An Unexpected Error

Mia Culpa (Not the Actress)

2012-01-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

Having reflected on my own rating system, I realize that I have mixed together two different types of rating measures; character, and views held, i.e., policy. They should be assessed separately, then brought together in a way that accounts for their weight, because a candidate could be rated high on things like his/her moral character, but hold views or espouse policies, entirely at odds with those of the rater. In such a case, the rater -- the prospective voter -- would not support the candidate no matter how highly he might rate his character. There is also the factor of importance, or weight. Some things on both the character scale and the policy scale will be more important to individual voters and they should have the option of giving those things greater weight in arriving at their figure of merit.

As I wrote previously, Article II of the Constitution specifies that the president has two primary job functions: to serve as chief executive of the federal government, and to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. In the latter role, the president has the authority to send troops into combat, as well as the power to decide whether to use nuclear weapons; awesome responsibilities. Our rating system should use this “job description” in considering how to rate our candidates: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (recent winner of the South Carolina primary), U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (winner of the New Hampshire primary), and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania (winner of the Iowa primary).

So, once again, how does a committed Republican decide who they want to support as the GOP nominee for President of the United States of America? I developed the following scheme with my best friend in mind. He’s a staunch Republican, a former Marine, and a person who considers me sadly misguided in all things political. He's also a decision analyst. Here’s how such a person might decide their candidate choice among the four remaining Republicans running.

First, for the CHARACTER measures, rank the measures by how important they are to you, from 1 (least important) to 5 (most important). You must prioritize the measures, e.g., they can't all be 5s. Then rate each candidate on how closely they demonstrate the characteristic on each measure, as follows: MINUS 2 - fails, MINUS 1 - poor, ZERO - average, ONE - above average, TWO - outstanding. Multiply the candidate's score on the measure by the measure's importance, add all results (retain the sign, positive or negative), and set that figure of merit aside while you score the policy measures.

CHARACTER

(Importance: _____) Has a core set of principles that guide his life and the decisions he makes.
(Importance: _____) Has the maturity and confidence to seek different viewpoints, to learn from his mistakes, accept blame, and share the credit for success with others.
(Importance: _____) Has a strong moral compass, is able to master his “inner self” and execute self control at all times. Seldom or never gets his mouth in gear before engaging his brain.
(Importance: _____) Is courageous, stays strong in the face of adversity, conveys strength and resolve, and inspires others.
(Importance: _____) Is intelligent, farsighted, imaginative, in touch with popular sentiment, knowledgeable about key issues facing the Nation, and makes informed, well thought-out decisions.

For the POLICY measures you will be ranking the issues reflected in the statement according to how important they are to you, with 5 being most important and 1 being least important. Then you will rate the candidates on how closely they reflect the policy stipulated, as follows: MINUS 2 - definitely does not support, MINUS 1 - is non-committal, ZERO - supports with major qualifications, ONE - supports with minor qualification, TWO - definitely supports without qualification. Now do the multiplication, importance by rating.

POLICY

(Rank: _____) The Environmental Protection Agency should be eliminated and environmental regulations severely curtailed or eliminated. No unilateral action by the United States should be initiated concerning global warming, which in any case, hasn't been shown to be human caused.
(Rank: _____) Roe vs Wade should be overturned, and a "personhood amendment" should be passed making abortion at any stage of conception, and for any reason, illegal. In addition, a constitutional amendment should be passed making marriage a strictly a union between a man and a woman.
(Rank: _____) Corporations are JOB CREATORS and should be relieved of unnecessary and burdensome regulations, including repeal of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Corporate taxes should be eliminated, as they are simply passed on to consumers and thereby depress consumer spending. should be repealed.
(Rank: _____) The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") should be repealed and replaced with a common sense approach to reducing health care costs that includes tort reform and private health savings accounts.
(Rank: _____) The United States must maintain a strong military and continue to project force aboard, including maintaining a significant presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East at large. Draconian cuts to military spending must be off the table. Under no circumstances should Iran be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and all means must be employed to prevent such a development.

Now multiply the results for Character by the results for Policy. The candidate with the highest total is your Republican nominee for president. Remember the sign, negative or positive, and that if you multiple a positive by a negative, the result is negative (by the same token, if you multiple a negative by a negative, the result is a positive, in which case, you've selected Barack Obama as your nominee).

To illustrate, I've arbitrarily ranked the Character traits and Policy issues as some "thoughtful" Republican might and then ranked the candidates based on what this fellow or gal might have learned to date about the four candidates' character and their stated policies. Here's what the hapless Republican came up with.

CHARACTER

Item	Import 1-least 5-most	Gingrich		Paul		Romney		Santorum
Item	Import 1-least 5-most	Rating	X	Rating	X	Rating	X	Rating	X
1	1	-2	-2	2	2	-2	-2	2	2
2	2	-2	-4	1	2	1	2	2	4
3	4	-2	-8	1	4	2	8	0	0
4	3	2	-6	1	3	0	0	0	0
5	5	1	5	-1	-5	1	5	-1	-5
	Total		-15		6		13		1

POLICY

Item	Import 1-least 5-most	Gingrich		Paul		Romney		Santorum
Item	Import 1-least 5-most	Rating	X	Rating	X	Rating	X	Rating	X
1	1	1	1	2	2	1	1	2	2
2	2	-2	-4	-1	-2	1	2	2	4
3	4	2	8	2	8	1	4	2	8
4	3	2	6	2	6	2	6	2	6
5	5	2	10	-2	-10	0	0	1	5
	Total		21		4		13		25

Multiplying Character totals by Policy totals yields the results below.

Gingrich		Paul		Romney		Santorum
-15*21	-315	6*4	24	13*13	169	1*25	25

Making Mitt Romney, the one person no "real" Republican seems to want, the "thoughtful" Republican's pick.

Now you try it. Rank the measures first, as you see their importance, then rate the Republican candidates on each measure, multiply ranking by rating, and total the five Character and then the five Policy columns. Then multiply Character by Policy and see who your pick would be. Record it in the Comments box below.

The Qualities of a Great President: Which Republican Candidate Has Them?

2012-01-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

Here we are, the South Carolina primary is history, Newt Gingrich won, upsetting the GOP bandwagon, and Republican primary voters are ping-ponging back and forth between four men contending for the Republican nomination for president: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. How does a committed Republican decide who they want to support as the GOP nominee for President of the United States of America?

Article II of the Constitution specifies that the president has two primary job functions: to serve as chief executive of the federal government, and to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. In the latter role, the president has the authority to send troops into combat, as well as the power to decide whether to use nuclear weapons; awesome responsibilities.

There have been numerous books, essays, and articles written about what makes a great president. Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Gergen have each put pen to paper articulating in relatively recent articles the characteristics they believe they’ve gleaned from history and experience. I’ve taken these characteristics, added a few of my own, and created a set of ten questions that you can rate the Republican candidates on using a five-point scale: 1 - strongly disagree, 2 - disagree, 3 - maybe yes/maybe no, 4 - agree, and 5 - strongly agree.

Go ahead and make your rating, and please be objective, even if you wouldn't vote for one of these clowns if they paid you (and they would).

Has a core set of principles that guide his life and the decisions he makes.
Has the maturity and confidence to seek different viewpoints, to learn from his mistakes, accept blame, and share the credit for success with others.
Has a strong moral compass, is able to master his “inner self” and execute self control at all times.
Is courageous, stays strong in the face of adversity, conveys strength and resolve, and inspires others.
Is aware and in touch with popular sentiment, and gives the sense that he will hear and understand the concerns, hopes, and aspirations of the people he hopes to lead.
Is intelligent, farsighted, imaginative, knowledgeable about key issues facing the Nation, makes informed, well thought-out decisions, and seldom or never gets his mouth in gear before engaging his brain.
I am comfortable with the views he espouses; the things he says make perfect sense to me.
Would “hit the ground running” and be an extremely hard working, exceptionally committed president.
Able to work effectively with other world leaders.
I am confident that as the commander and chief of our armed forces and the deciding authority on the possible use of nuclear weapons this man will make the right decisions.

Let us know your ratings and your selection for president in the comments box below.

Celibate Sex: Will the real Republicans please stand up?

2012-01-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

Celibate Sex: Will the real Republicans please stand up?: Why do Republicans devalue intelligence? Republicans use the word “intellectual” as a pejorative. One of Newt Gingrich’s attack ads directe...

Kucinich Announces ‘Game Changing’ Constitutional Amendment to Publicly Finance Federal Elections | Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich

2012-01-20T11:47:00.000-08:00

Kucinich Announces ‘Game Changing’ Constitutional Amendment to Publicly Finance Federal Elections | Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich

Dennis Kucinich home page

A carefully thought-out strategy: Throw the bums out!

2012-01-18T22:24:00.000-08:00

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is
for President Obama to be a one-term president...,” Mitch McConnell

Honestly, I find it puzzling that anyone but a died-in-the-wool Republican (like my retired Marine buddy) would even consider voting Republican on anything; president, senator, representative, dog catcher. And yes, I realize that in saying this I’m exhibiting the same mindless partisanship that in the past I’ve railed against, but let’s be truthful. For the last three years -- since Obama’s election -- Republicans have done everything they can to make government, all branches, dysfunctional.

This wasn’t just some knee jerk reaction to the election of a black, populist president, who wasn’t part of the old boys cabal. This was a carefully thought-out strategy (actually hinted at in a Dick Morris talking points memo) to sour the public on government and convince voters to “throw the bums out” -- the bums being majority incumbents, who were for the first two years, Democrats.

This strategy succeeded in 2010, when Republicans, with a witch’s brew of Tea Party participation, took over control of the House. It also succeeded in reducing the public’s approval rating for Congress to an all-time low, and may have fundamentally eroded faith in our Republic.

When it came to debt ceiling “negotiations,” it had the unintended consequence (unintended except perhaps for Tea Party members) of crashing the United State’s credit rating. Mitch McConnell said that the full faith and credit of the United States was “a hostage worth ransoming.”

McConnell made no bones about his party’s priority. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president....” I know you’ve all heard this before, but do you know how the Republicans have gone about trying to achieve their goal? By just saying “No.” To everything. In unison.

Republican obstructionism has ranged from opposing the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to refusing to confirm Obama’s judicial nominees. Obama's attempts to compromise with Republicans have weakened his position with his base -- a consequence Republicans welcome.

Not a single House Republican voted for the ARRA. Nada. Zero. Despite the urging of economists who saw the stimulus package as critical in avoiding a slide into a deeper recession, or worse, a depression. Three Senate Republicans supported the bill, giving it the 60 votes needed to overcome what has become the de-facto Republican response to any bill proposed by Obama and the Democrats -- the threat of a filibuster. Most economists now think the $787 billion stimulus package was too little, but Obama did well to get this much.

Likewise, financial reforms designed to prevent another meltdown were stonewalled by Republicans, despite Democratic compromises that ultimately weakened the bill. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act finally passed 60 to 39 in the Senate, with 3 Republicans siding with Democrats to avoid a filibuster. Not through with their obstructionism, Republicans refused to confirm President Obama’s selection of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established by the Act. The President had to resort to a recess appointment to get Cordray on the job. He had to do the same to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, where Republicans were refusing to confirm Obama’s appointees.

Republicans have blocked 223 of President Obama’s 1,132 executive and judicial appointees—over 20 percent. Republican senators have enforced a strict sixty-vote threshold for most nominations, but sometimes holds are placed on nominees by individual Republican senators. For example, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), he of the "D.C. Madam" scandal, put a hold on Obama’s selection of David Ashe to head the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Vitter vowed to keep it there until the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement issued fifteen offshore oil drilling permits. The permits were issued, but another Republican senator placed a hold on Ashe’s appointment over the Interior Department’s wild lands policy. Any individual senator can place a hold on a nomination for any reason, no matter how inane, and can do so anonymously. You can read about some of the more important Obama nominations being held up by the GOP here.

Of the 105 nominations submitted by President Obama during the first two years of his term, only 62 – two Supreme Court justices, plus 16 courts of appeals and 44 district court judges – were confirmed. That is the smallest percentage of judicial confirmations over the first two years of any presidency in American history. The Alliance for Justice has stated that due to Republican obstructionism, the high number of judicial vacancies has pushed the Judiciary into crisis.

Republican opposition to health care reform was no surprise, and one can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they voted their principles. Their tactics in trying to get public opinion on their side were despicable, but anything’s fair in love, war, and politics -- especially politics. But the bill passed anyway, and so the Republicans, vowing to repeal it “when they’re in charge,” are now working to dismantle it piece by piece by refusing to fund key provisions, and by taking the issue of mandatory insurance coverage to a stacked court.

This is another Republican tactic. Whenever they can’t block a bill, they simply refuse to fund its enactment, or the enforcement of its provisions.

In writing about President Obama’s recess appointments, Susan Brooks Thistlethwait, former president of Chicago Theological Seminary and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said:

“There is a larger issue here than a president making appointments to fill vacancies. The issue is the deliberate and sustained obstructionism that has as its goal maintaining vacancies in key positions in government. One or another party may agree or disagree on what government should do, but keeping government dysfunctional is profoundly wrong.” (Washington Post, On Faith, 01/05/2012).

Of course she’s right. Voters elected Barack Obama with 53% of the popular vote in 2008. What Republicans are doing now amounts to an ex post facto disenfranchisement of the people who voted for him.

Living without a pericardium, continued.

2012-01-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

[This essay begins here]

♫ Happiness is Lubbock, Texas, in your review mirror ♫

My wife arrived in Lubbock, Texas, in November, bringing along my two sons, the youngest born in Florida without me in attendance. I had to tell her about the Surgeon General’s letter and try to assure her that everything would be okay; I felt fine and told her I had no doubt I would again pass the medical board. But would I?

The Air Force was about to spend several thousand dollars putting a guy through an advanced degree program who’d been sick with a debilitating disease and had his chest opened not once, but twice in an effort to combat it, only to find it cropping up again, albeit in less severe form. Why take a chance?

My wife remembers me shopping for Thanksgiving and coming home with Cornish Game Hens. It was our first Thanksgiving together as a family of four, and the last time we had Cornish Game Hens for our Thanksgiving dinner.

I managed to get a delay in reporting to Sheppard AFB so that my time there would coincide with Texas Tech’s Christmas Holiday break. I threw a few clothes in a suitcase, stuffed my school work in my briefcase, said goodbye to my anxious wife and little sons, jumped in my trusty VW, and headed to Wichita Falls, Texas, about 4 hours east of Lubbock through some of the flattest, driest, most boring country in America. Nothing to occupy my attention, but my future.

Sheppard AFB Hospital

&&&&&

I returned to Lubbock a few days before Christmas feeling pretty good about my experience at USAF Sheppard Hospital. My tests had been normal, my consultations with the medical staff had gone well; they seemed well-informed and friendly. But I’d have to wait for their decision.

I went shopping for presents, a Christmas tree, and the makings of Christmas dinner. I came home with what turned out to be a stewing hen for the main course. It was our first Christmas together as a family of four, and the last time for many years that I was assigned holiday meal shopping responsibilities.

I returned to class after the holiday and tried to concentrate on passing Statistics. In January, one year after my pericardiectomy, I received the Sheppard Medical Board’s report, dated December 28, 1966.

Although the patient has had one episode of “pericarditis” [in quotes because this episode was thought to be an artifact of the surgery] since surgery two years ago (in comparison with nine episodes...prior to pericardiectomy), his prognosis appears to be excellent. It is possible that he will have recurrent episodes; however, the paucity of attacks since the pericardiectomy appears to be an excellent prognostic sign. He has absolutely no evidence of reduction of cardiovascular function and is totally asymptomatic in the interval between attacks and at the present time. The patient can go worldwide.

