1/13-1/15

Really? Halfway decent regulations regarding the disclosure of fracking chemicals and water use in Texas?:

Starting Feb. 1, drilling operators in Texas will have to report many of the chemicals used in the process known as hydraulic fracturing. Environmentalists and landowners are looking forward to learning what acids, hydroxides and other materials have gone into a given well.

But a less-publicized part of the new regulation is what some experts are most interested in: the mandatory disclosure of the amount of water needed to “frack” each well. Experts call this an invaluable tool as they evaluate how fracking affects water supplies in the drought-prone state.

What's ultimately necessary is for the EPA to step in and issue some serious regulations, both with respect to full disclosure and also regarding protection of clean water and air; in the meantime, if Texas, of all places, can do it, there's no reason every other state that already has fracking can't follow their lead. The EPA will be issuing rules on dealing with wastewater soon, but there's more to regulate than just that. As the EPA pointed out to New York this week, workers and environmentally-sensitive areas need to be protected, too:

In its comments, the EPA pointed out that New York's current permitting system for water treatment plants doesn't include limits on pollutants frequently contained in drilling wastewater, such as radionuclides, which can cause cancer at high levels.

The EPA said it needs to be more closely involved in analyzing and approving any treatment plant's application to accept drilling wastewater. And while the DEC's proposed rules suggest limits on radioactive elements such as radium, the EPA said it's not clear who would be "responsible for addressing the potential health and safety issues" related to radiation exposure.

The EPA also flagged health risks to workers close to wastewater and other potentially radioactive materials, like the large amounts of soil and mud unearthed by drilling. "At a minimum, the human health risks to the site workers from radon and its decay products should be assessed along with the associated treatment technologies such as aeration systems or holding for decay," the agency wrote.

Environmental management works better when all stakeholders are involved, everyone's views are given legitimate consideration, and those that lose out due to regulations are given other options for maintaining livelihoods; otherwise, those who are negatively affected won't be particularly supportive of new rules:

Fishermen voiced concerns about the expansion during a 7-year planning process, but managers showed little interest in following up, says Stephen Sutton of James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. Sutton also wondered whether media portrayals of fisher’s negative reactions were accurate. To find out, Sutton and his colleagues conducted face-to-face interviews and mail surveys with 114 fishers over more than two years, starting in 2007.The researchers’ affiliation with an independent branch of the university, the Fishing and Fisheries Research Centre, and their strong rapport with fishers, convinced many fishers to disclose sensitive details about their fishing spots and their perceptions of the new zoning restrictions, Sutton told Conservation.

Overall, most of the commercial fisherman surveyed did not favor the rezoning, but recreational fishermen – who do not depend on the park for most their income – were more supportive. And few fishers felt expressly engaged in what Sutton termed a “one size fits all” stakeholder involvement process. Although government planners had requested important fishing locations, for instance, he says many fishermen grew distrustful and didn’t participate fully because officials said little about how they would use the information. Since the sweeping laws were enacted, fishers said their access to productive areas, business profitability, and personal income all have dwindled. But the team also reports in Marine Policy that fishers adapted to new stomping grounds, mainly by moving their fishing efforts closer to home ports.

[...]

The Australian experience highlights the challenges faced by marine reserve managers in the United States, says Meg Caldwell, executive director of the Center for Ocean Solutions in Monterey, California. “It’s rare that fishermen are cheerleaders for the [reserve] system,” she says. “We may be asking too much of the survey to get positive results.” But the more honest planners are in engaging fishers and other stakeholders, the more straightforward their input will be, Caldwell says.

There’s no evidence, though, that happiness has any impact on whether fishermen comply with regulations, she notes. Instead, she believes “social cohesion” matters more, such as that created by having fishermen police themselves or enforcing strict penalties for violations.

Those working on governance of the commons and strategies like adaptive co-management have shown time and time again that factors like social cohesion and enforcement by those involved is more effective than top-down regulation in many cases. It's a bit disappointing to see that the lessons from Ostrom et al., which are grounded in reams of empirical evidence, are still not necessarily being incorporated into management actions.

