The Great Dying

Somehow, most of the life on Earth perished in a brief moment of geologic time roughly 250 million years ago. Scientists call it the Permian-Triassic extinction or "the Great Dying" -- not to be confused with the better-known Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that signaled the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Whatever happened during the Permian-Triassic period was much worse: No class of life was spared from the devastation. Trees, plants, lizards, proto-mammals, insects, fish, mollusks, and microbes -- all were nearly wiped out. Roughly 9 in 10 marine species and 7 in 10 land species vanished. Life on our planet almost came to an end. Was an asteroid responsible?

Many scientists believe that life was already struggling when the putative space rock arrived. Our planet was in the throes of severe volcanism. In a region that is now called Siberia, 1.5 million cubic kilometers of lava flowed from an awesome fissure in the crust. (For comparison, Mt. St. Helens unleashed about one cubic kilometer of lava in 1980.) Such an eruption would have scorched vast expanses of land, clouded the atmosphere with dust, and released climate-altering greenhouse gases.

Read more about the mystery on NASA's web site.

Cormack McCarthy

What would happen if something like this took place now? Have you read "The Road," by Cormack McCarthy?

Read a review of "The Road" here.

Palin Having Trouble with Reading Comprehension?

The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s crown jewel, went after a Murdoch employee, Sarah Palin, recently of FOX, on one of her errors, which appear on a regular basis from her Twitter feed or in speeches. 


Palin attacked the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, which is about as far over her head as she ever wants to get, and showed profound ignorance on inflation. She said anyone who’d gone shopping lately would know that “grocery prices have risen significantly over the past year.” A Journal blogger then noted that food and beverage inflation was practically nonexistent for the past year — the lowest on record — and that Palin was having some trouble with reading comprehension (From Liar's Club, by Timothy Egan).


Palin called studies supporting global climate change a "bunch of snake oil science." Well, it's certainly harder to read the climate studies, than it might be to read the business page, but for Palin, the results are the same -- she got it wrong. 

Allan Sandage, Astronomer, Dies at 84; Charted Cosmos’s Age and Expansion

New York Times, November 17, 2010

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Allan R. Sandage, who spent his life measuring the universe, becoming the most influential astronomer of his generation, died Saturday at his home in San Gabriel, Calif. He was 84.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to an announcement by the Carnegie Observatories, where he had spent his whole professional career.

Over more than six decades, Dr. Sandage was like one of those giant galaxies that sit at the center of a cluster of galaxies, dominating cosmic weather. He wrote more than 500 papers, ranging across the cosmos, covering the evolution and behavior of stars, the birth of the Milky Way galaxy, the age of the universe and the discovery of the first quasar, not to mention the Hubble constant, a famously contested number that measures the rate of expansion of the universe. Dr. Sandage pursued the number with his longtime collaborator, Gustav Tammann of the University of Basel in Switzerland.

In 1949, Dr. Sandage was a young Caltech graduate student, a self-described “hick who fell off the turnip truck,” when he became the observing assistant for Edwin Hubble, the Mount Wilson astronomer who discovered the expansion of the universe.

Hubble had planned an observing campaign using a new 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain in California to explore the haunting questions raised by that mysterious expansion. If the universe was born in a Big Bang, for example, could it one day die in a Big Crunch? But Hubble died of a heart attack in 1953, just as the telescope was going into operation. So Dr. Sandage, a fresh Ph.D. at 27, inherited the job of limning the fate of the universe.

“It would be as if you were appointed to be copy editor to Dante,” Dr. Sandage said. “If you were the assistant to Dante, and then Dante died, and then you had in your possession the whole of ‘The Divine Comedy,’ what would you do?”

Dr. Sandage was a man of towering passions and many moods, and for years, you weren’t anybody in astronomy if he had not stopped speaking to you. In later years, beset by controversy, Dr. Sandage withdrew from public view. But even after retiring from the Carnegie Observatories and becoming ill, he never stopped working; he published a paper on variable stars only last June.