I spent another 15 years in the Air Force retiring in 1981 as a lieutenant colonel. The Air Force sent me back to graduate school again during that time and I earned a PhD. The board’s finding that, “It is possible that he will have recurrent episodes.” was prescient. I’ve had mild bouts of pericardial pain on and off all my life. None have been so severe as to require hospitalization or even extended bed-rest. None have required ACTH (steroid) therapy. Pain has been controlled by nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

For many years I was unable to sleep on my right side -- the side of my original thoracotomy -- because I felt my heart beating. I think this was psychological. I always checked in with a cardiologist wherever I was assigned. And I got a waiver to the flu shot required by the Air Force, because there was a worry that I might get a repeat of whatever caused the inflammation of my pericardial tissue. I don't worry about that anymore; I worry more about getting the flu.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone without a pericardium playing football (although I did play touch football during my assignment to the Pentagon in 1968). Certainly a person without a pericardium is more vulnerable to cardiac injury, say as the result of an automobile accident, but beyond that, people without a pericardium can, and do, live a relatively normal life.

I went for 11.5 minutes on my stress test last year. That's 1.6 minutes less than I did in 1966 when I was 28 years old. My EKGs are normal. My blood pressure is usually about 114/76.

Prepped for for a heart monitor. Right scar was the window, left scar was the pericardiectomy.

Today, whatever pericardial pain I may experience is masked (confused with?) by the more banal discomforts associated with aging; arthritis, osteoporosis, gastritis, and who knows what. I’m 73 years-old. I’ve lived longer than the surgeon who did my pericardiectomy (he died at 71). I’m grateful for these old-age associated aches and pains. I know what the alternative was.

The one thing I'd change if I could is how self-absorbed I was when I was going through the worst phases of the disease, the operation, and the medical board. It was a very difficult time for my wife and I didn't spend enough time with her talking through things and listening to her concerns. It's a testament to her courage, loyalty, and love that she not only stuck with me, but supported me all along the way.

What's it like living without a pericardium? Great! That's the whole point. Before I had this life- threatening experience, I was a moody fellow who wanted to get out of the Air Force as soon as my 4-year obligation was up and write poetry about love and death. Being face-to-face with death changed that. I realized I wanted to live, and I realized that life was a gift. As strange as it seems, having pericarditis and all that went with it, made me a much happier person.

The End (?)

Living without a Pericardium

2012-01-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

The Pericardium

I was trying to give my heart to my cardiologist, let’s call him Dr. Sing.

“Why would I want your heart?” he asked in his soft, sing-songy voice, a little smile on his round, brown face.

“For research,” I said, holding out my hands as if they were holding the very heart I was offering.

“I’m not doing any research,” Dr. Sing protested. “Besides, there are plenty of hearts to be had if one is to be looking.”

“But my heart has been without a pericardium for over forty years now,” I said. “Surely that means something to medical researchers.”

I had chronic pericarditis as a young man and my pericardium had to be removed. Without going into all the gory details, think of the pericardium as a partially inflated balloon into which the heart is shoved. The balloon, the pericardium, forms around the heart and acts (I’m guessing here) as a kind of shock absorber. Pericarditis is an inflammation of the pericardium. It can have a variety of causes. Mine was caused by an unknown and very persistent virus. After many episodes, my pericardium had begun to constrict the heart and so had to be removed. Think of peeling a peach; a peach that has a lot of arteries attached to it.

Performing a pericardiectomy. That evil looking device is a rib stretcher.

“Medical researchers are very much acquainted with pericarditis,” Dr. Sing said. “In fact, last week I had a man come in with chest pain and as soon as I listened to his chest I knew what it was.”

“You heard a rub?” I said, showing off my knowledge of the so-called pericardial friction rub caused by the outer and inner walls of the inflamed pericardium rubbing against each other.

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Sing said, handing me a slip of paper. “This is an order for a chest X-Ray.”

I took the X-Ray order without looking at it. I’d derailed my argument by trying to show off. I tried to get back to it. “Yes, there’s a lot of information on pericarditis, but what about information on what happens to the heart when it has to get along without a pericardium?”

“Well, your heart seems to have done just fine,” Dr. Sing said. “Look at your stress test.”

The stress test involved hooking me up to an EKG and having me run on a treadmill, on which Dr. Sing kept increasing the incline until I was about to fall off the back. When I quit, breathing hard and drenched in sweat, Dr. Sing said, “I’m disappointed.”

“Why?” I asked. “I went longer than I did last year. What was it, eleven minutes? More?”

“Well, I had a man do almost twenty minutes,” Dr. Sing said. “Of course he was half your age and a tri-athlete,” he said, chuckling.

He was beginning to get on my nerves.

I was seeing Dr. Sing because I had been experiencing a recurrence of upper back pain, mostly under my left scapular. I have had chest and back pain on and off ever since my pericardiectomy in 1965. My doctors over the years had explained it as very probably inflammation of pericardial tissue remaining around major arteries.

“They can’t get everything,” one doctor told me, squeezing my shoulder reassuringly.

When I asked about why I got back pain from inflamed tissue around heart arteries, I was told the pain was “referred.”

I learned that referred pain happens when nerve fibers from one region of the anatomy converge with nerve fibers from another region at the spinal cord. Nerve impulses apparently jump the track and cause, for example, that horrible, aching pain that runs down the arm during a heart attack.

Pain felt in one area of the body does not always represent where the problem is because the pain may be referred there from another area. For example, pain produced by a heart attack may feel as if it is coming from the arm because sensory information from the heart and the arm converge on the same nerve pathways in the spinal cord.

But I digress. After all these years of living without a pericardium, I was wondering why we have it in the first place. Maybe, I thought, it’s vestigial, like the appendix. If so, removing it would probably have about as much impact as removing the appendix, although recently, medical researchers may have changed their mind about the usefulness of the appendix, describing it as a little factory that manufactures “good bacteria.” Surely the pericardium has a useful function, as well. Maybe it manufactures good acne. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what happens when a person has to get along for most of his or her life without a pericardium?

The pericardium is said to be a tough, two-layer membranous sac enclosing the heart. The outer layer, called the fibrous pericardium, protects the heart from contact with the chest wall, ribs, sternum, and lungs. The pericardium wraps completely around the heart, extending around the bases of the great vessels; the aorta, superior and interior vena cava, pulmonary artery and vein as they arise from the heart. Two ligaments attach the top of the pericardium to the back of the sternum. Other ligaments loosely connect the bottom of the pericardium to the diaphragm. These structures anchor the heart in its place in the chest.

I started researching the question of what effect removal of the pericardium might have and came across an abstract in the International Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine that began, “The removal of the pericardium does not appear to have…” This could be what I was looking for. I brought up the article itself and read on. “The removal of the pericardium does not appear to have any deleterious effect in the normal dog.” Well, that was a start, wasn’t it?

A study performed in Spain (Departamento de Cardiología y Cirugía Cardiaca, Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, Barcelona, España) found that of those patients who survived the initial procedure (16% did not), 82% were still alive after 9 years, and 64% after 10 years. Pericardiectomy improved or alleviated their symptoms. A study performed in France of long-term survival of pericardiectomy patients was not so positive. It found that pericardiectomy allowed a clear functional improvement, but following pericardiectomy more than 60% of patients died within 10 years of the diagnosis being made.

A Japanese study followed 24 post-pericardiectomy patients for up to 27 years, with surgeries taking place between 1966 and 1990. Survival rates were 85% at 5 years, 67% at 10 years, and 58% at 15 years. As in other studies I reviewed, the causes and complications encountered in the patient population varied considerably, making any definitive conclusions difficult.

A retrospective analysis of the records of 60 patients who underwentpericardiectomy over a 10-year period (1980 to 1990) at Johns Hopkins showed differential operative and long-term survival rates based on the cause of the disease. A history of malignancy,previous pericardial procedure, and preoperative New York HeartAssociation class IV were found to be predictors of poor survival. The operative mortality ratefor pericardial effusion and constriction was 4.2% and 5.6%,respectively. Follow-up (median follow-up, 56.9 ± 38.2months) was obtained on 56 patients (93.3%). Actuarial survivalat 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years for all patients was 82.1%± 5.1%, 71.7% ± 6.7%, and 59.8% ± 12.2%,respectively. All patients who underwent operation primarily for effusionwith associated pain were found to be alive and had improved functionalcapacity without steroid use. The researchers concluded that pericardiectomycan be performed with low mortality and can result in good long-termsurvival and improved functional capacity. Patients who areseen primarily with pain refractory to steroid therapy can berelieved of symptoms with operation.

The most interesting study from my standpoint was one performed at the Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, OH, titled: Constrictive pericarditis (CP): etiology and cause-specific survival after pericardiectomy. In this study, the etiology of CP was idiopathic in 75 patients (46%), prior cardiac surgery in 60 patients (37%), radiation treatment in 15 patients (9%), and miscellaneous in 13 patients (8%). Long-term survival after pericardiectomy for CP was found to be related to the underlying etiology, LV systolic function, renal function, serum sodium, and PAP. The relatively good survival with idiopathic CP emphasizes the safety of pericardiectomy in this subgroup.

One has to be careful about how to interpret findings that survival rates after pericardiectomy are best when the cause of pericarditis is "idiopathic," i.e., unknown. This isn't a case of, "The less we know, the better your chances." What this means to me is that ruling out known serious illness/injury as an underlying cause of pericarditis, such as tuberculosis, cardiac surgery, cancer, etc., results in a patient population for whom pericardiectomy is more straightforward and less likely to result in follow-on complications, thus improving survival.

&&&&&

I woke up on a sunny Tuesday morning in July of 1962 at Chanute Air Base in Rantoul, Illinois, feeling tired and slightly feverish. I had pain in my left shoulder and a dull ache in the middle of my chest. I dressed and went to my Aircraft Maintenance Officer’s training class. By noon, the ache in my chest was sharp and constant, and I was having trouble breathing. I went to Sick Call at the infirmary, where they checked my temperature (97), blood pressure (145/80), and pulse (88), listened to my chest (“clear”), and sent me home with a tube of Bengay heat rub.

By 1700 that evening my chest pain was severe and got worse if I tried to take a deep breath. I couldn’t lie down, because the pain became much worse and breathing was more difficult. It was a struggle getting back to the infirmary, as any exertion caused greater pain. When I shuffled into the infirmary gasping for breath they immediately put me in a wheel chair and took me to an examining room, and then admitted me with, “Chest pain, undetermined etiology.”

It was two or three days before a doctor brought in from the teaching hospital at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign diagnosed my problem as pericarditis by identifying the rubbing sound he heard while listening to my chest as a “friction rub,” the sound of the inner and outer layers of the inflamed pericardium rubbing against each other. This was my first case of pericarditis. I was 24 years old. I would have another 9 episodes of pericarditis before my pericardium was removed at Wiesbaden AFB, Germany, in January of 1965.

&&&&&

I was a 2nd Lt when I first came down with pericarditis at Chanute. I had a second episode while there, was admitted to the hospital again, and after a few days, was permitted to attend class during the day and return to the hospital in the evening. I completed training with the class behind my class and received my assignment to the 36th Tactical Fighter Wing at Bitburg Air Force Base, Germany.

Medical tests failed to reveal the underlying cause of my pericarditis. It was recorded as "idiopathic," and presumed to be viral in nature. An interesting footnote was appended to the medical record, which stated that I had been quartered with Arab officer maintenance training students and one of them, an "Ahmed Gandi," had been hospitalized with "precordial pain." He was in the hospital 2 weeks, and then again a second time for 4 weeks. He did not finish the training course, and nothing more was known about his condition. The doctor at Wiesbaden preparing the clinical record preceding my pericardial window, an F. Steichen, wrote that, "It might be interesting to write to Chanute AFB Hospital to get the diagnosis of Gandi's disease." It's puzzling to me why Dr. Steichen would think this information relevant, since everything I've read indicates that viral pericarditis is not contagious. In any case, to my knowledge, no follow up was done on the matter.

I had my first "overseas attack" of pericarditis on the 15th of February 1963 and this time I told the examining physician at the hospital exactly what the diagnosis was. He had my medical records and gave me no argument. While hospitalized I developed an effusion and was treated with ACTH (prednisone).

Air Force Hospital, Wiesbaden, Germany

On March 5th, I was transferred to Wiesbaden, the main hospital in Germany, for further evaluation. I was there for almost a month undergoing one test after another; blood work, EKG, X-Ray, and lymph node, bone marrow, blood vessel, and muscle biopsies. Finally, I underwent surgery to make a "window" in the pericardium, and allow doctors to obtain pleura and pericardial tissue samples, and to preclude constriction. All test results were normal, except for fibrosis of the pericardium, which was caused by scarring due to pericarditis.

I was returned to Bitburg to convalesce from surgery and returned to full duty after two weeks. I had another attack of pericarditis on the 24th of April, then on the 19th of November, and the 14th of December. My next attack wasn't until August 3rd, 1964. I married my nurse in September 1964. We were spending so much time together we thought we might as well formalize the arrangement.

When I wasn't in the Bitburg Air Base hospital, I was working in my specialty as an aircraft maintenance officer, first on the flight line, then as Chief of Maintenance, then as an assistant maintenance control officer. I worked 12-hour days regularly, and we were subject to frequent alerts, when the horn would sound at 0300 hours and we'd sprint to the flight line, not knowing whether it was another drill, or whether the Russians were charging across the Fulda Gap.

My frequent bouts with pericarditis effected me in three ways. First, I was less physically fit than I had been going into the Air Force. I'd been active in sports and was in excellent physical condition. I enjoyed running, but after several episodes of pericarditis, I found I had no "umph" in my legs. I remember starting to run on the air base track and staggering to a stop, bent over, hands on my knees. It was a very discouraging experience.

Second, my officer evaluations had been downgraded from outstanding to excellent by the reviewing officer, and my recommendation for a Regular Air Force Commission had been refused by the reviewing officer, on both counts because of my frequent attacks of pericarditis. I'd been hospitalized or confined to quarters a third of the time I'd been at Bitburg. I couldn't blame the reviewing officer for thinking that my boss was inflating my evaluation.

Bitburg AFB Hospital

Third, I was for the first time in my life concerned about my health and the implications for my future and that of my family. My new wife was pregnant with our first child. If the Air Force decided I was physically unfit for duty, what then?

&&&&&

The Superior Vena Cava and the Inferior Vena Cava both bring deoxygenated blood to the heart. Generally, the Superior Vena Cava carries blood from the upper part of the body while the Inferior Vena Cava carries blood from the lower part of the body. Like all veins, the Superior and Inferior Vena Cava are made of smooth muscle. Unlike arteries which require their elasticity to withstand the pumping of the heart, veins are more inelastic. These two large major veins feed into the right atrium.

On the 25th of January 1965, "through a left thoracotomy a pericardiectomy was performed with removal of the pericardium to include the area of the superior and inferior vena cava, anteriorly and posteriorly and to the base of the heart."

The surgeon performing the procedure was Dr. Dale E. Dominy, a 39 year-old Air Force major. In his operation report he wrote, "the left pleural space was entered through a left anterior chest incision [Dr. Dominy noted that I already had a previous right thoracotomy] with finding of considerable adhesion of lung to pericardium." Dr. Dominy went on to describe the surgery as, "excision of the pericardium to the region of the right phrenic nerve, the aorta and pulmonary artery..." Dr. Dominy stated that, "the left phrenic vessels and nerve were preserved."

Dr. Dominy wrote that I tolerated the procedure satisfactorily and was taken to recovery in excellent condition. My wife, who saw me leave surgery after what she thought was 4 to 6 hours, said I looked, "gray."

I returned to Bitburg to convalese, and then returned to duty. Unfortunately, my struggle with pericarditis was not over.

Three months after my pericardiectomy, March 1965, I was readmitted to the Bitburg hospital with pericardial pain. I was again treated with ACTH, my condition improved quickly, and I was released. I was told that whatever virus had caused the pericarditis in the first place was probably attacking bits and pieces of remaining pericardial tissue. The doctor told me, "They can't get everything."

I had another episode of pericardial pain in October 1965, and was treated as an outpatient.

In May of '66 I was notified that I had again been disqualified medically for a regular commission. Also in May of that year I was granted a waiver by the flight surgeon and given medical clearance for an altitude chamber flight.

In June of 1966, 3 months prior to my reassignment date, I experienced pain in my right shoulder, across my chest, and into my rib cage. Deep breathing exacerbated the pain, as did lying flat. This was all very similar to my experience before the pericardiectomy. Serial EKGs revealed "evolutionary changes of acute pericarditis with minimal improvement noted in later tracings." Not a good sign.