Speaking of Ostrom and the extensive literature on managing common pool resources, she and co-authors discuss best practices on managing for ecosystem services in a recent issue of Solutions:

Two decades of research into the management of what economists call common-pool resources suggests that, under the right conditions, local communities can manage shared resources sustainably and successfully. These revolutionary findings challenge the long-held belief in the “tragedy of the commons.” Instead, we have found that tragedy is not inevitable when a shared resource is at stake, provided that people communicate. In many places—from Swiss pastures to Japanese forests—communities have come together for the sake of the environment and their own long-term well-being.

Common-pool resources have two features: first, they are shared resources whose use by one person makes them less available for use by another; second, it is typically very difficult to limit the public’s access to them (through laws or physical barriers). Many, but not all, ecosystem services can be categorized as common-pool resources. Consider, for instance, the clean water provided by an intact watershed, the pollination provided by a community of bees, or the carbon sequestration provided by a healthy forest. These are public goods, but individual use can degrade a watershed or strip a forest, compromising these benefits for all. As we look to develop institutions to better manage ecosystem services, and ensure their resilience over time, we can benefit from the lessons learned in the management of common-pool resources.

[...]

Policymakers often gravitate toward one-size-fits-all solutions and static institutions. However, when it comes to the complexity of managing human-natural systems, a more adaptive approach is required. A key to success is understanding each unique place and the people who depend on its ecosystem services. Clear communication and storytelling at all scales not only will engage necessary participation but will help determine which successful strategies can be translated across cases and which are not translatable. Cost-benefit analyses are helpful but limited in describing how social values will ultimately result in a particular decision.

Just as natural systems evolve, so must our strategies and institutions. Like a durable good that reaches the end of its life and is then recycled, so too must we periodically evaluate and anticipate obsolescence of our management structures and tactics.

(Interested in more on Ostrom's work and getting a good summary of the literature on common pool resources and what it tells us? Check out her Nobel speech, as modified for publication in AER here.)


Is Microsoft's “unsafe neighborhood” avoidance patent problematic? Yes, it is; let us count the ways:

• Codifying something matters. Banks always discriminated against people of color and poor neighborhoods, but it got much worse when redlining became official policy. Since the advent of the Internet, technologies that are widely used by major corporations have a form of codifying power. This app will further mark some communities as places to avoid, exacerbating abandonment and creating a self-fulfilling prophesy.
• Folk knowledge is absent. "Street smarts" is often about relationships with people you know, specific incidents and particular places, not about raw data in GIS. As author Sarah Chinn wisely points out in the AOL article, most violent crime occurs between people who know each other. There is simply no way to create an exclusively "data-driven" application for street smarts in a way that actually makes people smarter. Note to IBM: The pathway to "smarter cities" involves smarter citizens, which goes beyond access to "data." This app would not teach us how to read, live in or navigate a city — it would simply chop the city up into "safe" and "unsafe" areas.
• This is a practice we want to undo, not replicate. All of us, especially if we are white and not poor, have avoided places based on some "sign" or reputation. Sometimes this is probably quite wise — I've been mugged, and I now know why I should have avoided that place. But we have all likely avoided places based on unfounded fear, one that permeates our society and constantly helps reproduce spatial inequality. We should be looking for ways to reduce the "automatic avoidance" instinct, not build it into our cellphones.

States running their own high-risk pool insurance programs are finding the programs cost more per enrollee than expected. Fortunately there's still more than enough money allocated to the PCIP to cover costs through 2014, when insurers can no longer discriminate against those of us with pre-existing health conditions:

Because nationwide enrollment has been far less than expected, federal funding for the program established under the health overhaul appears plentiful: $5 billion was set aside and less than $500 million has been spent in the first 16 months. The program is scheduled to end in 2014 when insurers can no longer deny people coverage for pre-existing health conditions.

But funding allotments for a few states are beginning to run low, largely because health costs have been higher than expected.

Carl Zimmer points to a new study showing how cancer can evolve:

[T]he same forces that drive the evolution of free-living organisms can also drive cancer cells to become more aggressive and dangerous. Evolution becomes our inner foe if mutations disable a cell’s self-restraint. The cell multiplies. Sometimes a new mutation arises in its descendants. If the mutations allow the cancer to grow faster, the cells carrying it will take over the population of cancerous cells. Natural selection and other processes that drive evolution on the outside start driving it on the inside.

