our lives.

But most health-care technologies don’t exist in the same world as other technologies. Recall the MRI my wife needed a few years ago: $1,200 for 20 minutes’ use of a then 20-year-old technology, requiring a little electricity and a little labor from a single technician and a radiologist. Why was the price so high? Most MRIs in this country are reimbursed by insurance or Medicare, and operate in the limited-competition, nontransparent world of insurance pricing. I don’t even know the price of many of the diagnostic services I’ve needed over the years—usually I’ve just gone to whatever provider my physician recommended, without asking (my personal contribution to the moral-hazard economy)...

Related:

The Slope of Hope

2009-08-19T11:05:00.001-05:00

HT: Instapundit

Fortune Magazine: 5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform

2009-08-11T11:42:00.002-05:00

A read-the-whole-thing analysis of current legislation in the House and Senate:

5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
5. Freedom to choose your doctors

HT: Wizbang

Obamacare

2009-08-07T17:23:00.004-05:00

HT: NY Post

Update: Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

2009-08-03T10:22:00.002-05:00

Via the Hoover Institution (HT: Instapundit):

Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose.

.... 1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.

3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:

Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).

Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.

More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).

Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade—even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.

10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States...

Realted: Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

Dayton Daily News: Ohio treasurer gives bank contract, gets political fund-raiser

2009-07-29T13:09:00.002-05:00

The email-bag had a link to this story on a very 'convenient coincidence'. Some people as just lucky:

Ohio treasurer gives bank contract, gets political fund-raiser

By Laura A. Bischoff, Staff Writer
12:47 PM Tuesday, July 28, 2009

COLUMBUS — Just a week after winning a new contract from Ohio Treasurer Kevin Boyce, Key Bank officials are hosting a $500-a ticket political fund-raiser for him in Cleveland on Tuesday, July 28.

Although the state has processed its own checks for more than 100 years, Boyce hired Key Bank to handle roughly 485,000 checks per month.

The contract is worth more than $160,000 a year but taxpayers will save at least $83,000 a year because the state expects to earn more interest off the checks, which will be deposited more quickly, and other in-house costs will be cut, according to Mike Culp, Boyce’s chief of staff. Two state employees who currently process checks will be assigned other work, he said.

Banks were invited to bid July 1, their responses were due July 15 and Key Bank got the work July 20.

“This could be the right decision but it’s clouded by this fundraiser and it’s clouded by how quickly this happened,” said Catherine Turcer of Ohio Citizen Action, a non-partisan good government organization.

Political contributions had nothing to do with the contract, Culp said.

“What motivated the treasurer’s office was that it’s a cheaper, more secure, and more technologically-advanced way to process warrants,” he said in an e-mail. Currently, when the state issues a check to pay for something, it gets processed by the banks and sent back to the state as a printed image. Electronic images of checks will replace printed images.

Key Bank lobbyist Erskine Cade, who is co-hosting the fund-raiser at the Key Bank Tower in downtown Cleveland, agreed and said he didn’t even know about the new contract...

ScienceDaily: Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’

2009-07-27T14:40:00.002-05:00

Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter':

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) — Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’...

Congressman John Conyers is Stuck on Stupid

2009-07-27T13:32:00.003-05:00

You can't make this stuff up.

As noted by Representative Conyers in the following video:

"What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"

HT: Wizbang

"Doing More With Less"

2009-07-25T13:55:00.005-05:00

Former Cincinnati native and now The Naked Cowboy runs for Mayor of New York City:

Before one discounts his chances, remember that a community organizer had the audacity to hope that he would one day become president.

Talk of the Nation Science Friday: Decoding the Science of Decision Making

2009-07-25T11:48:00.002-05:00

Decoding the Science of Decision Making (with Audio):

For decades researchers ranging from economists to psychologists to neuroscientists have tried to understand how people make decisions, both mundane and major. Guest host Paul Raeburn and guests look at what happens in the mind of "the decider" when there's a choice to be made.

Guests:

Michael J. Frank, assistant professor, Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition, Brown University, Providence, R.I.