At the beginning of July1966, I was transferred to Wiesbaden Hospital for further evaluation and possible medical board. The prospect of being discharged from the Air Force at this time was distressing.

I had been responsible for a major transfer of our three squadrons F-105 Thunderchiefs to Vietnam and replacement by the F-4 Phantom. This was a massive undertaking, because we had to ensure each aircraft had undergone periodic maintenance and been prepared for overseas flight. At the same time we had to bring in the F-4s, run them through acceptance inspection, and schedule any maintenance necessary. While doing this, we had to fly regular sorties as part of our mission. I worked long hours and spent most nights with scheduling charts spread on the living room rug trying to work out the details of the transfer and replacement (if only I'd had today's Mac and an Excel spreadsheet).

I had been receiving outstanding performance evaluations (this time not overturned by the reviewing officer), I had been promoted to 1st Lt, and then captain, and I had been selected to attend the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) to study for an advanced degree in human factors engineering at Texas Tech starting at the beginning of the school year, September 1966. My wife was pregnant with our second child and was expecting in October.

Thinking myself fit for world wide duty, I had also volunteered for Vietnam, something I had yet to tell my wife. It didn't seem that this was going to be a problem.

My wife and I decided that she and our 18-month old son should return to the States ahead of me and stay with her parents while I underwent the medical board at Wiesbaden. It was a very difficult trip for her. For me, it was a month of examinations, consultations, waiting, and wondering what the doctors at Wiesbaden would determine about my future in the Air Force.

&&&&&

The Wiesbaden medical staff decided that I was fit for worldwide duty, so informed my commander, and my permanent change of station (PCS) orders were cut, and was on a flight to McQuire Air Force Base, where I'd shipped my Volkswagen Beetle 2 months earlier.

Amazingly, the VW started right up, and I drove immediately to Florida to see my wife and son, and then on to Lubbock, Texas, to start school at Texas Tech, leaving my wife in Florida with her parents and under the care of her brother, who was a doctor.

Texas Tech

I checked into the BOQ and fell into bed. I needed sleep. But there was a lot to do and I was up early the next morning and making up a list of action items. I had to register at Texas Tech, find a house, manage shipment of my household goods, meet with my advisor, and come up with a slate of classes that would meet leveling requirements (my BS in Aeronautical Engineering didn't cover all the prerequisites for my degree work in IE/Human Factors), and keep me on schedule for degree completion in the time allotted by AFIT (1966-68).

I kept in virtually constant touch with my wife and was troubled to learn that she'd had some bleeding and had been put on bed rest awaiting delivery. She was bored, but otherwise seemed okay, or at least she made me believe that was the case.

My Air Force sponsor helped me locate a modest, three bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood and I located my household goods and had them shipped. In the meantime, I started attending classes. Our second son was born 5 weeks prematurely on September 19, 1966. He was being kept in the hospital for observation. My wife was okay.

On October 25, 1966, I was required to report to the local AFIT commander, who handed me a letter from the Air Force Surgeon General disapproving the recommendation of the Wiesbaden medical board and requiring that I undergo another medical evaluation board. My fight to continue my Air Force career without my pericardium was not yet over.

To be continued.

Celebrating Christmas is Haram for Muslims

2011-12-25T14:51:00.000-08:00

I went to the garage and let the cats in, and then walked out to get the newspaper. It an overcast, chilly Christmas morning. Our next-door neighbors had not yet turned off their outdoor Christmas lights. The lighted lawn ornaments, two reindeer, were still slowly moving their wire heads, on the alert for Christmas day hunters; the Muslim neighbors, perhaps?

We have two Muslim families living across the street from us. They have no holiday decorations up, which is not surprising, but I wondered what their attitudes are towards Christmas. For example, how would they react to being wished, "Happy Holidays?" What do they think about Christmas decorations going up on houses in the neighborhood, and downtown, or Christmas sales at all the stores, and the incessant Christmas music played in those stores? They might not shoot the wire-lighted reindeer, but, like me, wouldn't they love to shut off that damned music?

Well, of course, a practicing Muslim does not celebrate Christmas, or any other kuffar (kufr, kafir), i.e., unbeliever religious holiday. According to khilafah.com, "Celebrating the holidays and the occasions of the Kuffar is certainly Haram. You are not permitted to do it. Nor are your rulers allowed to make these (Kufr) holidays as official holidays, since it is an imitation of the Kuffar." Haram in this context connotes sacrilege and is forbidden.

According to the Quran, the Prophet صلى الله عليه is said to have provided the people of Islam with two holidays, Fitr, and Tashriq (Tashreeq). Fitr or Eid al-Fitr is the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. Tashriq are the days of eating and drinking and remembering Allah. The Islamic calendar is lunar, so the timing of these holidays varies according to the Gregorian calendar.

Many American Muslims are said to be tolerant of Christian holidays and are not offended if they are greeted with "Happy Holidays." It would not be appropriate, however, to wish them Merry Christmas.

Since moving here last February, I've had very little opportunity to interact with my Muslim neighbors, and certainly haven't had a heart-to-heart talk about religion. I have talked with Hamid, across the street, about the economic situation and his plans for returning to his country -- Bosnia. I've had more interaction with the other neighbor's son, Amed, who tosses the football with me and is like any American boy of 12.

I hope to learn more about my Muslim neighbors in the coming year, enshallah.

Crossroads GPS Twists Facts in Senate Ads

2011-12-23T20:36:00.000-08:00

Crossroads GPS Twists Facts in Senate Ads

The Iraq War Ends

2011-12-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

We went to war with Iraq a wounded nation. Some say we were compelled by lofty motives; to put down a dictator whose brutal repression of his people cried out for their liberation, and whose weapons of mass destruction threatened the region, if not the world. But in our heart we knew what drove us into that vast desert. In our hearts we seethed with anger, with hate, and yes, with fear, and we went to seek vengeance. And in the blasting heat of those desert sands we took their blood, and spilled our own. And in the end, they danced in Fallujah, as we cased our flags.

As of the end of November of this year, 4486 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, 316 troops of other nations have been killed. Over half of those killed were under 25 years old. Over 32,200 have been wounded, about 20% of which are serious brain or spinal injuries. There is no official count of soldiers suffering PTSD. Roughly 55,000 Iraqi insurgents have been killed. A secret U.S. government estimate puts the Iraqi civilian death toll at over 100,000, although some estimates are 6 times that amount.

Her name is Samira 

She is five
She sees the silver bird flying through a clear blue sky 
It glints in the sun and catches her eye
The bird makes a long slow arc
She loves the shape of the curve it makes 
Like the curve of her arm shielding her eyes
Her thoughts go to her very own tree
And the soft shapes of its lovely limbs
And she thinks of the sound 
Of the leaves at night
How they take her off to sleep

Excerpts of a poem by, “Kaneix,” 2003

December 7, 1941

2011-12-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

The destroyer USS Shaw explodes after being hit by bombs during the
Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941

USS Arizona Memorial

A Hookah Pipe Dream

2011-12-04T16:15:00.000-08:00

Me, with beard and hoodie, dressed to fit in with OWS

I’m growing a beard. My wife doesn’t like it. She turns her head when I go to kiss her. “It’s prickly,” she complains. Well, I’m feeling prickly. I don’t like what I see in the American political or business arenas. So I’m growing the beard in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) folks. I’m not sure what they don’t like, although articulating their complaints seems to be high on the list.

There are several things I don’t like, and I’m sure if I wandered around an OWS camp like James ‘ACORN’ O’Keefe (he takes photos of people misbehaving), I’d find common ground on many of them. For example, I don’t like James O’Keefe.

But let’s stick to the theme. How do I loath thee, Wall Street, let me count the ways.

I don’t like banks taking TARP money and then paying their executives huge bonuses.
I don’t like financial institutions like Goldman Sachs cheating investors.
I don’t like the lack of public and quasi-public oversight of our financial institutions.
I don’t like the executives of companies that led the American economy down the garden path to the dump going unpunished.
I don’t like corporations being people -- they’re so antisocial.

A judge just threw out the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed $285m settlement with Citigroup, which was accused of misleading investors in one of those toxic mortgage schemes at the peak of the US housing bubble. If I recall correctly, he called the amount of the fine, “rounding error” for Citigroup.

The SEC is supposed to be riding herd on Wall Street, but it’s letting the bulls run and feeding the rest of us manure. The SEC has had a longstanding practice of levying relatively minor financial settlements alongside de facto waivers of civil liability for the guilty. “Wealth management institutions,” as they like to call themselves, commit fraud and pay small fines, and the SEC allows them to walk away without admitting to criminal wrongdoing. Nice work if you can get it, and you can, and that brings me to my next dislike.

I hate the fact that no one went to jail. AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley were run by people involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. And the aforementioned Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. No one has been indicted, let alone gone to jail. And no one was watching. And that brings me to my next dislike.

I don’t like the total ineptitude of the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and other federal institutions, including the Justice Department. Justice is blind, only not in a good way.

And then there’s our Congress. So much to dislike and so little space to rail about it. But let’s stay with the theme -- Wall Street. Because running for office in the House and Senate requires raising obscene amounts of campaign cash, and because special interests are willing to contribute said cash, we have encouraged a system of legalized bribery. Wall Street leverages that system (Wall Street likes the word ‘leverage’), and the revolving door between the Fed and employees of Wall Street -- once you were a crook, now you’re a regulator -- to preempt and/or weaken regulatory reform, such as the Dodd-Frank bill.

The only way we’re going to solve the problem of a bought and paid for Congress is to institute a system of publicly funded elections -- no 527s, PACs, Super PACs, Pack-of-Money of any kind, soft, squishy, slimy, or otherwise. No endless robocalls at all hours. None, nada. This is what OWS should be demanding, but that brings me to my last dislike.

I dislike the search-and-destroy partisanship in Congress that makes campaign finance reform a hookah pipe dream.

Given the likelihood of any of these dislikes being addressed by Congress anytime soon, the OWS folks, and my beard, may be around for a while.

Sorry honey.

Every American Should Occupy the Hell Out of Wall Street!

2011-11-16T20:21:00.000-08:00

Listen. The bastards screwed us. I'm not kidding. It's a disgrace. They are not just unethical -- we expect that by now, don't we? They are crooks. If you don't understand that these bankers and brokers are crooks, you haven't been doing your due diligence -- shame on you. Furthermore, if you believe that the various government and private regulatory agencies charged with oversight and enforcement of our financial institutions are actually doing their job, unimpeded by the influence of revolving doors or money, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Look, corporate capitalism is, on the whole, amoral. Corporations and their CEOs aren't in business to "... form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, or promote the general welfare," especially not to promote the general welfare (consider tobacco companies). Corporations are in business to make a profit. As long as they do this more or less honestly, good for them. I mean, caveat emptor, to some extent, right?

But when corporations (which, despite what five members of the Supreme Court tell us, are not people) and their executive officers (who are people) lie, cheat, and steal, we object, don't we? I do. All those people in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement do (and good for them).

Every American should occupy the hell out of Wall Street any way we can. I've written about Goldman Sachs' approach to the idea of an "honest broker" elsewhere, so I'll go on to describe a personal experience with my former broker. I closed my Merrill Lynch account, and I wrote a rather lengthy letter to Merrill's regional director of "wealth management" and detailed the many and varied egregious Merrill activities that led me to my decision. Here's my letter.

March 6, 2009

James P. Hughes

Managing Director, Greater Northwest

1201 Pacific Ave.

Wells Fargo Plaza

Tacoma, WA 98402

SUBJECT: CLIENT SATISFACTION SURVEY

Dear Mr. Hughes;

In your letter of November 12, 2008, your requested that I complete subject survey. Forgive me for taking so long to respond. Developments in Merrill Lynch’s fortunes and conditions in global markets as a whole demanded my attention. Merrill Lynch has been in the news a lot, and the news hasn’t been good.

Today’s news on your firm is that one Merrill trader, Alexis Stenfors, apparently gambled away more than $120 million in the currency markets. Others seemingly lost hundreds of millions on tricky credit derivatives. And it has come to light that Merrill Lynch hemorrhaged $13.8 billion during the final three months of 2008 alone.

Bank of America's shareholders did not learn of the gaping hole until after they approved the merger of the two companies on December 5, 2008. Nor was the extent of the loss fully known when Merrill paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses, which were based on estimates of the firm's performance as of December 8, 2008. Thomas Montag, who headed up Merrill's markets operations, was alone paid a bonus of $39M. When the problems at Merrill became clear, Bank of America was forced to seek a second, multibillion-dollar rescue from Washington.

Before he was forced to resign in January of this year, ex Merrill CEO John Thain, brought in to right the Merrill ship, spent over $1.2M to redecorate his office, while it was coming to light that the firm had actually lost some $27 billion in 2008. Thain accelerated approximately $4B in bonus payments to employees at Merrill just prior to the close of the deal with Bank of America.

Merrill’s true loses appear to have been concealed from Bank of America. BoA, subject to its own lack of due diligence, lowered its dividend after buying Merrill, its stock subsequently dropped from 45 to 5, and Moody’s lowered BoA’s rating. After the BoA takeover, Peter Krause left Merrill and received a $25M “golden parachute” after just 3 months with the company.

In late 2007, Merrill’s CEO, Stanley O’Neal, who was largely responsible for “reinventing” Merrill to be the aggressive, high risk-taking company it became, was forced to resign after the firm suffered its biggest loss in its history (up to that time). O’Neal left with a $160M severance package.

Because I was concerned by what I was reading recently about Merrill Lynch, I did some background research on the firm and found many other examples of Merrill’s lack of values-based leadership. For example:

In January 2007, Merrill Lynch analyst Stanislav Shpigelman was sentenced to 37 months in jail for his part in an insider-trading scheme, following on the heels of ML broker Peter Bacanovic in another, highly publicized insider-trading scandal involving Martha Stewart.

In 2002, the New York State Attorney General’s Office accused Merrill Lynch, and its analyst, Henry Blodget of regularly issuing false or misleading recommendations about Internet-based stocks in an effort to increase the firm’s underwriting business. Merrill Lynch settled the allegations with a $100 million fine.

One of your firm’s most egregious actions was in aiding the massive Enron fraud by creating the false appearance of profits and cash flow. For example, Merrill Lynch purchased Nigerian barges from Enron on the last day of 1999 only because Enron secretly promised to buy the barges back within six months, guaranteeing Merrill Lynch a profit of more than 20%. As a result of this fraud, Merrill Lynch ultimately paid $80 million to settle with the SEC.

In an eerie preview of today, Merrill Lynch lost $377M trading mortgage-backed securities as far back as 1986, helping bankrupt Orange County, California, which sued Merrill.

Merrill Lynch has been fined by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and charged by the SEC with overcharging its mutual fund clients.

Mr. Hughes, the positive feelings I have for my financial advisor are, I’m afraid, overwhelmed by the negative feelings I’ve developed for Merrill Lynch. That’s why, after having had a relationship with Merrill Lynch for over 25 years, I am leaving your firm, and why I am not completing the subject client survey.

Sincerely,

and etc., etc.

Does it surprise you to learn that I never heard back from Mr. Hughes? No? My you are cynical.

Oligarchy, American Style

2011-11-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times, November 4, 2011

Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

IN 1985, THE FORBES 400 were worth $221 billion combined. Today, they’re worth $1.13 trillion—more than the GDP of Canada.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.

So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.

AMONG THE FORBES 400 who gave to a 2004 presidential campaign, 72% gave to Bush.

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

BUSH’S TAX CUTS GIVE a 2-child family earning $1 million an extra $86,722, equivalent to Harvard tuition, room, board, and an iMac G5 for both kids.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?

Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor,

it cannot save the few who are rich" - John F. Kennedy

Richard "Doc" Hastings Playing the Same Old Republican Saw

2011-11-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

You have to hand it to Richard "Doc" Hastings (R-WA) -- he stays on message, no matter whether the message meshes with the facts. Republicans want you to believe that if we just cut taxes and eliminate “burdensome” government regulations, jobs will suddenly pop up like mushrooms in May. Never mind that Republicans have being playing the same old saw since time immemorial with the same results, i.e., the rich get richer, and the rest of America gets screwed.