[...]

The chemotherapy knocked down all the clusters of cancer cells to such low numbers that doctors couldn’t find them any more. But they were still there. And when exposed to chemotherapy drugs, the most successful cluster was not the one that had been most successful back when the cancer was diagnosed. It was the relatively rare Cluster 4. Apparently, it had mutations that made it better able to withstand the chemotherapy drugs. Some its descendants later picked up new mutations, which enabled them to reproduce quickly and take over the cancer population, as they resisted new chemotherapy drugs as well.

“The AML genome in an individual patient is clearly a ‘moving target,’” the scientists right conclude. “Eradication of the founding clone and all of its subclones will be required to achieve cures.” Easier said than done, of course. The parallels between this research and studies on antibiotic resistance in bacteria are sobering. But at least now we’re starting to see what kind of evolutionary challenge we’re really up against.

Mike Konczal interviews Josh Kosman, author of The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, about private equity firms, Bain Capital, and the way the tax code is structured to encourage leveraged buyouts:

Private equity and buyouts started as a way to take advantage of tax gimmicks, not as a way of saying “we’re going to turn around companies.” And now it’s out of control. I look at the 10 largest deals done in the 1990s, during ideal economic times, and in six cases it was clear that the company was worse off than if they never been acquired. Moody’s just put out a report in December that looked at the 40 largest buyouts of this era and showed that their revenue was growing at 4 percent since their buyout, while comparable companies were growing at 14 percent.

In January — so just in the past 12 days — Hostess, the largest bakery in the country, just went bankrupt. Coach, the largest bus company, just went bankrupt. And Quizno’s is about to go bankrupt. All of these were owned by private equity.

[...]

What I’d like to see Mitt Romney do is to show an example of a buyout that went well. The only success stories he’s talking about on any level are venture capital investments — Staples and Sports Authority. Personally I like venture capital, I think it provides a lot of value, but that’s not what he did mostly, and that’s not what these takeovers are about.

The big fix I’d encourage is an end to interest-tax deducibility for leveraged buyouts. The tax system encourages companies to borrow as much as they can. For certain industries, like telecom, these deductions might make a lot of sense. But it was never intended for financing leveraged buyouts. If you put a cap on this you would find buyouts and private equity firms that were much more focused on building companies.

Amazing pianist and bandleader Vijay Iyer suggests we rethink what jazz means and stands for:

I said the other day, if we’re going to use what’s now being called “the J word” — there’s kind of a movement to jettison that word in fact — but if we’re going to use it, we have to understand it not as a style of music but as basically a strategy of transformation. Because it’s about transforming yourself and your surroundings and people around you, working with materials you have at hand, what you have at your disposal. When we talk about improvised music, it’s improvised not just in the sense that I’m choosing what notes to play, but I’m also choosing everything about it and putting it together because it’s what we have. If you were stranded in the forest overnight, you might improvise a tent out of some branches and a blanket. And when you think about it that way, that’s kind of what this music is. It’s a strategy for survival, a strategy for transformation and connection, and a strategy for creative becoming, I think is the best way to put it.

Watch and/or hear a recent performance by the Vijay Iyer Trio here.


Two neat interactive features over at the NYTimes: Who are the 1%? And what % are you?

Vanity Fair offers a lengthy oral history of .the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

In his misguided attempt at “balance” (which just generally reflects his unwillingness to take a stance on issues beyond the confines of the comfortable middle ground, in which he decries the extremism of both sides equally), Andy Revkin refuses to recognize that making the supply chain more efficient isn't enough to green Wal Mart. The simple answer to the question he poses is “no”; the reality of the situation that Revkin finds too extreme to acknowledge is that a society built on cheap, disposable mega-consumption — i.e., the very model that Wal Mart depends upon — cannot and will not ever be sustainable.

A study of 15 fisheries managed using catch shares shows generally positive outcomes for both fishers and communities, as well as the managed stocks.

Rawls, justice, and regional economies.

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Marin Alsop decodes Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra.