In 1991, Dr. Sandage was awarded the Crafoord Prize in astronomy, the closest thing to a Nobel for a stargazer, worth $2 million.

Wendy Freedman, his boss as director of Carnegie as well as a rival in the Hubble constant question, referred to him on Tuesday as the last giant of 20th-century observational cosmology. “Even when we had our scientific differences, I got a kick out of him,” she said. “His passion for his subject was immense.”

James Gunn, an astronomer at Princeton, said of Dr. Sandage in an e-mail message, “He was probably (rightly) the greatest and most influential observational astronomer of the last half-century.”

Allan Rex Sandage was born in Iowa City, Iowa, on June 18, 1926, the only child of an advertising professor, Charles Harold Sandage, and a homemaker, Dorothy Briggs Sandage. The stars were one of his first loves; his father bought him a commercial telescope.

After two years at the University of Miami, where his father taught, Allan was drafted into the Navy; he resumed his education at the University of Illinois, earning a degree in physics.

In 1948 he entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, where an astronomy program had been started in conjunction with the nearby Mount Wilson Observatory, home of Hubble, among others.

As a result, Dr. Sandage learned the nuts and bolts of observing with big telescopes from the founders of modern cosmology, Hubble; Walter Baade, who became his thesis adviser, and Milton Humason, a former mule driver who had become Hubble’s right-hand man.

In the years before World War II, there had been a revolution in the understanding of the nature and evolution of stars as thermonuclear furnaces burning hydrogen into helium and elements beyond. Astronomers could now read the ages of star clusters from the colors and brightness of the stars in them.

For his thesis, Dr. Sandage used this trick to date a so-called globular cluster, known as Messier 3, as being 3.2 billion years old, which meant that the universe itself could not be younger than that. In fact, Hubble’s own measurements of the cosmic expansion suggested an age of about four billion years — remarkably, even miraculously, consistent.

At the time, astronomers were also still debating whether the universe had had a Big Bang and a beginning at all, not to mention whether it would have an ending as well. An opposing view championed by the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle held that the universe was eternal and in a “steady state,” with new matter filling in the void as galaxies rushed away from one another. [See earlier post for another view]

Choosing between these models was to be the big task of 20th-century astronomy, and of Dr. Sandage. In 1961 he published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal showing how it could be done using the 200-inch telescope. He described cosmology as the search for two numbers: one was the cosmic expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant; the other, called the deceleration parameter, tells how fast the expansion is being braked by cosmic gravity.

That paper, “The Ability of the 200-inch Telescope to Discriminate Between Selected World Models,” may well have been “the most influential paper ever written in any field even close to cosmology,” Dr. Gunn said. It was to set the direction of observational cosmology for 40 years, ruling out the Steady State and the Big Crunch and culminating in the surprise discovery in 1998 that the expansion is not slowing down at all but speeding up.

Meanwhile, Dr. Sandage investigated the birth of the galaxy. By analyzing the motions of old stars in the Milky Way, he, Olin Eggen of Caltech and Donald Lynden-Bell of Cambridge showed in a 1962 paper that the Milky Way formed from the collapse of a primordial gas cloud probably some 10 billion years ago. That paper still forms the basis of science’s understanding of where the galaxy came from, astronomers say.

In 1959, Dr. Sandage married another astronomer, Mary Connelly, who was teaching at Mount Holyoke and had studied at the University of Indiana and Radcliffe, but did not pursue further research. He is survived by her and two sons, David and John.

It was measuring the cosmic expansion that was the most backbreaking part of fulfilling Hubble’s legacy. In an expanding universe, the speed with which a galaxy flies away from us is proportional to its distance. The constant of proportionality, the Hubble constant, is given in the mind-numbing terms of kilometers per second per megaparsec. Hubble’s original estimate of his constant of 530 meant that for every million parsecs (3.26 million light years) a galaxy was farther away from us, it was retreating 530 kilometers per second (around 300 miles per second) faster.