Hastings went on Fox News recently to propose that environmental regulations be lifted so logging could resume in National Forests in Washington. The state is facing a 4 to 5 billion dollar budget shortfall in the next 2 years. Budgets for education, health care, and help for the state’s poor and disabled are being slashed, and Hastings is going on Fox to lament environmental regulations on slash and burn logging?

What's up Doc? Total Timber sales revenues in 2011 amounted to about 4% of the state’s deficit and money going into the State's coffers from that revenue stream is minuscule. How about spending a little time working on the other 99% of the problem and stop playing with that old Republican saw in our forests?

When it comes to the Washington State budget shortfall, thoughtful people (not you, Doc) have some difficult decisions to make. Decide what your priorities are on the League of Education Voters web site and see how you fare in cutting the deficit.

To Cyber Attack or Not to Cyber Attack?

2011-10-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

It has been reported recently that the Obama Administration decided against using cyber warfare to suppress Libya's air defenses as the US sought to aid the rebels attempting to overthrow the Qaddafi regime. Why the reluctance to use a modern, bloodless attack mode?

Libya Before Qaddafi

I spent 5 weeks in Libya on a temporary duty (TDY) assignment in 1964. I was with the US Air Force stationed at Bitburg AFB in Germany. I was, at the tender age of 26, the Chief of Periodic Maintenance for our F-105 squadron. We deployed F-105s to Wheelus AFB, Libya, for pilot training in air-to-air, and air-to-ground combat. I headed up the maintenance squadron of over 100 enlisted men.

I remember my first tour of Wheelus. It was a vast base ideally located for flying off into the Libyan desert (90% of Libya is desert), dropping bombs on the sand dunes, and then returning for a dip in the Mediterranean and a cold beer at the O-Club. The down side of Wheelus was the heat (the highest naturally occurring temperature ever recorded on earth occurred in the Libyan desert). We regularly experienced day-time temperatures of over 45C (113F). One section of the base was reserved for the Libyan Air Force. It consisted of a couple of C-47 "Gooney Birds" and a like number of Cessna, T-37, "Tweet," twin engine trainer-attack aircraft.

Libya Before the Uprising

By 2010, Libya's air force was the largest in North Africa. It was headquartered at Okba Ben Nafi Air Base -- formerly Wheelus and Methega Air Bases -- located 7 miles due east of Tripoli. This was a relatively well-equipped air base that had been developed with Russian assistance to support and maintain over 200 combat aircraft. Another large air base was located at Benghazi and a third, Gamal Abdul Nasser Air Base, was situated a few miles southwest of Tobruk. Two other air bases were located near the Egyptian border -- at Al Kufrah Oasis and at Jabal al Uwaynat in the far south. Overall, the Libyan air force was believed to consist of over 500 combat aircraft, with some reports suggesting the number was as high as 700, including MiG-23s, MiG-25s, Su-24, Fencer 'D's, Su-27s and Mirage F.1EDs. At least one squadron of Tu-22 bombers were known to be located at Okba Ben Nafi AB.

Libya deployed the SA-2, SA-3, and Crotale missiles. At least one battery of each of these types were spotted at each of Libya's three main air bases (Okba Ben Nafi, Benghazi and Gamal Abdul Nassar). One battery of Crotale sites had been detected at each of the two smaller bases in the southeast. The Libyan Army also operated three SA-5 batteries at undisclosed locations -- probably in storage.

NATO Aids the Uprising Against Qaddafi

The New York Times reports that according to military officials, American warplanes struck at Libyan air defenses about 60 times, and remotely operated drones have fired missiles at Libyan forces about 30 times, since the United States handed control of the air war in Libya to NATO in early April. Today, Aljezeera reports that Libya's air force "no longer exists as a fighting force" following the devastating air strikes by international coalition forces, a British military officer has claimed.

There are no reports on the casualties that Libyan regular forces may have suffered as a result of the air strikes that targeted Libya's air defenses. A U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet crashed in Libya, but it was the result of a mechanical failure, not hostile fire, and its two crew members managed to eject to safety. It was the first coalition aircraft to have crashed in the three days of air strikes over Libya up to that time.

It's not necessary to detail the costs and risks of conventional air defense suppression methods to understand that a cyber attack would be cheaper, less risky, and, at least in the short term, equally effective. Only if the objective is to eliminate air defense capabilities in the long term, would conventional methods be the choice.

Why the US Didn't Use Cyber Warfare

According to reports, the Obama administration intensely debated whether to open the Libyan air campaign with a cyber attack to disrupt and disable the Qaddafi government’s air-defense system, which might have threatened allied warplanes (although this is unlikely). The objective would have been to break through the firewalls of the Libyan government’s computer networks to sever military communications links and prevent the early-warning radars from gathering information and relaying it to missile batteries aiming at NATO warplanes.

But administration officials and even some military officers balked, fearing that it might set a precedent for other nations, in particular Russia or China, to carry out such offensives of their own, and questioning whether the attack could be mounted on such short notice. They were also unable to resolve whether the president had the power to proceed with such an attack without informing Congress.

Early in 2010, the US Deputy Defense Secretary warned of cyber warfare’s appeal to potential foes who are unable to match the U.S.'s conventional military might. An enemy could deploy hackers to take down U.S. financial systems, communications and infrastructure, he suggested, at a cost far below that of building a trillion-dollar fleet of fifth-generation jet fighters. "Some governments already have the capacity to disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure." The nation's top intelligence official warned that cyber-enemies have already "severely threatened" U.S. computer systems, and said that, "Malicious cyber activity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication."

United States Cyber Command

But the US military has been working for years on developing its own sophisticated Information Operations (IO) capability and cyber warfare is the most technologically advanced and perhaps the most militarily important element of this IO capability.

The Air Force is developing the ability to infiltrate any computer system anywhere in the world completely undetected. It plans to slip computer code into a potential foe's computer and let it sit there for years, maintaining a low and slow gathering paradigm to thwart detection.
The Army is developing techniques that capture and identify data traversing enemy networks for the purpose of Information Operations or otherwise countering adversary communications.
And the Navy is developing a non-lethal, non-attributable system designed to offer non-kinetic offensive information operation solutions.

In fact, the US established the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) on May 21, 2010. USCYBERCOM “plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

USCYBERCOM coordinates the cyber activities of the various military departments. Service elements include Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER); 24 AF/ Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER); Fleet Cyber Command (FLTCYBERCOM); and Marine Forces Cyber Command (MARFORCYBER).

US Capabilities and Limitations

According to some IT experts, the US is one of the top three of nations in terms of cyber warfare capabilities; the other two are China and Russia. The US is concerned that if it is discovered using cyber war against an enemy, other countries would not hesitate to respond by using cyber war against our infrastructure and/or interests. In other words, the US views cyber war in the same way it views conventional war -- you bomb me, I'll bomb you. That premise is certainly debatable (does anyone really believe that North Korea hesitates to use cyber war to attack the US?), but what isn't debatable is that just as warfare in general has gone beyond the nation state boundary, cyber warfare has certainly done the same -- that is after all, the nature of the beast. Richard Clarke talked about this in a PBS interview.

In their book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, Richard Clarke and Robert Knake state that, “Cyberspace includes the Internet plus lots of other networks of computers that are not supposed to be accessible from the Internet. Clarke and Knake point out that cyberspace includes transactional networks that do things like send data about money flows, stock market trades, and credit card transactions; and control systems that just allow machines to speak to other machines, like control panels talking to pumps, elevators, and generators. They go on to say that, “In the broadest terms, cyber warriors can get into these networks and control or crash them.” Certainly, the United States has or is quickly developing these capabilities.

A warning pops up on Iran's Bushehr's SCADA computer screen.
The plant was attacked by the Stuxnet malware.

Ironically, the US has rejected efforts by other nations to institute a cyber war "arms control" treaty. That rejection is probably reasonable, given the difficulty of verifying compliance. Nevertheless, discussion and debate domestically and in international fora is needed.

Unfortunately, the cyber arena, like so many other national issues, has become a partisan battleground, with Republicans forming their own cybersecurity task force as a response to President Barack Obama's May 2011 legislative proposal. Republicans appear to be concerned again with excessive government regulation regarding defensive measures that might be required of private companies who are part of America's critical infrastructure.

So, the Obama Administration's reluctance to undertake an offensive cyber attack against Libyan air defense systems reflects the administration's caution in setting a precedence in a still evolving arena of advanced warfare. One wonders whether the other 21 nations with such capabilities, and the non-nation players assembling cyber capabilities, will be as cautious.

Should You Get a PSA Test?

2011-10-14T03:34:00.000-07:00

According to the Mayo Clinic, "Prostate cancer screening can help identify cancer early on, when treatment is most effective. And a normal PSA test, combined with a digital rectal exam, can help reassure you that it's unlikely you have prostate cancer."

But according to a recent finding of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force,"The vast majority of men who are treated do not have prostate cancer death prevented or lives extended from that treatment, but are subjected to significant harms." The American College of Preventive Medicine (ACPM) does not support the efficacy of PSA tests or the digital rectal exam (DRE) for prostate cancer screening.

PSA tests have been used for men over 50 since FDA approval in 1994. DREs have been done even longer. When a PSA test turns up prostate cancer in a man with no outward symptoms, that early warning could help him beat a tumor that otherwise would have killed him. But there are two other possibilities: Either the tumor is so aggressive that the patient dies anyway, or it is so slow-growing that it wouldn't have been fatal, even if left untreated.

According to the task force, fully 95% of men whose prostate cancers are detected with PSA tests will be alive 12 years later even if they don't get treatment. And, the panel added, no study on prostate cancer screening has ever shown that screening reduces the number of deaths.

I started having the PSA test, in addition to a digital rectal exam (DRE), annually after age 55. Over the years, my PSA gradually rose,eventually reaching double digits (no pun intended). My urologist recommended a biopsy. The first one he performed did not reveal any cancer, but my PSA continued to rise, and I had a second biopsy, which did show traces of cancer. Incidentally, although the biopsy is an unpleasant out-patient procedure, and has its own risks (infection, blood in urine and/or sperm), it is not one of your more involved or painful medical tests.

After considering my situation further and doing some research on the Internet, I opted for the "watch and wait" option, rather than having surgery immediately. My urologist was okay with this. While I "watched and waited," I researched treatment options, specialists, and medical centers. I talked with men who'd had various treatments. I documented my findings systematically, using an Excel spreadsheet. I was focused and meticulous. I knew the probable effectiveness and risk probabilities of each form of treatment, from doing nothing, to radical prostatectomy.

I waited a year. After another biopsy showed cancer, I asked to discuss the findings of the biopsy with the local pathologist (tissue samples had been sent to a pathologist in another city, as well as being examined by our local pathologist). The local pathologist was very willing to discuss the results with me and even sat me down in front of a dual microscope and showed me what he was identifying as cancerous tissue. This was a very interesting experience for me and demonstrated quite dramatically how important experience is in the examination of tissue samples, for what the pathologist saw, I would have definitely missed.

Prostate Tissue Sample

I decided that I wanted my prostate removed. For me the deciding factor was my life expectancy. I was 68. Both my parents had lived into their 100s. I opted for a procedure that attempted to preserve the nerves attached to the prostate. These nerves are crucial for a man's erectal function. Nerve-sparing prostatectomy requires very precise surgery, and therefore I chose retropubic prostatectomy; it is more invasive, but provides the surgeon the best clearance.

Once I decided on my treatment, I looked for the best surgeon to do the job. I found the man who pioneered the technique, Dr. Paul H. Lang. He was located at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, a 4-hour drive from where I lived. My urologist did this type of surgery, but I talked to him about it and he agreed that Dr. Lang would likely be a better choice for the technique I'd chosen. It may also have been that given how much effort I'd put into deciding my course of action, he'd rather have someone else responsible for the result. Frankly, I didn't care about hurting his feelings -- it was my prostate, and my future.

I had my prostate surgery 5 years ago and I've been extremely happy with the result. For those pondering their options given the most recent findings regarding screening for prostate cancer, my advise, for what it's worth, is, be your own consultant and advocate. No single test, whether for that pain in your left knee, or your problems urinating, is going to be sufficient for making a decision on screening or treatment.

When it comes to early detection of prostate cancer, and what to do about it, you have to consider all the relevant factors, including your age, health, family history, and so on. The PSA test is simple and painless and can be done along with other blood work. I'd recommend doing it and the DRE annually for men over 55 who have concerns about their predisposition for prostate cancer. If your PSA is elevated, don't panic, take the next steps and gather all the information available to you -- you'll find there's a lot -- before deciding what your course of action will be. And when dealing with your doctor, remember, it's your future.

How to be a Denialist

2011-09-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) "We knew they were cooking the science to support the flawed UN IPCC agenda."

Allege that there's a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence.
Use fake experts to support your story.
Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited.
Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts.
Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man.
Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature. Insist "both sides" must be heard and cry censorship when "dissenting" arguments or experts are rejected.

(Martin McKee, The European Journal of Public Health, vol 19, p 2)

Blow Smoke in Her Face and She'll Follow You Anywhere

2011-09-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

The Tobacco Industry is fighting back after they were finally taken to task by Congress for killing Americans and lying about it. It is estimated that the tobacco industry spends some $15 billion per year advertising its products. More and more, Big Tobacco is focusing its advertising dollars, product design and placement on teenagers, with the aim of getting them hooked early. They are even creating tobacco products that are easily concealed in schools and at home. And they're coming up with smokeless products. Camel, for instance, is test marketing tobacco sticks, strips, and orbs. The orbs look a lot like Tic Tacs mints, while the sticks resemble toothpicks, and the strips are much like Listerine breath mint strips. One tobacco lobbyist felt pretty good about this because, in his words, it really reduces the effects of second-hand smoke.

"All my friends are doing it."

The perfume they used? Chanel #5 @ $300/oz. What they smell like? Tobacco smoke.

Do these young women think they look sexy with smoke spewing out of the mouths? Isn't it just a bit absurd really? But tobacco company advertising has for years tried to convince us that smoking is cool and sexy.

"Blow smoke in her face and she'll follow you anywhere."

The Industry doesn't use models like these to advertise their products.

Ronnie smokes 'em. Shouldn't you?

Maybe Ronnie will send some to you for Christmas

Nicotine is not addictive. I swear.

Smoking is stupid, and blowing smoke out of one's face looks stupid, even if it's an electric cigarette. I mean, what's that smoke coming out of your face?

And how about chewing tobacco? Sticking that stuff between your cheek and gum. Yuke! Seeing all that spitting by ball players is bad enough, but believe me, you don't want to see the pictures of people's ruined teeth, jaw, and most of their face. Ugh!

Baseball banned tobacco use in the minor leagues in 1993,
but it is still common in the majors.

"...men with half-burned wood in their hands and certain herbs to take their smokes, which are some dry herbs put in a certain leaf, also dry, like those the boys make on the day of the Passover of the Holy Ghost; and having lighted one part of it, by the other they suck, absorb, or receive that smoke inside with the breath, by which they become benumbed and almost drunk, and so it is said they do not feel fatigue. These, muskets as we will call them, they call. I knew Spaniards on this island of Española who were accustomed to take it, and being reprimanded for it, by telling them it was a vice, they replied they were unable to cease using it. I do not know what relish or benefit they found in it." (as recorded by Bartolome de las Casas, sent by Columbus into the interior of Cuba, circa 1500).

The Last Century of Wild Seafood

2011-09-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

by Richard Black, BBC

Factory Trawler

There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study. Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Writing in the journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity. But a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks.

"The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one," said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada.

“This century is the last century of wild seafood. What we're highlighting is there is a finite number of stocks; we have gone through one-third, and we are going to get through the rest," said Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project. He added: "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood."

This is a vast piece of research, incorporating scientists from many institutions in Europe and the Americas, and drawing on four distinctly different kinds of data. Catch records from the open sea give a picture of declining fish stocks.