Jennifer S. Lerner, professor, Harvard Kennedy School, director, Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Colin Camerer, professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

Obama vs. Obama

2009-07-19T12:31:00.002-05:00

HT: Wizbang

Going 'Galt' May Be Hard-wired Into Our Psychology

2009-07-10T14:03:00.005-05:00

Instapundit recently posted this email from a reader:

Interesting article, and somewhat parallels my experience. I’ve “gone Galt” myself, taking 6 weeks leave without pay. Business is very slow, we’ve already got too many people wasting away on overhead. SinceI don’t need the money (right now), I volunteered to take some time off in the hope that someone else won’t get laid off.

The one positive in all this is that I think that (at my marginal tax rate) I’ve denied the (state and federal) government some $4,000 in income taxes.

Here's an economics research paper that may give some insight into the 'Going Galt' phenonmenon (emphasis added):

A Behavioral Laffer Curve: Emergence of a SocialNorm of Fairness in a Real Effort Experiment

Abstract

This paper demonstrates, through a controlled experiment, that the “Laffer curve” phenomenon does not always reflect a conventional income - leisure trade-off. Whether out of reason or out of emotion, taxpayers may also be willing to punish intentionally unfair tax setters by working less than they would under the same exogenous circumstances...

...1. Introduction

The quest for American independence grew as issues like taxation without representation in the British government angered the local population of the former British colonies. When the British decided to tax the colonists to pay a share of their expensive war against the French and Indians, the colonists were angry and rallied behind the phrase, “No Taxation without Representation”. The British were then forced to remove (1764-1767) most of the unfair taxes (tax on sugar, Stamp Act, Townsend Act) that they had been trying to enforce unilaterally. Two centuries later, the same scenario repeated in California as property taxes went out of control. Taxpayers were losing their home because they could not pay their property taxes, yet the government maintained the burden. California taxpayers stood up and passed Proposition 13 (1978) that reduced property taxes by about 57%. The tax revolt that swept the country had a worldwide impact.

Since then, tax revolts have been closely associated with the name of Arthur Laffer who forcefully defended as a simple rule of public finance that there is a unique optimal tax rate which maximizes revenue collection. If the tax level is set below this level, raising taxes (more specifically, marginal tax rates) will increase tax revenue. However, if the tax level is set above this level, then raising taxes will decrease tax revenue. This proposition, now called the “Laffer curve”, had considerable influence on fiscal doctrine, and fuelled the “supply side economics” argument that a tax cut would actually increase tax revenue if the government is operating on the right side of the curve.

The Laffer curve was based on conventional economic analysis: tax revenues are obviously zero if the tax rate is zero, and are still zero if the tax rate is equal to one, as rational agents would withdraw from the market to evade tax or consume untaxed leisure. However, our paper demonstrates that the Laffer curve phenomenon does not always reflect a conventional income - leisure trade-off. Consistent with the history of tax revolts, we demonstrate the existence of a “behavioral Laffer curve” that will arise as a reaction to the perceived unfairness of taxation by a Leviathan government. Whether out of reason or out of emotion, taxpayers are willing to “punish” tax setters who intentionally violated the social norm of fair taxation by working less than they would under the same exogenous circumstances. We further point out that the behavioral Laffer curve peaks at a substantially lower tax rate than the conventional Laffer curve...

This Is What Goes for Transparency at the EPA

2009-07-06T11:10:00.002-05:00

WSJ: The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic by Kim Strassel:

The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.

Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.

Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he'd given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.

So much so that one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."

Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest...

Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

2009-06-24T18:46:00.003-05:00

From a 2005 aritcle in the New York Times Magazine, The Quality Cure? (emphasis added):

...Virtually every would-be reformer, Democrat and Republican alike, starts with the presumption that the major problem in health care is high costs. This is understandable: America now spends 15 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. That's a higher percentage than any country has ever spent in the history of the planet, and the figure is increasing. The United States spends more on health care than on automobiles; we spend more on health care than China spends on tea; in fact, as Cutler likes to point out, we spend more on health than the Chinese spend, per capita, on everything. And health care threatens (far more than Social Security) to consume the federal government. Medicare, the health-care program for retirees, and Medicaid, which provides basic services for the poor, already account for one-fifth of the federal budget, and their share could double in a generation.