Hubble’s original estimate, however, corresponded to an age for the universe of only 1.8 billion years, at odds with both geological calculations of the Earth’s age and Dr. Sandage’s later estimate of the ages of star clusters.

But Hubble had made mistakes — he saw bright patches of gas as stars, for example — and as Dr. Sandage and Dr. Tammann delved into the subject in a series of papers, the problematic constant came down and the imputed age of the universe rose.

In 1956, Dr. Sandage suggested that the Hubble constant could be as low as 75 kilometers per second per megaparsec. By 1975 the value, they said, was all the way down to 50, corresponding to an age of as much as 20 billion years, comfortably larger than the ages of galaxies and globular clusters.

This allowed them to conclude that the universe was not slowing down enough for gravity to reverse the expansion into a Big Crunch. That was in happy agreement with astronomers who had found that there was not enough matter in the universe to generate the necessary gravity.

As Dr. Sandage wrote in The Astrophysical Journal in March 1975, “(b) the Universe has happened only once, and (c) the expansion will never stop.”

“So the universe will continue to expand forever,” Dr. Sandage said in an interview, “and the galaxies will get farther and farther apart, and things will just die. That’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter whether I feel lonely about it or not.”

Shortly thereafter, however, their results on the Hubble constant came under attack by rival astronomers, who said that Dr. Sandage and Dr. Tammann had overestimated the distances to galaxies — a crucial part of the equation for the constant — making the universe appear bigger and older than it really was. The universe, they said, was really about 10 billion years old.

Stung by the criticisms, Dr. Sandage retreated from public view, even while he and Dr. Tammann redoubled their efforts to measure the troublesome constant, always getting a low value. As the groups shot back and forth at each other, the universe, as reflected in newspaper headlines, boomeranged back and forth from 10 billion to 20 billion years.

In 2001, a team led by Dr. Freedman, using the Hubble Space Telescope, reported a value of 72 kilometers per second per megaparsec, in good agreement with measurements of relic radiation from the Big Bang that give an age of 13.7 billion years for the cosmos full of dark energy and dark matter, and a Hubble constant of 71, which most astronomers now accept.

To the frustration of colleagues, Dr. Sandage, also using Hubble, kept getting a lower value.

We may never know the fate of the universe or the Hubble constant, he once said, but the quest and discoveries made along the way were more important and rewarding than the answer anyway.

“It’s got to be fun,” Dr. Sandage told an interviewer. “I don’t think anybody should tell you that he’s slogged his way through 25 years on a problem and there’s only one reward at the end, and that’s the value of the Hubble constant. That’s a bunch of hooey. The reward is learning all the wonderful properties of the things that don’t work.”

And your point is?

“This so-called climate science is just ridiculous,” said Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. “I think it’s all cyclical.”

“Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”

(See the full article)

A Matter of Priorities

F-15 Armament Load

According to an article in the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States spends substantially more on military endeavors than any country in the world. If war spending and allocations to the “Global War on Terror” are excluded, the U.S. military budget is still more than seven times that of its next closest competitor, China. If you include those other expenditures, U.S. military spending surpasses that of all other countries in the world combined.

Now there is some debate on whether or not defense spending, specifically spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hurts or helps the U.S. economy. Certainly, the military-industrial complex feels strongly that defense spending helps the economy. Building guns, tanks, planes, and ships creates jobs, after all. And the more we blow up, use up, have shot down, or see that military equipment sink to the bottom of the sea, the more we have to manufacture, and that makes for steady employment, if not great longevity for our troops. It's also interesting to consider that in addition to all the money we spend on blowing things up (shock and awe), we spend another bundle paying major U.S. corporations like Halliburton, to "reconstruct" them (all in the interests of "nation building").

One quarter of each dollar we pay in taxes (actually twenty-six and a half cents) goes to the military (not including veteran's benefits). But that doesn't tell the whole story. Because we've had to borrow money to pay for our wars, we pay another five cents of every dollar to service the debt; a debt by the way, whose interest accounts for the third largest portion of our tax dollar.