In 2003, 29% of open sea fisheries were in a state of collapse, defined as a decline to less than 10% of their original yield. Bigger vessels, better nets, and new technology for spotting fish are not bringing the world's fleets bigger returns - in fact, the global catch fell by 13% between 1994 and 2003.

Historical records from coastal zones in North America, Europe and Australia also show declining yields, in step with declining species diversity; these are yields not just of fish, but of other kinds of seafood too.

Zones of biodiversity loss also tended to see more beach closures, more blooms of potentially harmful algae, and more coastal flooding.

Experiments performed in small, relatively contained ecosystems show that reductions in diversity tend to bring reductions in the size and robustness of local fish stocks. This implies that loss of biodiversity is driving the declines in fish stocks seen in the large-scale studies.

The final part of the jigsaw is data from areas where fishing has been banned or heavily restricted. These show that protection brings back biodiversity within the zone, and restores populations of fish just outside.

"The image I use to explain why biodiversity is so important is that marine life is a bit like a house of cards," said Dr Worm. "All parts of it are integral to the structure; if you remove parts, particularly at the bottom, it's detrimental to everything on top and threatens the whole structure. "

And we're learning that in the oceans, species are very strongly linked to each other - probably more so than on land."

What the study does not do is attribute damage to individual activities such as over-fishing, pollution or habitat loss; instead it paints a picture of the cumulative harm done across the board. Even so, a key implication of the research is that more of the oceans should be protected.

But the extent of protection is not the only issue, according to Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the global marine programme at IUCN, the World Conservation Union. "The benefits of marine-protected areas are quite clear in a few cases; there's no doubt that protecting areas leads to a lot more fish and larger fish, and less vulnerability," he said. "But you also have to have good management of marine parks and good management of fisheries. Clearly, fishing should not wreck the ecosystem, bottom trawling being a good example of something which does wreck the ecosystem." But, he said, the concept of protecting fish stocks by protecting biodiversity does make sense. "This is a good compelling case; we should protect biodiversity, and it does pay off even in simple monetary terms through fisheries yield."

Protecting stocks demands the political will to act on scientific advice - something which Boris Worm finds lacking in Europe, where politicians have ignored recommendations to halt the iconic North Sea cod fishery year after year. Without a ban, scientists fear the North Sea stocks could follow the Grand Banks cod of eastern Canada into apparently terminal decline. "I'm just amazed, it's very irrational," he said. "You have scientific consensus and nothing moves. It's a sad example; and what happened in Canada should be such a warning, because now it's collapsed it's not coming back."

"So long, you've run out of all the fish."

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

Attack on the Pentagon, September 11, 2001

I was working at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Science & Technology Intelligence when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. The event completely changed my work focus and I soon found myself working out of a special compartmented information facility, a SCIF (pronounced “skiff”), in the basement of the Pentagon helping to plan Operation Iraqi Freedom. I saw the damage to the Pentagon first hand.

When I returned to PNNL, I worked on counter terrorism. We briefed a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) for our region -- JTTFs were set up as a result of what were seen as intelligence failures in preventing 9/11 -- and worked with an FBI office in Seattle to help them shift from after-the-fact crime assessment to forward-looking attack prevention. I worked with our counterintelligence/counter terrorism group doing threat assessments.

Back in the PNNL SCIF, I saw playing cards showing the most wanted members of Saddam Hussein’s government posted on the cork board. These cards were called “personality identification playing cards.” We turned them upside down as the individuals were captured or killed. You can now buy these cards on eBay (but some of the decks for sale are not the original cards).

After my temporary duty at the Pentagon, my focus at PNNL shifted from intelligence analysis of major powers, to the far more difficult assessment of non-state actors. We quickly learned that an over dependence on technical means for intelligence collection (e.g., imagery) wouldn't cut it in the new threat environment.

I think the world changed dramatically after 9/11 -- mine certainly did.

"As the United States heads toward the sixth year of the global war on terror, representing violent nonstate actors (VNSA) as a system remains elusive to all but a few pockets of the Department of Defense." (Maj. Tara A. Leweling, 2006)

Blowing Smoke About Clouds

2011-09-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

by Pericles

Originally posted to Pericles on Tue Sep 06, 2011 at 07:51 AM PDT.

Also republished by Science Matters, SciTech, and Community Spotlight.

Cloud formation over Amon Basin, Kennewick, Washington

Last week an International Business Times headline brought me up short: "Alarmists Got it Wrong, Humans Not Responsible for Climate Change: CERN".

"Wow," I thought. "CERN. Not some Exxon-funded stooge. CERN, where the real scientists are. There's the CERN logo right in the article. I'd better read this and rethink my opinion on climate change."

I read the article and I learned a lot. But not about science, about propaganda. Hijacking the well-deserved prestige of a scientific organization like CERN is easier than I thought.

Occasionally you need to know some science to spot the BS in a newspaper science article, but most of the time you just need some common sense. Start with: Does the content of the article justify the headline?

Not this time. The article discusses new research about cloud formation that CERN scientists recently published in Nature (another one of the biggest names in science). But nobody at CERN is quoted saying, "Humans aren't responsible for climate change."

In fact, the article doesn't quote anybody from CERN (or Nature). Who, then? Lawrence Solomon, David Whitehouse, and Nigel Calder. If you're just skimming, you might assume at least one of them represents CERN, but they don't.

Who are they? In the Age of Google, that's an easy question.

Solomon is the author of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud; And those who are too fearful to do so.
Whitehouse is from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, described by SourceWatch as "a United Kingdom group opposing action to mitigate climate change". Funded by ... they won't say.
Calder (according to Wikipedia) is "a long-standing skeptic of global warming" who "participated in the polemic film The Great Global Warming Swindle."

So a more accurate headline would be: "Global-Warming Skeptics Claim New CERN Research Vindicates Them".

Well, of course they claim that. But then any real journalist would have to ask: Does it?

Journalism -- even journalism about rocket science -- is not rocket science: Punch "CERN cloud experiment results" into Google, and in seconds you'll be looking at the CERN press release and its supporting press briefing. Spend a few minutes chasing links, and you'll see the lead author of the Nature article (Jasper Kirkby) quoted in Scientific Computing, Live Science, and -- oh, look at this! -- Nature News, which is put out by the same people who publish Nature.

So it isn't hard to find sources closer to the action than Solomon, Whitehouse, and Calder. Do any of them say "Humans are not responsible for climate change"? No. So what is this experiment and what does it really show?

CERN made a cloud chamber that simulates Earth's atmosphere, and tried to figure out where atmospheric aerosols -- tiny particles that cloud droplets form around -- come from. They discovered that previous theories only accounted for a small fraction of the aerosols observed in the atmosphere. They could account for more when they added cosmic rays to their simulation, but they still couldn't form a complete theory.

The CERN press release quotes Kirkby:

“It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone. Now it’s vitally important to discover which additional vapors are involved, whether they are largely natural or of human origin, and how they influence clouds.”

The press briefing concludes:

“This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapours have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects on clouds have been confirmed.”

Nothing in the press release quantifies this possibility. Kirkby told Nature News: "At the moment, [our research] actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it's a very important first step."

Live Science also talked to Kirkby:

“The research doesn't call into question the basic science of greenhouse gas warming, Kirkby emphasized, but rather refines one facet of the research. ... "It's part of the jigsaw puzzle, and you could say it adds to the understanding of the big picture," he said. "But it in no way disproves the other pieces."

None of that stops Solomon from claiming (in the Financial Post -- again published with no comment from the actual researchers) that, “The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.”

Discover's Bad Astronomy blog responds:

“There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort.”

BA goes on to explain why you shouldn't expect any future research to support Solomon either:

“The problem here is two fold: there doesn’t appear to be a large variation in Earth’s temperatures with solar activity, and also that temperatures are rising extremely rapidly in the past 100 years, when solar activity has been relatively normal.”

So, who do you think the conservative media outlets go with: science publications that have done the legwork and talked to the CERN researchers, or a long-time global-warming denier who makes unsupported claims in an opinion piece in a financial newspaper?

Do you have to ask?

Fox Business Channel's Tobin Smith:

“We can report tonight the science of climate change is now all but settled. Yes friends and neighbors, and the global warming alarmists have been dealt a wee bit of a blow, right? CERN, C-E-R-N, one of the world's largest and most prestigious centers for scientific research, has concluded that it's the sun's rays, not human activity, which controls the earth's climate. Now, that, of course, is horrible news for the greenies who've used, you know, for years questionable science to justify more and more regulations against fossil fuels like coal and oil, all the while arguing for more and more for the renewable energy sources they just love so dearly. So are the greens prepared to back down now that the science has proved them wrong?”

Media Matters collects similar statements from CBN, the Washington Times, and Investor's Business Daily -- all clearly repeating Solomon's interpretation rather than CERN's.

So this is what you need to hijack the well-deserved prestige of a research organization like CERN and a journal like Nature:

three zero-credibility cranks to "interpret" the research by making stuff up,
two newspapers willing to ignore anybody connected to the research, and instead source their articles to the cranks,
an echo chamber of news outlets willing to accept the first two papers as reliable sources, do no independent checking, and instead let false claims grow in the telling,
opinion leaders in the echo chamber who shift the onus away from the cranks onto their opponents: What's wrong with those greenies, that they still hold out now that they've been proven wrong?

Result? Rank-and-file conservatives hear the same message from multiple directions. When they confidently tell their friends and co-workers that CERN has proved Al Gore wrong, people who get their news from the New York Times know nothing about it -- because an accurate assessment of these tentative results was not deemed sufficiently newsworthy. And the conservative nods knowingly: It's that liberal media, constantly suppressing anything that doesn't fit its biased worldview.

Comments of General Liang Guanglie, Minister of National Defense, China

2011-08-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

The 10th IISS Asia Security Summit

The Shangri-La Dialogue

Singapore

Sunday 05 June 2011

Fourth Plenary Session

China’s International Security Cooperation

Q&A

General Liang Guanglie

Minister of National Defense, China

Dr Dana Allin, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs; Editor of Survival, IISS

General, thank you for your remarks. You spoke eloquently about some general principles, among them inclusive security, and that no alliances should be directed against [a] third country. However, like some others in this hall, I would like to ask you about a more specific problem. As the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) continues to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, is it not understandable and indeed inevitable that threatened countries such as Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) are going to seek an ever-closer military alliance with the United States?

General Liang Guanglie [As translated from Chinese: Since North Korea performed nuclear tests several years ago, the situation on the Korean Peninsula has become the concern of all parties, especially the international society, in recent years. It is sometimes under tension, and the tension is alleviated at other times. From the end of last year to the start of this year, especially, it was almost on the verge of breaking out in a war.

As a neighbour to the Korean Peninsula, we surely attach great importance to this problem. The Chinese side, or the government of China, is making joint efforts with the international society, including Russia, America, Japan, South Korea, and others. For this purpose, the mechanism of the Six-Party Talks was established, and the United Nations has also created related resolutions, which I will not further discuss here. China has signed the resolution documents of the UN, and it is quite clear that we oppose the tension on the Korean Peninsula as well as the development of nuclear weapons by North Korea. With the joint efforts of all parties involved, the tension on the Korean Peninsula is somewhat alleviated now, but relations are still quite weak.

Yesterday, I discussed this problem with Mr Toshima Kitazawa, the Defence Minister of Japan, and Mr Kim Kwan Jin, the Defence Minister of South Korea. All of us are highly concerned about the military developments in this region, and we hope the weak situation will not last much longer. All parties involved should properly solve the problem through active efforts and negotiations, avoiding producing man-made tension.

We will try our best to communicate with South Korea and Japan, as well as North Korea. I can be very frank with you that what we have done in communications with North Korea is much more than you imagine, including the work of our representatives to the Six-Party Talks, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the leaders of our country. We have been advising North Korea, via different channels, not to take the risk.

Of course, South Korea and Japan are also actively negotiating with us and communication with each is ongoing. It is the joint effort of all parties that helps to alleviate the tension in this region. Therefore, I hope all parties involved can keep calm and exercise restraint, doing more work that is beneficial for the stability on the peninsula and not going to arms. What we do should not lead to the increase of tension in this region, but help to alleviate the tension and promote stability on the peninsula. Thank you.]

Me and Steve Jobs

2011-08-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs announced his retirement as CEO of Apple last Wednesday, August 24, 2011, thirty years after I first encountered the Apple computer. I owe whatever facility I have with personal computers to Jobs. I’m sorry to see him go, and I’m glad he got together with Steve Wozniak in his dad’s garage to found Apple.

I was employed by Battelle’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in 1981, where I’d been hired right after retiring from the Air Force to work on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) project examining human factors in nuclear power plant design. The NRC initiated the project after the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979, and contracted with PNNL to do the human factors study. I started work with a group of nuclear engineers, some of whom were former Navy submariners, and each of us had been provided the Apple II-plus personal computer. They were okay, but in my view, no giant leap forward in “user friendliness.”

My early experience with computers involved reserving time on the university’s central processor to run programs I’d written in FORTRAN and key punched on Hollerith cards. I waited overnight for the results and if my program didn’t run, I had to find my error and start over again. This was in 1966.

I was still using central computing in the Air Force in 1968, where our programs were stored on paper tape. Later, when I had access to a desktop computer, I was required to use an input/output language via text commands typed on the keyboard and displayed on the screen. This was still the case when I retired from the Air Force in 1981; the year Apple went public (Apple Computer was famously formed on April 1, 1976).

It wasn’t until about 1984 that I came to know and love the Graphical User Interface, or GUI (pronounced gooey). I was assigned as project manager on a contract with the Army to help modernize small caliber ammunition production. Our particular task was to implement an improved quality control system at the Army’s Lake City Army Ammunition Plant (LCAAP) in Independence, MO, by computerizing the measurement and control process using personal computers. The project was known as the LCAAP Production Quality Control System (PQCS) project. When we first toured the WWII-era plant, we found that the quality control line was staffed by women with absolutely no experience with computers and, in fact, a distinct aversion to them.

In a conference back at PNNL one of our computer scientists mentioned a new kind of computer that employed a much easier to use input/output system, employing a mouse, pictures, and standard english, rather than computerize. The system had been developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). After some further research, we found that Steve Jobs had toured Xerox PARC, made a deal with them, and was developing a computer using Xerox PARC’s GUI ideas. The computer was known as “Lisa.” Reportedly, Lisa stood for "Local Integrated Software Architecture", but it was also the name of Steve Jobs' daughter.

We purchased several Lisa 2/10 computers and began “playing” with them. We were impressed with their ease of use, but realized that the cost of the machines was prohibitive. However, Apple was coming out with a new line of computers called the “Macintosh;” a smaller, cheaper (at around $2500) computer with an attached keyboard and mouse for input, and a built-in screen for output. We purchased several machines, bundled them up, and headed back to Lake City to try and convert the women to computer users.

Initially, things didn’t look good, as a number of the women when told that they would input data by clicking the “mouse,” refused to touch the device. Fortunately, we had a nice looking guy on our team, with curly hair, blue eyes, a personable manner, and the patience of Job (pun intended). He worked with a more pliable member of the women’s group and taking her hand in his gently placed it on the mouse and guided her through the motions of inputting data. She became a convert and began working to convince the other women to cooperate. We went back to PNNL and began programming the PQCS.

Not only was implementation of the PQCS at LCAAP a success, but staff at PNNL began coming around to see what members of my project team were using as their personal computers and before you knew it, Macintosh computers began proliferating in the Lab. My department manager later berated me, only partly in jest, for causing the Lab the problem of providing technical support to both the PC and Macintosh product lines. Of course, Apple's famous and controversial commercial that ran during Superbowl XVIII helped somewhat.

My original Mac had a 7.8 Mega Herz processor, 512 Mega Bytes of internal memory, and a 9-inch monochrome screen. I’m using a Macintosh “MacBook Pro” laptop to write this piece. It has a 2.5 GHz processor, 4 GB of internal memory, and 15-inch color screen. It cost me $600 less than my original Mac. I love it.

Thanks, Steve!

Oh Zooxanthellae, wherefore art thou?