The Jayhawks stop by the studio of public radio's very fine Sound Opinions. And Jim and Greg give a shout-out to German experimental masters Can. Check out this absolutely mindblowing performance of their fantastic tune “Halleluwah”:


Heather's Happy Link of the Day: snowboarding crow.

1/12

California was ahead-of-the-curve in passing groundbreaking climate change legislation that actually considers the importance of land use patterns. But the supposedly sustainable communities that the law incentivizes won't be sustainable unless they take equity and public health into account:

But according to a recent analysis by Oakland’s Pacific Institute and a group of public health and air-quality advocates known as the Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative, California’s efforts to build sustainable communities as mandated by the state law could unintentionally threaten the health of Bay Area residents.

“Unless health-protective measures are incorporated into infill and transit-oriented development policies, these forms of development may actually exacerbate the adverse impacts of freight transport on community health and quality of life,” the report said.

According to the Pacific Institute analysis, about a quarter of Bay Area land prioritized for smart-growth development under the 2008 law intersects with the air district’s high health risk communities.

“Infill development could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by locating more housing near job centers and public transportation, making it easier for people to avoid driving long distances to meet their everyday needs,” the report stated. “However, infill development could also expose more people to toxic air pollution if more housing is sited near freeways and other freight-related land uses without accounting for the risks that this poses to human health.”

Track and map US GHG emissions. (Though, as Think Green notes, it could be better: “the exclusion of industrial agriculture pollution is a loophole inserted by Congress to protect the dangerous business model of Big Ag.”)

NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman makes the case for taking parking lots seriously as public spaces:

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

What to do? For starters we ought to take these lots more seriously, architecturally. Many architects and urban planners don’t. Beyond greener designs and the occasional celebrity-architect garage, we need to think more about these lots as public spaces, as part of the infrastructure of our streets and sidewalks, places for various activities that may change and evolve, because not all good architecture is permanent. Hundreds of lots already are taken over by farmers’ markets, street-hockey games, teenage partiers and church services. We need to recognize and encourage diversity.

Mike Konczal is thinking about parking, too — using recent experiments regarding parking spaces in Chicago and, soon, Los Angeles as a starting point to consider the ideology of privatizing public goods:

[P]eople react strongly against privatization without market competition, and there’s three good reasons why they should. There’s the matter of who ultimately controls the residual, so if there are rents captured they go to private agents as opposed to the public. If monopolists provide too little of a good at too high a price, that surplus goes to private agents, instead of recycling to taxpayers. This has huge implications for whether the initial price tag is set right, for whether the government will get too little because of crony practices or because they are liquidity-constrained, and what mechanisms are in place for reevaluating the deal at points in the future. Chances are these will all be problems, as they were in Chicago.

Often, since the logic of the market isn’t appropriate for certain situation, there are significant regulations of these allocations. This seemingly defeats the purposes of introducing the privatization reforms itself. For instance, private prisons have extensive regulations associated with them, because the baseline of what should be done to prisoners shouldn’t be left to market forces. This can lead to an increase in the importance of regulations, because monitoring of private agents can become quite costly. Lobbying by private firms to change the policy and regulations of these goods can often increase the Public Choice style corruption that privatization was meant to combat.

Finally, it makes it harder for the democratic process to play a part in the allocation, and puts elements of democracy and the public in conflict with private ownership. For many goods associated with infrastructure and government services, these will be at odds. In the Chicago parking meter example, when there are block parties or art fairs that block meters the public has to compensate the private owners. Private investors need to approve or get paid for there to be public gatherings on Chicago streets. People find this inherently offensive, as well they should.

(Konczal's inspiration to think about these issues is a piece on parking guru Donald Shoup published in Los Angeles Magazine. Read it.)


Speaking of driving and parking,  a new study published in EHP shows (surprise, surprise) that there are positive health benefits associated with reduced automobile travel:

[S]ignificant health and economic benefits are possible if bicycling replaces short car trips. Less dependence on automobiles in urban areas would also improve health in downwind rural settings.

Shocking, I know. Apparently biking is good for health and produces fewer particulate emissions than driving. Meanwhile, Kaid Benfield tells us that livable, walkable neighborhoods promote walking and reduce driving:

New research from Southern California has found that residents of neighborhoods with a central core of shops and services – a pattern typically found in older, traditional communities – walk nearly three times more often than do residents of neighborhoods whose nearest shops and services lie along a major arterial roadway – a pattern typically found in newer suburban development. Residents of traditionally styled and centered neighborhoods also drive less than their counterparts residing in the newer pattern.