It seems to me that the question comes down to priorities; could we be creating jobs by spending our [borrowed] money on something more permanent, such as modernizing our deteriorating infrastructure, i.e., domestic reconstruction, or on improving our inner city schools (two cents of our tax dollar goes to education), or, god forbid, on health care?

What do you think?

The Demise of a Thoughtful Republican

George W. Bush, Donald Rusfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz announcing Joint Resolution to authorize force against Iraq.

By J. Phillips

The Iraq War is an utterly depressing subject. My upbringing as a military brat and career as an international nuclear security expert and weapons inspector in Iraq between the two wars cast this unnecessary foreign adventure in a grave, unflattering light. This war alone broke me out of a lifelong tradition of support for the Republican Party. In the history of strategic blunders, this war may prove to be much worse than Vietnam from the perspective of our nation’s place in the world.

Charles Duelfer, chief U.S. investigator on
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, confirming
there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq.

The lack of a persuasive casus belli in the case of Iraq, and the predictable distraction that resulted, interfered with the proper execution of justifiable military and nation building efforts in Afghanistan.

Success in that endeavor is now imperiled.

The military difficulties of defeating the Taliban and other tribal coalitions, on Afghani terrain, are well understood. Afghanistan has a storied history of ruining all invaders going back many centuries and they have not been successfully administrated by an external power since Timur’s conquest 600 years ago. The dramatically punctuated Afghani terrain and its finely parsed tribal feudalism is a simile of Russian winter and its regional partisans in the annals of military history. It’s a place where invaders have gone to die a slow death. The combination of that difficult, but justifiable proposition with the coincident invasion and occupation of Iraq, arguably the Yugoslavia of the Middle East and the primary foil of Iranian ambitions, was pure Bush Administration folly.

All but seven of 272 Republican legislators lent active support to Bush’s destructive foreign policy. The Democrats, cowed by a nationalist spin machine wrapped in the flag, voted tepidly against the war 147 to 111. The neocon spin machine had convinced a willfully ignorant electorate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the ready to use against us, was complicit in 9/11 and was in league with Al Qaida. These assertions were patently false. It’s not possible that the Bush Administration was uninformed. The lack of justification for war was simply an inconvenient truth standing between them and their ideological goals.

No less than Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to George HW Bush during the First Gulf War, opined against the imminent invasion in the Wall Street Journal in an attempt to divert the Titanic from its tragic course, but Bush’s neocons and the Republican Party would have none of it. After witnessing these events I could not, in good conscience, support a political party that actively promoted and participated in this ill-fated national decision. It became the demise of a thoughtful Republican.

Though I did not respect the pack of craven Democrats who supported the Iraq invasion, over half did not support the Iraq War – including then Senator Obama. They bucked the popular view as a matter of principle. Ironically, cleaning up this horrendous mess, left by the previous Republican Administration, has now fallen to President Obama’s Administration along with an extensive laundry list of other messes.

Recent estimates of the direct losses of the Iraq War on the larger U.S. economy range as high as $3 trillion all said and done. This does not include opportunity costs, which are the “unknowable unknowns” – the might have beens. The related increment in the national debit will exceed $1 trillion. Your personal share of the U.S. economic losses of the Iraq War will total roughly $10,000. That comes to a U.S. “investment” of roughly $150,000 per Iraqi man, woman and child, spent thoroughly eviscerating their nation in a blender as it were. If it’s not obvious to the reader, this is an inconceivably large figure in contrast with the extremely limited means of an average Iraqi citizen.

We have spent our national treasure destroying another country without justifiable cause and then trying to contain the consequence of the ensuing chaos. It has been a war funded entirely on debit from day one and has been a significant contributor to the destruction of our economy, but speaking from the heart, the wasted treasure is so much less compelling than other things.

I feel familial grief for the uniformed services that have suffered in the aftermath of that thoughtless decision. To date, in excess of 4,400 U.S. soldiers have died and roughly 30,000 suffer with combat injuries. Thousands suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders, chronic depression and related substance abuse. Many thousands of marriages have been destroyed by deployments without end – remember the “Stop Loss policy?” Their children join the swollen ranks of the progeny of broken homes. Suicides among military personnel have soared. All of these casualties of war have families and extended families that bear the brunt of our unfortunate nationalist excess.