2011-08-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system, composed of roughly 3,000 individual

reefs and 900 islands, that stretch for over 1,600 miles. The reef is located in the Coral Sea

off the coast of Queensland in north-east Australia.

Warmer sea surface temperatures as a result of global warming are blamed for an increase in a phenomenon called coral bleaching, which is a whitening of coral caused when the coral expels a single-celled, symbiotic alga called zooxanthellae. This alga usually lives within the tissues of the corals and, among other things, gives them its spectacular range of colors.

Zooxanthellae are expelled when the coral is under stress from environmental factors such as abnormally high water temperatures or pollution. Since the zooxanthellae help coral in nutrient production, their loss can affect coral growth and make coral more vulnerable to disease. Major bleaching events took place on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 and 2002, causing a significant die-off of corals in some locations.

A Cross in the Oak

2011-08-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

As I was going to war
I cut a cross in the oak,
So that father and mother shouldn't weep,
So that the crossed oak should weep.

Es, karā aiziedams,
Cirtu krustu ozolā,
Lai nerauda tēvs, māmiņa,
Lai raud krustiņš ozolā.

But they do weep, the mothers and fathers. Over six thousand US men and women have died in Iraq (4442) and Afghanistan (1584) as of June 2011, and yet our news media ignores these futile wars and their toll, and instead concentrates its coverage on the lives and deaths of sometime celebrities, who greatest contribution to society may be an object lesson in wasted lives.

Sport, Horsemanship and the Stage According to the Green Book of Maummar Qadaffi

2011-08-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

The following excerpt from Col Maummar Qaddafi's "Green Book," is provided in the hope that it will provide the guidance necessary for the NFL and NBA to make rationale choices about the futures of their sports.

Sport is either private, like the prayer which one performs alone inside a closed room, or public, performed collectively in open places, like the prayer which is practised corporately in places of worship. The first type of sport concerns the individuals themselves, while the second type is of concern to all people. It must be practised by all and should not be left to anyone else to practise on their behalf. It is unreasonable for crowds to enter places of worship just to view a person or a group of people praying without taking part. It is equally unreasonable for crowds to enter playgrounds and arenas to watch a player of a team without participating themselves.

Sport is like praying, eating, and the feelings of coolness and warmth. It is unlikely that crowds will enter a restaurant just to look at a person or a group of people eat. It is also unlikely that they will let a person or a group or people enjoy warmth or ventilation on their behalf. It is equally illogical for the society to allow an individual or a team to monopolize sports while the society as a whole pays the costs of such a monopoly for the exclusive benefit of one person or team. In the same way, people should not allow an individual or a group, whether it is a party, class, sect, tribe or parliament, to replace them in deciding their destiny and in defining their needs.

Private sport is of concern only to those who practise it on their own and at their own expense. Public sport is a public need and the people cannot be either democratically or physically represented by others in its practice. Physically, the representative cannot transmit to others how his body and morale benefit from sport. Democratically, no individual or team has the right to monopolize sport, power, wealth or arms for themselves. Sporting clubs represent the basic organization of traditional sport in the world today. They retain all expenditure and public facilities allocated to sport in every state. These institutions are social monopolistic agencies like all dictatorial political instruments which monopolize authority, economic instruments which monopolize wealth, and traditional military instruments which monopolize arms.

As the era of the masses does away with the instruments monopolizing power, wealth and arms, it will, inevitably, destroy the monopoly of social activity in such areas as sports, horsemanship, and so forth. The masses who queue to vote for a candidate to represent them in deciding their destiny act on the impossible assumption that this person will represent them and embody, on their behalf, their dignity, sovereignty and point of view. However, those masses who are robbed of their will and dignity are reduced to mere spectators, watching another person performing what they should naturally be doing themselves.

The same holds true of the crowds who, because of ignorance, fail to practise sport by and for themselves. They are fooled by monopolistic instruments which endeavour to stupefy them and divert them to indulging in laughter and applause instead. Sport, as a social activity, must be for the masses, just as power, wealth and arms should be in the hands of the people.

Public sport is for all the masses. It is right of all people for their health and recreational benefit. It is mere stupidity to leave its benefits to certain individuals and teams who monopolize these while the masses provide the facilities and pay the expenses for the establishment of public sports. The thousands who crowd stadiums to view, applaud and laugh are foolish people who have failed to carry out the activity themselves.

They line up lethargically in the stands of the sports grounds, and applaud those heroes who wrest from them the initiative, dominate the field and control the sport and, in so doing, exploit the facilities that the masses provide. Originally, the public grandstands were designed to demarcate the masses from the playing fields and grounds; to prevent the masses from having access to the playing fields. When the masses march and play sport in the centre of playing fields and open spaces, stadiums will be vacant and become redundant. This will take place when the masses become aware of the fact; that sport is a public activity which must be practised rather than watched. This is more reasonable as an alternative than the present costum of a helpless apathetic majority that merely watches.

Grandstands will disappear because no one will be there to occupy them. Those who are unable to perform the roles of heroism in life, who are ignorant of the events of history; who fall short of envisaging the future, and who are not serious enough in their own lives, are the trivial people who fill the seats of the theatres and cinemas to watch the events of life in order to learn their course. They are like pupils who occupy school desks because they are uneducated and also initially illiterate.

Those who direct the course of life for themselves have no need to watch life working through actors on the stage or in the cinema. Horsemen who hold the reins of their horses likewise have no seat in the grandstands at the race course. If every person has a horse, no one will be there to watch and applaud. The sitting spectators are only those who are too helpless to perform this kind of activity because they are not horsemen.

Bedouin peoples show no interest in theatres and shows because they are very serious and industrious. As they have created a serious life, they ridicule acting. Bedouin societies also do not watch performers, but perform games and take part in joyful ceremonies because they naturally recognize the need for these activities and practise them spontaneously.

Boxing and wrestling are evidence that mankind has not rid itself of all savage behaviour. Inevitably it will come to an end when humanity ascends the ladder of civilization. Human sacrifice and pistol duels were familiar practices in previous stages of human evolution. However, those savage practices came to an end years ago. People now laugh at themselves and regret such acts. This will be the fate of boxing and wrestling after tens or hundreds of years. The more the people become civilized and sophisticated, the more they are able to ward off both the performance and the encouragement of these practices.

The Sword of Damocles Approach to Deficit Reduction

2011-08-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

Damocles at the feast of Dionysis.

Oil painting by Richard Westall

Everyone seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when Congress finally agreed to raise the debt ceiling, given certain conditions, all of which involved cutting government spending. Then two days later, stock markets around the world plunged -- the Dow Jones was down over 500 points and the S&P was down almost 5%. Is it possible that the "path ahead" hashed out by partisan bickering with the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads wasn't the most intelligent approach to solving the long-term debt crisis?

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" (“the stimulus”), which included $288 billion of tax cuts and $499 billion of spending, added between 1m and 2.1m jobs to the American economy by the end of 2009. Moody's, IHS Global Insight, and Macroeconomic Advisers think it added between 1.6m and 1.8m jobs.

The American economy is staggering along at a growth rate of 1.3% in Q2 of 2011 (for comparison, China's GDP rate is 9.5% and India's is 7.8%). The US unemployment rate increased to 9.2%. Among major economies, this is the third highest rate of unemployment after France (9.7%) and India (9.4%). And yet Republicans in Congress are clamoring for additional cuts in government spending and decrying past stimulus spending. Instead, they want to extend the Bush tax cuts and they don't want to eliminate tax breaks and/or subsidies, or close loopholes. According to Paul Krugman, they've got it bass ackwards. Tax cuts do little to stimulate the economy, especially those for the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Public spending, on the other hand, can raise GDP by $1.50 for every dollar spent.

The bottom line is that the $775b fiscal stimulus proposed by President Obama in 2009 (ultimately cut to $600b by the Senate), wasn't enough then, and spending cuts now will exacerbate the mistake. The American economy needs a shot in the arm, not a kick in the pants.

The Bush Tax Cuts at the Root of America's Fiscal Problem

2011-07-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

Republicans have argued incessantly that the 2001 Bush tax cuts are not the reason America is in the fiscal mess we find our nation struggling to overcome today. Now, a senior policy analyst on Ronald Reagan's and George H. W. Bush's administrations tells us otherwise.

Bruce Bartlett, in a July 26th op ed piece, tells us how a projected $6 trillion surplus under Bill Clinton, turned into a $6 trillion deficit as a result of the Republicans' ideologically driven fiscal mismanagement under George W. Bush. In the same piece, Bartlett points out that despite the facts, Republicans have continued to misrepresent the results of the Bush tax cuts, stating categorically that they did not reduce revenues, when in fact the did, and that they stimulated the economy, when we all know for a fact that they did not.

Republican ideologues want a smaller federal government. A government without a Department of Education. A government without an Environmental Protection Agency. A government with only the barest minimum role in protecting older Americans, children, and the disabled. A government that doesn't interfere in Wall Street's financial shenanigans, or in the manipulation of tax loopholes by corporations. If they have to bankrupt the country to get what they want -- so be it.

Republican Zealots Threaten America's Security

2011-07-23T22:06:00.000-07:00

Based on an article by Nicholas Kristof in the NYT, 7/23/2011

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.

Republican zealots yelling about America's debt and the Democrat's "tax and spend" policies are in fact, fanatics willing to ruin our economy in order to have their way. No tax hikes, no way, no how. No new revenue, not even from corporations that pay no taxes, like General Electric. Not even from corporations like Exxon-Mobile that are making billions in profits and still accepting taxpayer handouts in the form of government subsidies.

No, the Republican Tea Party members and sympathizers would rather cut programs that can serve to bolster America's long term economic recovery, keep America at the forefront of science and technology, educate our young people, and help the elderly and disabled. That's the Republican way. It's always been the Republican way (During the 1960s Ronald Reagan was the key participant in an American Medical Association (AMA) sponsored campaign to prevent the enactment of Medicare).

Republicans under George W. Bush drove the American economy into the toilet with unwarranted tax cuts for the wealthy, a prescription drug program that has cost over $549 billion and was not paid for, and two costly wars that were not only not paid for, but were underway when Republicans slashed taxes. It was no less than fiscal criminal negligence.

Now Republicans are feigning righteous indignation over the Nation's enormous national debt and preparing to stand firm on their demands for massive cuts to social programs and no new taxes. Well, to hell with them!

Richard Francis Burton and John Henning Speke

2011-07-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

Early 1900s map of British East Africa

We saw the movie, Mountains of the Moon via Netflix this week. It was badly done (to say it was melodramatic would be an understatement) but the subject was very interesting -- the 1856-59 East African explorations of Sir Richard F. Burton and John Henning Speke. Both are fascinating men, especially Burton, who can be thought of as the proto-anthropologist/ethnographer/explorer. Speke is credited by most with discovering the source of the Nile (Lake Victoria, which he named), but Burton disputed his claim on the basis of insufficient scientific evidence. The dispute unfortunately, destroyed their friendship. Both men endured incredible dangers and daunting hardships in their explorations, both together and separately. Burton was knighted in 1886. Speke died in 1864 of a self-inflicted wound while hunting, which some claim was a suicide.

Sir Richard F. Burton

John Henning Speke

The Hell with Future Generations!

2011-07-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

A House spending bill passed in February 2011 would stop the EPA from enforcing new limits on toxic emissions, such as mercury, from cement plants and from updating air pollution standards on dust and other coarse particulate matter that exacerbate asthma and lung ailments. It withdraws funding for the enforcement of dredge and fill regulations that the EPA recently used to halt a big mountaintop-removal coal project in West Virginia. And of course, it removes funding for climate change mitigation efforts.

Coal ash pond rupture near Kingston, TN, late 2008.

Using the Nation's budget crisis as their cudgel, Republicans are moving aggressively to rollback government policy, regulations, and programs that they have long held in contempt, including programs put in place (with bipartisan support) to protect the health and safety of Americans, and preserve America's incomparable natural beauty.

One of their key targets is the Environmental Protection Agency and its program to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and to boost climate-related research.

Hal Rogers, R-Kentucky, will head the House Appropriations Committee. He will reign in dollars allocated to the "run amok" EPA and their efforts to deal with climate change; efforts Rogers claims will "devastate" Kentucky's coal industry.

The incoming Chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee (believe or not) is 87 year-old Ralph Hall, R-Texas, a major recipient of oil money, who is willing to spend time and money investigating climate scientists, but apparently not on climate research. At his age, he's probably thinking, "why worry?"

Hall's Vice Chair, Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, says climate scientists are frauds and fascists (does it take one to know one?). Paul Broun, R-Georgia, Chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Committee, supports his colleague's view, stating that climate change concerns are a hoax perpetrated by a scientific community bent on getting federal dollars (and no doubt by the perfidious Al Gore, trying to sell his books).

Perhaps my favorite climate change denier is Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, who heads the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, He tells us that global warming isn't something to worry about because God said he wouldn't destroy the earth after Noah's flood.

But Republicans aren't satisfied with gutting climate research; they want to rollback regulations on clean air, clean water, and endangered species.

Nothing "endangered" about these species. Rep. Paul Broun, R-GA, has them preserved in his office.

Representative Broun seems to equate his ideological opponents with terrorists. In his invocation for a GOP-sponsored barbecue in Cobb County he prayed, "Father, there are many who want to destroy us from outside this nation. Folks like al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists. But there are folks that want to destroy us from inside, the progressives and the socialists..."

Broun and his Republican cohorts have devised a plan for countering the Progressives radical attack on America; they will defund clean air and clean water regulations. Apparently, Republicans plan to hunker down in cigar lounges drinking single malt scotch, so will be safe from air or water pollution. Who knows what these wingnuts are thinking?

The Dynamic Between Aerosols and CO2

2011-07-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

The Datong Coal-Fired Power Plant in China

Given the widely noted increase in the warming effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008. We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings. Declining solar insolation as part of a normal eleven-year cycle, and a cyclical change from an El Nino to a La Nina dominate our measure of anthropogenic effects because rapid growth in short-lived sulfur emissions partially offsets rising greenhouse gas concentrations. As such, we find that recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.

Robert K. Kaufmann, et. al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2, 2011.

U.S. Climate: The New Normal

2011-07-06T14:10:00.000-07:00

Pine Bark Beetle expanding its destructive rampage due to warming

Comparing average temperatures year round, every state experienced warmer temperatures in 1981–2010 compared to 1971–2000.

U.S. Climate: The New Normal

Consequences of Failure to Raise the Debt Ceiling

2011-07-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

America's debt ceiling is currently set at $14.294 trillion. Our accrued debt hit that mark 6 weeks ago, on the morning of May 16. The US Treasury (you know, the place you sent your taxes April 15) suspended investments into Federal Retirement Funds (like the one that pays my military pension) in order to extend the US borrowing limit until August 2. After that, America defaults, we don't pay the bills for things we've already "bought."

Foreign holders on US bonds might dump a bunch and stop buying them in the future. That would drive up the cost of borrowing and the cost of everything else, as well. BTW, you know who pays the bill if it costs the Treasury more to borrow? Taxpayers like us. The politicking over this issue has already caused a loss of confidence in the dollar, which could, in the long term, lead to a downgrade in the US credit rating. Bad news for borrowing.

A default could lead to a run on money market funds and we could see financial firms going the way of Lehman Brothers. Next thing you know, banks and investment firms aren't lending. There goes any hope of economic recovery. It goes without saying that stock markets around the world will take a nose dive. What did your 401K lose in the 2008 crash, 30%, 40%? It will be worse this time.

The government might have a partial shutdown; federal pension payments might be suspended (there goes my military pension); social security payments might be suspended (Republicans would like to see them eliminated altogether -- they thought it was a bad idea in the first place); states might cease to receive Medicaid funding; and so on. Bad news all the way around.

Now here's the kicker. It's unconstitutional (under the 14th Amendment) for the US not to pay its debts, debt ceiling or no debt ceiling. Thus, the president can declare default unconstitutional and arrange to pay the nation’s debts unilaterally. Maybe that's what Republicans are hoping for. Then they can use President Obama's "authoritarian spendthrift ways" against him in the 2012 election. Nah, they wouldn't be that crass, would they?