Curbing such growth has been the aim of every reformer, and according to Cutler, it is the reason reform has failed. The Clinton team proposed to pay for universal coverage by limiting increases in spending (partly through mandatory caps). But limiting spending also meant limiting service. The proposed legislation was never put to a vote.

Managed care was next at trying to contain costs. It succeeded for a while, until it became clear that Americans did not want health-maintenance organizations to limit their choices any more than they wanted the government to. Since then, reform has languished. The Medicare drug bill is suggestive of why. The Republican Congress promised restraint but then passed a hugely expensive law that barred Medicare from using its clout to negotiate prices with drug companies. The pattern has been failed efforts to control costs, followed by a void of new ideas.

Cutler's approach is radically different. He says that most health-care spending is actually good. Spending has been rising, he says, because it delivers positive, and measurable, economic value, and because it can do more things that Americans want. Therefore, Cutler says, we should focus on improving the quality of care rather than on reducing our consumption of it. Rather than pay less, he wants to pay more wisely -- to encourage health-care providers to do more of what they should and less of what is wasteful...

The National Debt Road Trip

2009-06-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

Senator Coburn's Report: 100 Stilumus Projects: A Second Opinion

2009-06-16T12:58:00.002-05:00

A real tear-jerker: 100 Stilumus Projects: A Second Opinion

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

Evolution in the Blink of an Eye

2009-06-15T19:03:00.003-05:00

Science News: Evolution Can Occur In Less Than 10 Years, Guppy Study Finds:

How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside's Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology.

Gordon and her colleagues studied guppies — small fresh-water fish biologists have studied for long — from the Yarra River, Trinidad. They introduced the guppies into the nearby Damier River, in a section above a barrier waterfall that excluded all predators. The guppies and their descendents also colonized the lower portion of the stream, below the barrier waterfall, that contained natural predators.

Eight years later (less than 30 guppy generations), the researchers found that the guppies in the low-predation environment above the barrier waterfall had adapted to their new environment by producing larger and fewer offspring with each reproductive cycle. No such adaptation was seen in the guppies that colonized the high-predation environment below the barrier waterfall.

"High-predation females invest more resources into current reproduction because a high rate of mortality, driven by predators, means these females may not get another chance to reproduce," explained Gordon, who works in the lab of David Reznick, a professor of biology. "Low-predation females, on the other hand, produce larger embryos because the larger babies are more competitive in the resource-limited environments typical of low-predation sites. Moreover, low-predation females produce fewer embryos not only because they have larger embryos but also because they invest fewer resources in current reproduction."

Natural guppy populations can be divided into two basic types. High-predation populations are usually found in the downstream reaches of rivers, where they coexist with predatory fishes that have strong effects on guppy demographics. Low-predation populations are typically found in upstream tributaries above barrier waterfalls, where strong predatory fishes are absent. Researchers have found that this broad contrast in predation regime has driven the evolution of many adaptive differences between the two guppy types in color, morphology, behavior, and life history.

Gordon's research team performed a second experiment to measure how well adapted to survival the new population of guppies were. To this end, they introduced two new sets of guppies, one from a portion of the Yarra River that contained predators and one from a predator-free tributary to the Yarra River into the high-and low-predation environments in the Damier River.

They found that the resident, locally adapted guppies were significantly more likely to survive a four-week time period than the guppies from the two sites on the Yarra River. This was especially true for juveniles. The adapted population of juveniles showed a 54-59 percent increase in survival rate compared to their counterparts from the newly introduced group.

"This shows that adaptive change can improve survival rates after fewer than ten years in a new environment," Gordon said. "It shows, too, that evolution might sometimes influence population dynamics in the face of environmental change."...

Humans Meet Your Masters

2009-06-03T09:30:00.004-05:00

NCR moving from Ohio to Georgia

2009-06-02T12:27:00.001-05:00

Via the Cincinnati Enquirer:

DAYTON, Ohio — NCR Corp. says it is relocating its corporate headquarters to Georgia and some of the roughly 1,250 workers at its current headquarters in Dayton will be offered transfers when the company moves.

The maker of ATMS and retail checkout scanners said Tuesday the new headquarters will be in Duluth, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta.

NCR said it chose the new location after considering available work force, infrastructure, financial incentives and government tax structures.

The company says it will also establish a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Columbus, Ga., that will employ an additional 870 people over the next five years...