The tragic legacy of the Iraq War is only beginning to unfold within the military community. Knowledge that it is a rear guard effort to try and recover from a disastrous Republican Administration decision only makes these losses more intolerable. In a nation whose conscience has become seared by an outbreak of neoconservative nationalism, it’s not even worth raising the hundreds of thousands of casualties on the Iraqi side including the uncounted multitude of innocents killed, maimed and displaced after the fact by the sectarian conflict we unleashed. How many innocents will die and be maimed before Iraq is stabilized? Do we even care?

Most Americans are either ignorant of the facts or can’t find the personal courage to stare into that dark abyss and contemplate whether they bear a share of indirect responsibility for that disaster through their voting decisions. They would rather sit in church pews, watch football games and go to barbecues – so would I. But we can rest assured that more than one generation of Iraqis will not forget this. It is now burned into their national consciousness and it will increase the danger of terrorism we face for the foreseeable future.

So where’s the honor to be found in this debacle? I propose that these good soldiers and their families are worthy of double honor, respect and support from the American people for toiling to stabilize Iraq. Thereby saving the United States from the utter disgrace and disrepute that would have been ours if Iraq were allowed to spin out of control into a sectarian genocide of our making. The Bush Administration, the voters that put them in power and a minority of craven Democrats that supported it, started this war, but the U.S. military is now compelled to finish it.

To those arm chair generals out there that have been supportive of the Iraq War from its inception, please find the personal courage and humanity to see the brilliant film The Messenger. Its heart-felt portrayal of the ocean of grief unfolding in my “home town” stuns one into a holy silence – as the commanding officer in the film states: notification of the first of kin is a sacred duty. While you’re at it view The Hurt Locker for its depiction of the chaos and inhumanity of the sectarian violence that you and I elected to unleash. Those so certain of their point of view should not be afraid to be students of its actual consequence.

The suffering of military personnel and their families coping with death, physical maiming and mental injuries from this elective war is beyond my ability to impersonally dismiss as a usual outcome that the military will have to tolerate for the greater good of the country. There’s nothing usual about this situation.

And what of the flood of Iraqi war refugees, many of whom are Christians, killed or forced from their country by the Islamic fundamentalism that we elected to unleash? Iraq, despite its notorious dictatorship, was a secular state that protected its Christian minority. What of the other minorities who are now crushed under the wheels of majority groups fighting to fill the power vacuum that we elected to create? Apparently, “freedom is an untidy business” as Mr. Rumsfeld so casually stated.

But does taking responsibility in Iraq mean that the electorate should now have corporate amnesia and absolve the Republican Party for making this disastrous decision before they have fully appreciated the consequence and reformed their perspective? This is about political tough love that only an educated electorate can administer to the proper measure. I voted for them all my life before they did this terrible thing, but I can have the personal integrity now to admit my error, change my mind, and vote against them until their last nationalist neocon has been sent packing.

Adolf Hitler was a nationalist neocon. He was a German populist elected in reaction to the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic – Germany’s first attempt at liberal representative democracy. That ideological path is spawned in economic hardship and riven with danger and infamy. God help us if we cannot find the strength to resist that path.

As in the time of FDR and Truman, the Republicans have lost their way. They’re in desperate need of an extended retreat to the political wilderness to find themselves again and cast off the radical influences of populism and neoconservatism. If they don’t accomplish this painful task of reform, they will not be in a position to help build a positive future. They will cease to be the worthy inheritors of the proud legacy of Lincoln, TR and Eisenhower – all of whom would be labeled “RINO” by populist Republicans today.

America’s future needs Republicans, but this batch is defective. Believe in an America that’s a force for good in the world rather than a force for greed, destruction, war and fear. Send the Republicans away until they get it right.