A good Q & A on the debt ceiling and the potential consequences of default can be found here.

The Current Mass Extinction

2011-06-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass extinctions of the geological past? Could some equivalent of meteorite impacts or dramatic climate change be underway, as humankind's rapid destruction of natural habitats forces animals and plants out of existence?

Increasingly, researchers are doing the numbers, and saying, yes, if present trends continue, a mass extinction is very likely underway. The evidence is pieced together from details drawn from all over the world, but it adds up to a disturbing picture. This time, unlike the past, it's not a chance asteroid collision, nor a chain of climatic circumstances alone that's at fault. Instead, it is chiefly the activities of an ever-growing human population, in concert with long-term environmental change.

The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.

The typical rate of extinction differs for different groups of organisms. Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years. There are about 5,000 known mammalian species alive at present. Given the average species lifespan for mammals, the background extinction rate for this group would be approximately one species lost every 200 years. Of course, this is an average rate -- the actual pattern of mammalian extinctions is likely to be somewhat uneven. Some centuries might see more than one mammalian extinction, and conversely, sometimes several centuries might pass without the loss of any mammal species. Yet the past 400 years have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered.

Think of the Rain Forest as the Earth's lungs.
Rain forests are being destroyed at a rate
of some 50 million acres per year.
In time, we humans will all be emphysemic.

Therein lies the concern biologists have for many of today's species. While the number of actual documented extinctions may not seem that high, they know that many more species are "living dead" -- populations so critically small that they have little hope of survival. Other species are among the living dead because of their interrelationships -- for example, the loss of a pollinator can doom the plant it pollinates, and a prey species can take its predator with it into extinction. By some estimates, as much as 30 percent of the world's animals and plants could be on a path to extinction within 100 years. These losses are likely to be unevenly distributed, as some geographic areas and some groups of organisms are more vulnerable to extinction than others. Tropical rain forest species are at especially high risk, as are top carnivores, species with small geographic ranges, and marine reef species.

Earth's population will double
in about 40 years to some
10 million in 2050.

Humanity's main impact on the extinction rate is landscape modification, an impact greatly increased by the burgeoning human population. Now standing at 5.7 billion and growing at a rate of 1.6 percent per year, the population of the world will double in 43 years if growth continues at this pace. By draining wetlands, plowing prairies, logging forests, paving, and building, we are altering the landscape on an unprecedented scale. Some organisms do well under the conditions we've created: They tend to cope well with change, tolerate a broad range of habitats, disperse widely, and reproduce rapidly, and they can quickly crowd out more specialized local species. City pigeons, zebra mussels, rats, and kudzu and tamarisk trees -- these are examples of what biologists call "weedy" species, both animals and plants. Many weedy species will probably survive, and even thrive, in the face of the current mass extinction. But thousands of others, many never known to science, are likely to perish.

Picking through the rubble.

And what is the fate of our own species likely to be, if we really are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction? One possibility is that as diversity and abundance wither, the species causing it all -- Homo sapiens, the most dominant species in history -- could also be on the road to oblivion. But another possibility is that Homosapiens, which has proved to be a very effective weedy species itself, will persist. That's the view of paleobiologist David Jablonski, who sees us as one of the survivors, "sort of picking through the rubble" of a world that has lost much of its biodiversity -- and much of its comfort. For along with that species richness, the ecosystem is likely to loose much of its ability to provide many of the valuable services that we take for granted, from cleaning and recirculating air and water, to pollinating crops and providing a source for new pharmaceuticals. And while the fossil record tells us that biodiversity has always recovered, it also tells us that the recovery will be unbearably slow in human terms -- 5 to 10 million years after the mass extinctions of the past. That's more than 200,000 generations of humankind before levels of biodiversity comparable to those we inherited might be restored.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

(T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)

The old ways have blown up all by themselves,

2011-06-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

fallen under the weight of a system that was a Potemkin village of alleged prosperity and progress based on easy credit and crazed consumerism. A financial system in which it was possible to become rich and powerful while investing and trading in nothing at all. An information system paralyzed and sabotaged by the technology that was outstripping it. A political system for which too many held open contempt. A consumer culture making things that didn’t last and that people didn’t really need. What happens to a country that has developed the peculiar habit of shopping for recreation when it runs out of money? Well, it can either screech to a halt, or it can discover that its priorities need to be recalibrated, and that “stuff” is not salvation.

Excerpt from Anna Quindlen 2011 Commencement Address at Grinnell College

Goldman Sachs Demurs

2011-06-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, testified before Congress in April 2010 regarding Goldman's role in the mortgage crisis, that Goldman Sachs had no moral or legal obligation to inform its clients it was betting against the products they were buying from Goldman Sachs because Goldman was not acting in a fiduciary role. Now a fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances that give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence. So Blankfein was saying, in effect, that its clients had no reason to believe that they could trust Goldman Sachs. That certainly turned out to be true, but was it true a priori?

Apparently the courts thought so, because in April 2010, Goldman Sachs was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that claimed the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail. The move marked the first time that regulators have taken action against a Wall Street deal that helped investors capitalize on the collapse of the housing market. Goldman paid a settlement of $550 million in 2010 to settle accusations that it had misled investors who bought the Abacus mortgage security.

The Death of Innocence

2011-05-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

Child killed in Libya

3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability

2011-05-21T15:43:00.000-07:00

Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity.

Humans are now the most significant driver of global change, propelling the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems.

These are conclusions of the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability, May 16-19, 2011.

RealClimate reported that, "On Wednesday, 17 Nobel laureates who gathered in Stockholm have published a remarkable memorandum, asking for “fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change”. The Stockholm Memorandum concludes that we have entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene, where humanity has become the main driver of global change."

Deny, Deny, Deny

2011-05-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

People who deny that human activities are contributing to global warming use many arguments in defense of their position, including: increased solar activity (this is a favorite); the imperfect rotation of the earth around its axis (it "wobbles"); and volcanic eruptions spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (they actually throw a lot of dust up that can cause temporary cooling). Other causes have been postulated, including some fairly esoteric ones, such as reversal of the earth's polarity, cosmic rays, and terraforming by extraterrestrials as a prelude to their invasion (they like every place to be like Florida).

As bizarre as the extraterrestrial terraforming may be, another position seems to me to be even more outlandish, viz., humans are just too insignificant a presence to cause such a major change in the environment. One of my critics argued that, "We know the global climate is on a up and down cycle of hundreds of millions of years with mini up and down cycles of hundreds and thousands of years along this path of millions of years." Yeah, I mean what impact can puny humans have on the environment?

Burning the rain forests: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonFireRise/

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

Species extinction/declining biological diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/population-speak-out-02-26-2009.html

Purple Mountains Majesty: http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/

Los Angeles, January 29, 2004
I grew up in LA, 1938 -1961, and it didn't look anything like this; damn extraterrestrials!

It's encouraging to see that Americans generally (~70%) have come to accept the fact that the planet is warming, although it's disappointing that there is still so much disagreement over what's causing it. Even when people agree that human activities are causing warming, there is disagreement over what to do about it, if anything. Another of my critics says, "Why bother trying to reduce our emissions, when China, India, and other developing nations are more than offsetting our efforts with their emissions?"

While China is the world's greatest emitter of greenhouse gases (it took over that dubious distinction from the United States in 2006), the US ranks at the top of the GHG leader board in cumulative emissions since 1850, with the EU second. Between them, the US and the EU account for over 55% of cumulative emissions. China is a poor fourth at 7.6%, and India is further down the list at 2.2%. Thus it seems to me disingenuous to tell the world that we're not going to do anything about our emissions because China, and other developing nations, are now emitting GHGs, too.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is that for all practical purposes, it never goes away, i.e, "carbon is forever." University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer has stated that, "The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO₂ to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far."

Thus, if we really work hard at decreasing our GHG emissions (instead of increasing them as we're doing now), our best hope is to avoid accumulating more atmospheric CO2 and maybe be lucky enough to avert a "tipping point" crisis, where positive feedback effects overwhelm current climate dynamics and, like flipping a switch, plunge the planet into climate hell.

The Earth's Hadean period, roughly 4.7 billion years ago.

Terrorism and the Death of Osama bin-Laden

2011-05-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

Osama bin_Laden, 1957(?) - 2011

I believe that the vast majority of Americans feel, as I do, that justice was served when US special forces killed Osama bin-Laden last Sunday, May 1, 2011. Bin-Laden’s death occurred some ten years after the al-Qaeda planned and executed suicide attacks on Nine-Eleven killed nearly 3000 people.

We can all be proud of and grateful for the bravery of those who carried out the attacks and those who made them possible, from our president, to the anonymous intelligence analysts painstakingly sifting through massive amounts of seemingly disparate facts and rumors.

Eric Rudolph (2005) pleaded guilty to
bombing a Birmingham abortion clinic
and 3 other bombings, including the
1996 Atlanta Olympics

Now is the time to come together as one people and celebrate the bringing to justice of this international criminal; in ridding the world of his evil intent and deeds forever. At the same time, we must know that those bent on perpetrating indiscriminate violence to achieve their ideological views remain and they are of all stripes. In addition to Islamic extremists, Christian fundamentalists, environmental and animal rights extremists, and globalization opponents, among others, employ terror as their instrument of change. The US National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) reports that, “Approximately 11,000 terrorist attacks occurred in 83 countries during 2009, resulting in over 58,000 victims, including nearly 15,000 fatalities” (NCTC Report on Terrorism, 2009).

There is a need for effective counter terrorism measures to combat the continuing threat. At the same time, the Nation must continue to address the thorny issues that have plagued us since Nine-Eleven and our response to it. President Obama deserves credit for his leadership in the operation to eliminate Osama bin-Laden, but he has been less proactive in addressing some of these crucial issues, including the balance between our civil rights and the need for effective surveillance, intelligence gathering, and incarceration. Guantanamo remains open and detainees remain under indefinite detention. Should terrorists be tried in civilian courts or by military tribunals? And perhaps most troubling morally, the tracking down of bin-Laden has rekindled the torture debate; did “enhanced interrogation techniques” result in the identification of bin-Laden’s hideout? Do the ends justify the means?

PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms

2011-05-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

by John Sullivan, Special to ProPublica May 2, 2011, 12:01 a.m.

This story has been co-published [1] with the Columbia Journalism Review [2].