Federal Grant Gives $91,300 to Purchase a $133,000 Home

2009-05-27T11:14:00.004-05:00

You can't make this stuff up! The safety net is becoming a hammock and fair-minded taxpayers are holding it up.

South Florida Sun Sentinel: Federal stimulus money allows Tamarac mom to buy first home:

Even though she sees the pain of people struggling in this economy, Staci Gullett is poised to take a leap of faith.

Gullett, 28, who works for the state unemployment office, deals all day long with people who sob on the telephone as they beg her to push their benefits through.

But she's also seeing firsthand the benefits of a federal grant project meant to ease the nation's economic pain by getting distressed houses off the market and giving or lending people money to spend on them.

Gullett will become one of Broward's first recipients of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, the national housing rescue plan to help cities and states flip foreclosed homes, rent them out, or dole out grants to first-time home buyers. On June 19 she's closing on her first housing purchase, a two-bedroom with hardwood floors in Tamarac.

All I did was rent," Gullett said. "To buy my own home, it's wonderful. And I'll have a back yard."

In Broward and Palm Beach counties, dozens of local governments have been awarded a total of $104 million to turn abandoned, foreclosed properties into occupied, tax-producing dwellings.

Tamarac has $4.7 million to spend on down-payment assistance in some neighborhoods, such as Heathgate-Sunflower, Westwood, Mainlands, Vanguard Village and Concord Village.

Gullett is a single mother of a 1-year-old daughter, Madison. With a salary "in the 20s" as a clerk for the state unemployment office, she meets the program's income guidelines.

The house in the Mainlands neighborhood will cost her $133,000. The city, through a grant, is chipping in $91,300...

Details on the city's assitance program can be found on their web site.

In Memoriam

2009-05-25T07:49:00.003-05:00

Remember to honor all that put their lives on the line for our freedom.

Sergeant Matt Maupin

WSJ: Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

2009-05-18T09:36:00.002-05:00

Americans know how to use the moving van to escape high taxes:

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Mr. Quinn and other tax-raising governors have been emboldened by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that "tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option." A recent letter to New York Gov. David Paterson signed by 100 economists advises the Empire State to "raise tax rates for high income families right away."

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities...

Three Plead Guilty to Voter Fraud in Ohio

2009-04-29T19:13:00.002-05:00

3 voting advocates guilty

Three staff members for Vote Today Ohio, an independent get-out-the-vote organization supporting Barack Obama, pleaded guilty in Franklin County this afternoon to improper voting.

The three came to Ohio from states where Obama was likely to win in an effort to swing Ohio's electoral college vote toward their candidate, Judge Charles A. Schneider said. The judge gave all three 60 days in jail but suspended it if they paid a $1,000 fine. He also ordered a year's probation.

The three are Daniel Hausman, 32, and Amy Little, 50, both of New York, and Yolanda Hippensteele, 30, of California. They told the court they had good intentions when they registered to vote and cast ballots the same day in early voting at Veterans Memorial.

"I was paying rent and living full-time in Ohio," Hippensteele told the judge, "I didn't attempt to vote in another state. ... I think it's all a misunderstanding. I have a profound respect for the voting process."

Assistant Prosecutor Brian Simms said the three later tried to rescind their registration and cancel their votes; two were successful. Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien had warned visiting campaign staff members that they shouldn't vote here if they didn't plan to stay after the election.

Schneider told the three that "rescinding your request is like giving back the money once you've been caught."

Torture Memos: Food for Thought

2009-04-17T13:48:00.029-05:00

In the wake of the recently released Torture Memos by the Obama administration, the following is offered as food for thought.

Coming in From the Cold: CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary But Torture:

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

"The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline."

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

And here's a look at the issue through the lenses of Science and Game Theory:

Assume for the moment that torture was used on terrorists like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) ("principal architect" of the 9/11 attacks). The science of immune systems (Immunology), Evolution and an analysis informed by Game Theory offer us billions of years of 'best practices' in dealing with deadly threats that can be translated to the moral challenges our society faces in the Global War on Terror.