The Unfair Game

Maureen Dowd
Washington, October 12, 2010

As Barack Obama struggles to rekindle the magic, one of the most pathetic headlines was the one on a CNN poll last week: “Was Bush Better President Than Obama?”

“Americans are divided over whether President Barack Obama or his predecessor has performed better in the White House,” the CNN article said.

So now the Republican president who bungled wars and the economy and the Democratic president trying to dig us out are in a dead heat?

America’s long-term economic woe has led to short-term memory loss. Republicans are still popular, and the candidates are crazier than ever. And crazy is paying dividends: Sharron Angle, the extreme Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, vacuumed up $14 million in the last quarter in her crusade to knock out Harry Reid — the kind of money that presidential candidates dream of collecting.

Karl Rove has put together a potent operation to use anonymous donors to flood the airwaves with attack ads against Democrats. And a gaunt-looking Dick Cheney is out of the hospital and back to raking in money defending torture and pre-emptive war. He, Lynne Cheney, Rove, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Laura Bush drew more than 10,000 people at $495 a pop to a conference in Bakersfield, Calif., last weekend.

Republicans are also gearing up to start re-sliming Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson when “Fair Game,” the movie based on their memoirs, opens next month. Robert Luskin, a lawyer for Rove who considered Plame collateral damage and labeled her “fair game,” dismissively told Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The Times that the Wilsons are “a little past their ‘sell-by’ date.”

It’s hard to believe that it was seven years ago when the scandal of the Glamorous Spy and Showboating Ambassador exploded. Joe Wilson first accused the Boy Emperor of not wearing any clothes on the Iraq W.M.D.’s, and then charged the Bush White House with running a “smear campaign” against him and outing his wife as a CIA spy.

He was right on all counts and brave to take on a White House that broke creative new ground in thuggery and skulduggery.

But it was child’s play for the Republicans to undermine the former diplomat and the spy who loved him. Wilson was “pretty widely known as a loudmouth,” as the movie’s director Doug Liman put it, and overstepped at times, posing for Vanity Fair in his Jaguar convertible with his wife coyly cloaked in scarf and sunglasses.

While her husband was in his promotional whirlwind, Plame was in her reticent cloud, her air of blonde placidity belying her anguish at being betrayed and her disgust that Cheney Inc. bullied the CIA, overriding skepticism about Saddam’s weapons system and warping intelligence. “It’s called counterproliferation, Jack,” Naomi Watts’s Plame says to her superior. “Counter.”

The movie makes clear that Plame was not merely “a secretary” or “mediocre agent” at the agency, as partisan critics charged at the time, but a respected undercover spy tracking Iraqi W.M.D. efforts. And it reiterates that Plame did not send her husband, who had worked in embassies in Iraq while Saddam and Bush Senior were in charge and was the ambassador in two African countries, on the fact-finding trip to Niger about a possible Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium. She merely acted as an intermediary when a colleague threw his name into the hat for the unpaid gig.

The film creates composites to heighten the tension and suggests that Plame’s Iraqi contacts and their families were murdered once she was outed — a subplot Variety called “apocryphal and manipulative.”

But the movie is a vivid reminder of one of the most egregious abuses of power in history, and there are deliciously diabolical turns by actors playing Scooter Libby, David Addington and Rove. Plame’s CIA bosses are portraits in cravenness, cutting her loose at the moment she starts receiving death threats and her Iraqi sources become endangered.

Liman, who grew up watching his father Arthur’s Buddha-like interrogations during the Iran-Contra hearings, does not use an Oliver Stone sledgehammer on history. He views the scandal through the lens of the Wilsons’ marriage, which snaps for a time under the strain of being hounded by the most powerful men on earth. As Valerie writes in her book about Joe’s demand to see Rove “frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs”: “Husbands. What can you do?”

Costumed with lush mane and round paunch, Sean Penn is well suited to capture Wilson’s arrogance and mouthiness, while also showing his honesty, brazenness, sly charm and fierce love of wife and country.

They were the Girl and Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and we should all remember what flew out.