David Barstow, NYT

The Gulf oil spill [3] was 2010's biggest story, so when David Barstow walked into a Houston hotel for last December's hearings on the disaster, he wasn't surprised to see that the conference room was packed. Calling the hearing to order, Coast Guard Captain Hung Nguyen cautioned the throng, "We will continue to allow full media coverage as long as it does not interfere with the rights of the parties to a fair hearing and does not unduly distract from the solemnity, decorum, and dignity of the proceedings." It's a stock warning that every judge gives before an important trial, intended to protect witnesses from a hounding press. But Nguyen might have been worrying too much. Because as Barstow realized as he glanced across the crowd, most of the people busily scribbling notes in the room were not there to ask questions. They were there to answer them.
"You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three," Barstow said. "There were platoons of PR people."
An investigative reporter for The New York Times, Barstow has written several big [4] stories [5] about the shoving match between the media and public relations in what eventually becomes the national dialogue. As the crowd at the hearing clearly showed, the game has been changing.
"The muscles of journalism are weakening and the muscles of public relations are bulking up -- as if they were on steroids," he says.
In their recent book, "The Death and Life of American Journalism [6]," Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about .45 PR workers per 100,000 population compared with .36 journalists. In 2008, there were .90 PR people per 100,000 compared to .25 journalists. That's a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.
How much better?
The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Jamil Jonna, used census data to track revenues at public relations agencies between 1997 and 2007. He found that revenues went from $3.5 billion to $8.75 billion. Over the same period, paid employees at the agencies went from 38,735 to 50,499, a healthy 30 percent growth in jobs. And those figures include only independent public relations agencies -- they don't include PR people who work for big companies, lobbying outfits, advertising agencies, non-profits, or government.
Traditional journalism, of course, has been headed in the opposite direction. The Newspaper Association of America reported [7] that newspaper advertising revenue dropped from an all-time high of $49 billion in 2000 to $22 billion in 2009. That's right -- more than half. A lot of that loss is due to the recession. But even the most upbeat news executive has to admit that many of those dollars are not coming back soon. Six major newspaper companies have sought bankruptcy protection in recent years.
Less money means fewer reporters and editors. The American Society of News Editors found [8] the number of newspaper reporters and editors hit a high of 56,900 in 1990. By 2011, the numbers had dropped to 41,600. Much of that loss has occurred since 2007. Network news did not fare any better -- the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism estimates that employment there is less than half of what it was in the peak period of the 1980s.
"I don't know anyone who can look at that calculus and see a very good outcome," said McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois.
The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. "What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda," McChesney said. "We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country."
The First Modern PR Man
Modern public relations was born from a train wreck.
Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, CJR contributor, and author of "Discovering the News [9]," said modern public relations started when Ivy Lee, a minister's son and a former reporter at the New York World, tipped reporters to an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before then, railroads had done everything they could to cover up accidents. But Lee figured that crashes, which tend to leave visible wreckage, were hard to hide. So it was better to get out in front of the inevitable story.
The press release was born. Schudson said the rise of the "publicity agent" created deep concern among the nation's leaders, who distrusted a middleman inserting itself and shaping messages between government and the public. Congress was so concerned that it attached amendments to bills in 1908 and 1913 that said no money could be appropriated for preparing newspaper articles or hiring publicity agents.
But World War I pushed those concerns to the side. The government needed to rally the public behind a deeply unpopular war. Suddenly, publicity agents did not seem so bad. Woodrow Wilson picked a former newspaperman, George Creel, to head his new Committee on Public Information in 1917. The group cranked out thousands of press releases in support of the war and started a speakers bureau that eventually grew to 75,000 people, all giving morale-boosting talks across the country.
"After the war, PR becomes a very big deal," Schudson said. "It was partly stimulated by the war and the idea of journalists and others being employed by the government as propagandists."
Many who worked for the massive wartime propaganda apparatus found an easy transition into civilian life. Samuel Insull, president of Chicago Edison and an early radio magnate, launched a campaign on behalf of electric utilities, which, according to Schudson, was the most far-reaching public relations effort of the era. It prompted an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and a new raft of angry reports about the increasing power of PR.
People "became more conscious that they were not getting direct access, that it was being screened for them by somebody else," Schudson said.
But there was no turning back. PR had become a fixture of public life. Concern about the invisible filter of public relations became a steady drumbeat in the press. From the classic 1971 CBS documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon [10]," warning that the military was using public relations tricks to sell a bigger defense budget, to reports that PR wizards had ginned up testimony about horrors in Kuwait before the first Gulf War, the theme was that spin doctors were pulling the strings.
Gary McCormick, former chairman of the Public Relations Society of America, said that was unfair. McCormick acknowledged that there have been PR abuses, but he said most public relations people try to steer clear of falsehood. And he makes a pretty logical argument: lying does not work, because you are almost always going to get caught. And when you do, it makes it worse for your client.
"If I burn you, I am out of business," said McCormick, whose organization has a membership of 21,000. He concedes that can be a tough message to relay to a client facing bad press. "The problem is when you get caught up with a client, and the business drives you to tell a message differently than you would advise," McCormick said.
McCormick is right: lies are not ubiquitous, and they are not the heart of the matter. The problem is that there is a large gray zone between the truth and a lie.
Eric Alterman, a professor at Brooklyn College and a columnist at The Nation, said skillful PR people can exploit this zone to great effect. "They are able to provide data that for journalistic purposes is entirely credible," he said. "The information is true enough. It is slanted. It is propagandistic. But it is not false."
PR Up -- Journalism Down
So what has changed? Isn't this article yet another in a long line of complaints, starting with Silas Bent's counting of stories generated by publicity agents in one day's issue of The New York Times in 1926 (174) or Peter Odegard's 1930 lament that "reporters today are little more than intellectual mendicants who go from one publicity agent or press bureau to another seeking 'handouts'"? It is, in a way. But the context has changed. Journalism, the counterweight to corporate and government PR, is shrinking.
"We are coming out of a period when news organizations were extraordinarily prosperous and able to insulate themselves from a lot of pressures," said Paul Starr, a sociology professor at Princeton University and author of "The Creation of the Media." "The balance of power has shifted."
When public relations began its ascent in the early 20th century, journalism was rising alongside it. The period saw the ferocious work of the muckrakers, the development of the great newspaper chains, and the dawn of radio and, later, television. Journalism of the day was not perfect; sometimes it was not even good. But it was an era of expansion that eventually led to the powerful press of the mid to late century.
Now, during a second rise of public relations, we are in an era of massive contraction in traditional journalism. Bureaus have closed, thousands of reporters have been laid off, once-great newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News have died.
The Pew Center took a look at the impact of these changes last year in a study of the Baltimore news market. The report, "How News Happens," [11] found that while new online outlets had increased the demand for news, the number of original stories spread out among those outlets had declined. In one example, Pew found that area newspapers wrote one-third the number of stories about state budget cuts as they did the last time the state made similar cuts in 1991. In 2009, Pew said, The Baltimore Sun produced 32 percent fewer stories than it did in 1999.
Moreover, even original reporting often bore the fingerprints of government and private public relations. Mark Jurkowitz, associate director the Pew Center, said the Baltimore report concentrated on six major story lines: state budget cuts, shootings of police officers, the University of Maryland's efforts to develop a vaccine, the auction of the Senator Theater, the installation of listening devices on public busses, and developments in juvenile justice. It found that 63 percent of the news about those subjects was generated by the government, 23 percent came from interest groups or public relations, and 14 percent started with reporters.
An example: when the University of Maryland announced on July 22, 2009, that it would test the new swine flu vaccine, the university press release read this way: "The research is a first step toward the U.S. government's stated goal of developing a safe and effective vaccine."
The Daily Record newspaper in Maryland, Pew said, was first out with the story: "Research on the vaccine is the first step toward the U.S. government's aggressive goal of developing a vaccine for the virus."
Tom Linthicum, executive editor of The Daily Record, said that first story reflected the reality of the Internet age. "It's kind of like working for the wire services in the old days," he said. "You write the short lede to get it up there first. You come back the next day and flesh it out."
Linthicum said the vaccine story, while important, was not really in The Daily Record's typical coverage area -- the paper is more business-oriented. "We came back and fleshed it out some; frankly, we did not flesh it out a lot," he said. "I think we did with it about what we could given our other priorities."
This is not terrible. It is a decision that editors make every day. But, as Pew points out, it does hand a lot of control over the narrative to the institution that is peddling the story.
Of the 19 stories Pew reviewed that covered the development of the vaccine, three contained significant new information, another three had new details, and the rest either repeated the same basic facts as the press release or were identical stories appearing on a different platform. "One of the key findings of the study was that as the press scales back, dissemination of other people's work becomes a more important part of the news system," Jurkowitz said. "There is also a greater emphasis on time, on speed, on getting the first bit of information up quickly. Often that first bit of information is coming from government agencies or public relations."
Of course, in the modern world, news does not stay in one place for long. Stories may begin on a newspaper blog or a TV website, but they soon ripple across the Internet like a splash in a pond. Tom Rosenstiel, Pew's director, said that ripple effect makes the original story that hits the web -- and the source of information it is based on -- even more important.
"The nature of digital technology is that it is distributive," he said. "A story would be grabbed and distributed and when the original story is later updated, other versions out there might not be. It all depends on when someone grabs it."
Some experts have argued that in the digital age, new forms of reporting will eventually fill the void left by traditional newsrooms. But few would argue that such a point has arrived, or is close to arriving. "There is the overwhelming sense that the void that is created by the collapse of traditional journalism is not being filled by new media, but by public relations," said John Nichols, a Nation correspondent and McChesney's co-author. Nichols said reporters usually make some calls and check facts. But the ability of government or private public relations to generate stories grows as reporters have less time to seek out stories on their own. That gives outside groups more power to set the agenda.
PR Goes Direct
Leonard Downie Jr., who was executive editor of The Washington Post for 17 years, does not believe that reporters working for reputable organizations are going to let PR people dictate their stories, no matter how busy they get.
"Observing our own newsroom" at the Post, "I don't see a difference in the way people are working," said Downie, who is now a professor at Arizona State University and vice president at large of the Post. "In addition to talking to PR people, both in government and in business, our reporters want to talk to principals all the time. I don't see a change in that relationship."
What Downie does see is a change in the relationship between PR and the public itself. The Internet makes it easy for public relations people to reach out directly to the audience and bypass the press, via websites and blogs, social media and videos on YouTube, and targeted email.
"Let's take a hypothetical situation in which there had been no reduction in the media; at the same time, there still would be growth in the ability of public relations people to directly reach the public," Downie said. "They are filling a space that has been created digitally."
Some quick examples: in the academic world, the website Futurity regularly offers polished stories from research universities across the country like "Gems Clear Drug Resistance Hurdle" (Northwestern University) and "Algae Spew Mucus to Alter Sea Ice" (University of Washington); on the business front, Toyota used satellite press conferences and video feeds on its website to respond to allegations about sudden acceleration in its cars last year, and published transcripts on its website of a long interview with reporters at the Los Angeles Times; and in the realm of political advocacy, Media Matters for America led a battle across the Internet for the past several months with the anti-abortion group Live Action over a videotaped sting that Live Action did on Planned Parenthood.
In a vacuum, none of this is bad. Schools need to publicize their research, corporations defend their products, and political groups stake their positions. But without the filter provided by journalists, it is hard to divide facts from slant.
It's also getting tougher to know when a storyline originates with a self-interested party producing its own story. In 2005 and 2006, the New York Times [4] and the advocacy group PR Watch [12] did separate reports detailing how television news was airing video news releases prepared by corporate or government PR offices, working them into stories as part of their newscasts. PR Watch listed 77 stations which aired the reports, some of them broadcast nearly verbatim.
Stacey Woelfel, the past-chairman of the Radio Television Digital News Association, said when his group looked into the issue after it was raised by the reports, it was troubled by how widespread the use of the releases had become. "Some stations were running video news releases all the time, sometimes packages from corporate interests," he said.
There is evidence that it has not stopped. James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times media columnist, recently won Penn State's Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism for columns last year that showed how local television stations were running paid content in their news programs. "There's a good chance that your small screen expert has taken cash to sell, sell, sell," Rainey wrote in a Sept. 15 column.
In 2008, the New York Times again returned to the issue of hidden public relations agendas with a series of stories [5] in which Barstow showed how the Pentagon was using retired military officers to deliver the military's message on the war in Iraq and its counterterrorism efforts. Barstow described how the officers were presented on the news programs as independent consultants offering unvarnished opinions.
After being stonewalled by the Pentagon for two years, the Times eventually sued to obtain records about the Defense Department's use of retired military officers. Barstow found evidence that the officers' appearances on television were not happenstance, but a carefully coordinated effort of what the Pentagon called "message force multipliers."
Barstow was struck by the sophistication of the operation. "In a world saturated with spin, viewers tend to tune out official spokespeople and journalists," he said. "Where they are influenced is when they see people who are perceived to be experts in the subject matter but independent of the government and the media."

Koch Brothers

Front Groups Obscure Special Interests
Hiding the PR agenda is not a new tactic, but one that seems to be rising to new levels. One form it takes is front groups, supporting this cause or that, this candidate or that, this product or that, without revealing their ties to the cause, candidate, or product.
Jane Mayer focused national attention on such groups in an encyclopedic article about the Koch brothers [13] last summer in The New Yorker. The article described how the Kochs had funded groups to promote their conservative political philosophy and oppose "so many Obama Administration policies -- from heath-care reform to the economic-stimulus program -- that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus."
Mayer said one of the most difficult tasks in reporting the story was finding the connections between the groups and their funders. Many people and organizations besides the Kochs fund advocacy groups, and from both ends of the political spectrum. Mayer said it takes so much effort to find out what group is connected with what organization that it is difficult for reporters to keep up.
"You never know what you don't know -- it is getting harder and harder to find out who is behind those front groups," she said. That is no accident, according to Wendell Potter, a former vice president for corporate communications at CIGNA, the insurance company.
Potter, who has since become a vocal critic of corporate public relations, particularly related to the health-care debate, said PR's influence has become deliberately more opaque as viewers become more attuned to its influence. During the debate over the Clinton health-care plan in 1993 and 1994, Potter said, the health-insurance industry's trade group openly opposed the measure. In a series of ads featuring Harry and Louise, the fictional married couple, the industry warned that the Clinton plan would mire health care in tangled bureaucracy. The industry's role in the ad, he said, "was very visible, very vocal."
The industry's opposition to the bill reflected the public's concern at the time about government interference in health care, Potter said. But by 2007, public opinion had changed and polls showed that a majority of Americans felt that some degree of government involvement was needed.
Thus, Potter said, the industry no longer wanted to be closely linked to lobbying on the issue. So instead of directly running ads, it farmed a lot of the work out, obscuring its role.
"You really want someone that seems to be an ordinary person. That gives you credibility and the perception that the public is on your side," he said.
The health-insurance industry's trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans or AHIP, declined to speak for this story. But executives with the public relations firm APCO Worldwide, which has worked for the health-care industry, said that when their agency sets up a group to fight for an issue, they don't try to hide their association. B. Jay Cooper, APCO's managing director, said in the recent health-care fight APCO managed such a group, but every reporter who covered the issue knew who APCO represented. That doesn't mean the link was always reported to the public.
Indeed, it is often difficult for reporters to find the connection. It took Drew Armstrong, a health-care reporter for Bloomberg, months to nail stories showing how the health-insurance industry had funded efforts by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to fight against changing the health system.
Armstrong dug into tax records to show what had previously been hidden -- that AHIP contributed a whopping $86.2 million to the Chamber to fight against the Obama health-care plan. "I was shocked by the amount," Armstrong said. "It was 40 percent of the Chamber's budget."
The problem for Armstrong was that neither organization's filings proved a link. There was no definite proof that it was the same money. The IRS forms filed by the groups are pretty scanty -- they require organizations to list donations but not the donor -- and Armstrong had to work with sources to confirm the connection.
It took a while for Armstrong to establish the link, but he did so in a Nov. 17, 2010, story [14]. Neither group would confirm that it was the same money -- the Chamber still won't -- but no one called for a correction.
"Giving money to the Chamber lets you have it both ways," Armstrong said. "You can sit with the Democrats, lobby for your position, and have your phone calls returned. At the same time, you have someone like the Chamber out there, running ads, doing the public relations campaign."
After his first story, Armstrong looked into how the Chamber used the money. He found that it set up a sophisticated operation to oppose the law, particularly in swing states. The Chamber paid for ads that ran in 21 states beginning in August of 2009. The ads warned that the government-proposed plan would lead to tax increases, swell the deficit, and expand "government control over your health."
Bill Vickery, who Bloomberg said was paid by the Chamber to help run the opposition in Arkansas, told Armstrong that he organized about 50 events targeting incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who was a key supporter of the health-care law. Lincoln lost by 21 percent in last November's midterm elections.
"I talked to a lot of consultants, pollsters," Armstrong said. "They said this was one of the most sophisticated operations, akin to a presidential campaign, that they had ever worked on."
Steve Patterson, the Lincoln campaign manager, said most of the ad money for the health-care fight actually hit the state the year before the midterm election while the battle over the Democratic plan was in full cry. "Most of it was educational in nature," he said. "Call Sen. Lincoln and tell her to vote no."
But Patterson knew early on that the heath-care fight was likely to be the defining issue of the Senate race, and many of the ads were already targeting Lincoln's position in favor of change to the health-care system. So he asked the campaign's ad buyer to track the spending. They found $6 million in issue advertising was spent during the period -- a very large amount in a small media market state.
From October to early December, Lincoln's buyer found that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $2 million in advertising. Americans for Stable Healthcare -- a coalition of liberal groups, the pharmaceutical industry, and unions in favor of the plan -- spent $1.2 million. And the 60 Plus Association, a conservative senior citizen group opposed to the plan, spent $650,000.
"I think it was the critical issue that turned voters against Sen. Lincoln," he said. "Her numbers started turning when this process began."
Tom Collamore, who ran Fred Thompson's presidential campaign before becoming senior vice president of communications and strategy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, likened a modern issue campaign to a presidential race. "There are all the elements," he said. "You test the message and then you push the message out through all the outlets."
"If you are really serious about something you have to make a big investment," Collamore continued. "It involves research and focus groups and proper messaging that will lead to highlighting things that resonate."
In the heath-care battle, the Chamber created a web hub, healthreformimpacts.com [15], to continue the fight. It set up coalition groups like Employers for a Healthy Economy. Collamore said much of the effort also involved old-fashioned PR work as well. "We did a lot of online pushing of the message through stories, columns," he said. "A lot of interaction with the press, a lot of interviews."
Although the fight over health care was larger than most campaigns, Collamore said it was not fundamentally different than several other public relations efforts the Chamber is working on.
One of the largest is the Chamber's $100 million "Campaign for Free Enterprise," an effort to fight government involvement in business matters. Besides the traditional effort of advertising, press releases, and position papers, the Chamber has set up groups like Students in Free Enterprise and the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour to target college campuses.
It's also making an online push. The Chamber kicked off part of the campaign with $100,000 in prize money for a video contest on its Facebook page. The campaign received 100,000 views, recorded 10,000 votes, and collected 4,000 email addresses to add to the Chamber's database. Right now, it has 146,000 fans -- not Lady Gaga level (more than 30 million at press time) but not bad for a business group.
"The news cycle never ends. There is a lot of space, there is a lot of competition for people's attention," Collamore said. "It's not just press releases anymore."

Why corporations should pay taxes

2011-04-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

"General Electric, the Nation's biggest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion."

"So what? Why should corporations pay taxes in the first place?

"Why shoudn't they?"

"They're not people."

"They are according to the US Supreme Court. That's why they can contribute lots of money to politicians they like."

"If corporations have to pay taxes, they'll just pass the cost on to consumers."

"Maybe, maybe not. It depends on their competition. In any case, corporations pay taxes on their profits. They can afford to do that. In addition, corporations must be regulated or, as we know too well, they'd screw over everybody. Who's going to regulate corporations? Government, that's who. It costs money to regulate. Corporations should pay their fair share. And it ain't zero."

Warning! New threat warning system.

2011-04-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has decided that a new threat warning system is in order. The current system has five, color-coded levels:

Low/Green -- we hope everything will be okay, but you never can tell, and isn’t green a nice, non-threatening color?

Guarded/Blue -- we have this sort of floating anxiety; it makes us feel blue

Elevated/Yellow -- it seems about time something bad happened and we’re getting really scared

High/Orange -- we’ve heard some rumors that something bad is going to happen and that makes us think of exploding pumpkins

Severe/Red -- suspicious people seem to be chatting a lot about stuff that doesn’t make any sense to us and it reminds us of the “Red Scare.”

Since its inception, the DHS threat level has mostly cycled back and forth between yellow and orange, initially keeping everyone on edge until most people learned to ignore it and focus instead on steadily more intrusive airport security procedures.

DHS has finally admitted that they don’t really have the intelligence (double meaning) to discriminate between the five levels, so they’ve tossed three levels and now have just these two:

Elevated threat alert -- the previous four threat levels wrapped into one nebulous level we were going to color code puce, but Janet wouldn’t let us

Imminent threat alert -- be afraid, be VERY afraid (and vote Democratic/Republican)

I feel better already. How about you?

One Pinnacle of Human Achievement to Another

2011-04-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

Astronauts on flight STS-1 captured this view of Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait through a viewport on the space shuttle on April 13, 1981. The photo was taken with a handheld camera on the 15th orbit around Earth, during a flight that lasted 54 hours.

This week NASA is announcing where the soon-to-be-retired space shuttles will be displayed as museum relics. On April 19 the space shuttle Endeavor will be launched, on the penultimate mission of the program. The end of the space shuttle program will mean that the U.S. will have to rely on Russian rockets to deliver American astronauts to space, pending the development of private commercial spaceflight.

Wave goodbye to human space exploration.