Game Theory is often used as a tool to abstract and model the payoffs of various strategies and responses in biology and human behavior (eg: Cheating Viruses and Game Theory and Tit for Tat). John Maynard Smith and George R. Price used game theory concepts to develop the category of Evolutionary Game Theory analysis. The use of torture against terrorists as a last resort is analogous to the last resort strategies utilized by the immune system; a defense mechanism whose strategies have withstood the test of time through error and trial.

In principle, an immune system works to protect an organism by attacking pathogens that would do it harm. White blood cells, or leukocytes, are constantly at work defending against harmful microbes in the body. The fevers we experience when our bodies get the flu, a 'high-level attack' and a disease that takes 250,000 to 500,000 humans annually, are part of the overall defenses the immune system utilizes. A fever's prolonged high temperatures can cause death. That's why the body maintains a normal temperature when it is simply experiencing 'low-level attacks', like the germs that infect a small wound on your hand.

Unfortunately, the immune system's protection comes at a price; it's a two-edged sword with built-in imperfections. Sometimes it attacks the very organism it's trying to defend. This condition is called Autoimmunity. Rheumatology is one branch of medicine that treats one of these imperfections.

Eons of evolution have given us an immune system that precariously balances aggressive actions, like high fevers, with unintended consequences. We must remind ourselves that the attack-and-defend interplay between pathogens and immune systems is not a steady-state system, but is co-evolving. One of the more fascinating adaptations is the process of active immunity and its production of antibodies. With active immunity, an immune system is constantly re-programming itself in response to the diseases/attacks it has survived.

Much like the immune system uses a potentially deadly fever as a last resort defense mechanism, our society should keep waterboarding as a legitimate, but rarely used, tool to protect the greater good. Particularly against individuals like KSM who are determined to destroy our society.

The argument is often made that the Geneva Conventions and policies against torture are there to protect our soldiers. But the historical evidence doesn't support this claim. The Nazis and Japanese abused POWs during WWII. POWs were tortured during the Vietnam War. And more recently, our troops have been tortured to death in Iraq.

Like a doctor treating a patient, our society should be guided by the core principles of 'first do no harm' and the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat you) as we debate and evolve our policies. Implied within the Golden Rule and the Geneva Conventions is an expectation of reciprocity; even from our enemies. It's worth remembering that al-Qaida and its operatives are not signatories to the Geneva Conventions and have no claim on its protection.

While water boarding is an extreme tactic, it is justified by the extreme measures our enemies have taken against us. Our challenge is to make sure that we judiciously use this tool and don't allow a potential abuse that would result in an attack on the very society we're trying to protect; ala an autoimmune disease. We must be mindful of the potential hazard of declaring the operation (our anti-terrorism tactics) a success at the expense of losing the patient (our ethics and morals).

Related:

Update: Intel chief: Harsh techniques brought good info

Cincinnati Tea Party II

2009-04-15T20:17:00.002-05:00

Great coverage and pictures at RWNJ and BizzyBlog.

Kowtow-gate?

2009-04-09T05:11:00.003-05:00

White House: No bow to Saudi:

The White House is denying that the president bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at a G-20 meeting in London, a scene that drew criticism on the right and praise from some Arab outlets.

"It wasn't a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he's taller than King Abdullah," said an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity...

Under What Authority Can the President Extend This Promise?

2009-03-30T12:59:00.001-05:00

President Obama's remarks on U.S. car industry:

...GOVERNMENT WARRANTY

It is my hope that the steps I am announcing today will go a long way towards answering many of the questions people may have about the future of GM and Chrysler. But just in case there are still nagging doubts, let me say it as plainly as I can -- if you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warrantee will be safe.

In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warrantee...

This begs the question, "How did they organize the protest?"

2009-03-29T15:17:00.001-05:00

Wales News: Anarchy in the UK as G20 protestors set to march:

AN ARMY of anarchists is set to march on London’s G20 summit, to vent their anger at bankers.

Thousands of activists are expected to travel from all across Wales to the capital, to coincide with the meeting of the leaders of the world’s 20 most powerful economies in London this week.

Among those travelling up to London is Ian Bone, once dubbed “the most dangerous man in Britain,” who rose to prominence in Swansea in the 1980s.

The 61-year-old, who founded anarchist newspaper Class War, said: “There will be hundreds, thousands, of anarchists pouring into London from Radnorshire to Powys, from Brecon and elsewhere. There will be a lot of people from Swansea and Newport.”...

If you read just one analysis on the financial meltdown, 'Fluke? Credit crisis was a heist' must be the one

2009-03-20T14:26:00.004-05:00

A jaw dropping analysis from Jim Jubank. Read the whole thing!!!:

Fluke? Credit crisis was a heist
By Jim Jubak

Thanks to a complicit Congress, the reins were systematically loosened on the looters of the financial industry. And they're still at it, looking for new plunder.

It was no accident.

The folks in power in Washington and on Wall Street want to pretend that the current global financial crisis -- you know, the one that reduced household net worth in the United States by $11.2 trillion in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve -- was an accident caused by some unfortunate confluence of greed and asleep-at-the-switch regulators.

What we're now living through, though, is the result of a conscious, planned looting of the world economy. Its roots stretch back decades. And it wouldn't have been possible without the contrivances of the bought-and-paid-for folks who sit in Congress.

Of course, just because the plan blew up on the looters, taking off a financial finger here and a portfolio hand there, you shouldn't have any illusion that they've retired. In fact, in the "solutions" now being proposed -- by Congress -- to fix the global and U.S. financial systems, you can see the looters at work as hard as ever.

Blaming the regulators

The smoke screen -- the official explanation of the global crash -- was on full display at a March 5 hearing led by Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala., respectively the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Banking Committee, into the $170 billion morass that is American International Group (AIG, news, msgs). Served up on the grill were Eric Dinallo, the supervisor of insurance for New York state, and Scott Polakoff, the acting director of the federal Office of Thrift Supervision.

"Are you trying to evade your responsibility?" Shelby thundered at Dinallo, who was responsible for regulating AIG's insurance business, headquartered in New York.

Neither Dinallo nor Polakoff had a convincing explanation for why their agencies hadn't done more to stop the meltdown at AIG, which has so far cost taxpayers $170 billion. At times, they certainly seemed like they were trying to weasel out of responsibility, exactly as Shelby suggested.

Dinallo, for example, pointed out his agency regulated only AIG's insurance business and not the London financial-products unit, which had written the derivative contracts that took down the company. Shelby countered by asking why Dinallo's office hadn't done more to stop the risky lending of securities by the company's regulated insurance units, which account for $35 billion of the $170 billion bailout.

Polakoff wound up eating crow and more crow. "AIG was successful in many regards for many years, but it had issues and challenges," he said in his prepared statement for the committee. After that exercise in the numbingly obvious, it was hard to muster up much sympathy for Polakoff when Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., got him to participate in his own evisceration. "The perception that this London operation was some rogue group that was unsupervised, that you had no access to it and that your regulator authority didn't reach there is not accurate," Reed said. "Correct," Polakoff answered. "That would be a false statement."...

New York Times: Many in Government Knew Weeks Ago About A.I.G. Bonuses (Updated with Video)

2009-03-20T11:45:00.005-05:00

Many in Government Knew Weeks Ago About A.I.G. Bonuses

March 20, 2009

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — The question was direct and prescient. Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, asked the Treasury secretary in an open hearing what could be done to stop American International Group from paying $165 million in bonuses to hundreds of employees in the very unit that had nearly destroyed the company.

Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, responded by saying that executive pay in the financial industry had gotten “out of whack” in recent years, and pledged to crack down on exorbitant pay at companies like A.I.G. that were being bailed out with billons of taxpayer dollars.

The exchange took place before the House Ways and Means Committee on March 3 — one week before Mr. Geithner claims he first learned that the failed insurance company was about to pay a round of bonuses that have since caused a political uproar.

A Treasury spokesman, Isaac Baker, said in a statement on Thursday night, “Although Congressman Crowley raised the issue of the bonuses two weeks ago, Secretary Geithner was not aware of the timing or full extent of the contractual retention payments or the other bonus programs until his staff brought them to his attention on March 10.”

Mr. Baker said that after Mr. Geithner had been briefed on the bonuses, he called Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G., and “insisted that they be renegotiated and restructured, in light of the extraordinary assistance being provided by taxpayers.”

Mr. Baker added that Mr. Geithner “takes full responsibility for not being aware of these programs before last week.” ...