This is true even when the data are controlled for individual and household economic and demographic characteristics.

[...]

Notably, the residents of the centered neighborhoods were found to take shorter trips, suggesting that walkable proximity – both closeness and a safe, direct walking route – to shops and services is also important. It may not do much to encourage walking, for example, if the dry cleaner’s is a quarter mile away as the crow flies but you have to travel two or three times that far navigating busy roads around the subdivision to get there.

Benfield also has a recent post about “pocket neighborhoods” worth reading.


If you thought Mitt Romney might return to his moderate style of governance, you should probably give up hope on that. Notorious immigrant-hating, nativist, and voter suppression expert Kris Kobach, author of the draconian anti-immigrant “show me your papers” legislation in both Arizona and Alabama, just endorsed Mittens. The NYTimes editorial page chimes in:

Mr. Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, drafted that state’s photo-ID law supposedly to stem fraudulent voting but with the real purpose of suppressing Democratic votes. He is nationally known for drafting statutes, many passed by states and local governments, that usurp federal control of immigration enforcement and aim to make life intolerable for immigrants. He is with the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that wants to reduce legal immigration.
[...]

In this campaign, Mr. Romney has shed all good sense. He recently said he would even veto the Dream Act, which could give legal status to blameless young immigrants who go to college or serve in the military.

More on Guantánamo +10. The Guardian reminds us of just how how of a travesty the past ten years have been:

The ACLU's Hina Shamsi said: "Guan­tánamo has been a catastrophic failure on every front: legally, ethically, and in terms of our security. There are 171 captives left in the camp, and of those, 89 have been cleared for release but are still stuck there in a Kafkaesque limbo. That comes at an annual cost to the US taxpayer of $800,000 per captive." With 17 soldiers guarding each inmate, Guantánamo isn't cheap.

A further 46 unidentified men were designated under last year's inter-agency review as being "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution" – there isn't sufficient evidence to put them on trial, but nor will they be released.

"We must restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that made this country great." That statement could have been made by any one of the many Guantánamo critics still campaigning for its closure. In fact, the words were spoken by Obama on 22 January 2009, the day after his inauguration, as he signed an order to close the camp within one year. So what went wrong?

Pardiss Kebriaei of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, who has acted as defence lawyer for four detainees, believes the rot set in at the very moment of the signing. At that point, she said, Obama could have told the American people the truth about Guantánamo detainees: that most of them are low-level operatives who are a far cry from the "worst of the worst", as they were described when the first 20 arrived exactly a decade ago.

The Guardian also describes the Kafkaesque fate of the lone British detainee:

Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, who visited him two months ago, said he could not disclose what Aamer said because complaints he might have about his mistreatment, or his chronic health problems, are deemed classified until the US "sees fit to allow me to discuss them".

Stafford Smith wrote to Hague at the time saying: "I do not think it is stretching matters to say that he is gradually dying in Guantánamo Bay."

Why Aamer, born 45 years ago in Medina, Saudi Arabia, has not been released is a mystery. Under US law the defence secretary, Leon Panetta, must certify that Britain is a safe place for him to return to, and that he will commit no future crimes there.

Despite the British government's protestations, this is something that Panetta seems unwilling to do.

Scott Horton takes a look at what lessons we've learned from America's experiment with war crimes and the violation of our nation's core principles:

What lessons can be drawn from the American experiment at Guantánamo? Two have consistently garnered less media attention than they merit. The first is that, ten years out, the United States still has not tried any Gitmo detainees as high-profile leaders of the 9/11 plot. Five of the prisoners have been charged, and the evidence assembled against some of them seems impressive. But the failure of the United States to act quickly against the instigators of 9/11 by charging them with crimes, presenting clear and persuasive evidence of their involvement, and convicting them is an inexcusable one, shared by the Bush and Obama administrations. Plenty of excuses have been offered, including the need to extract intelligence from prisoners, the need to conduct thorough investigations, the complications created by the use of torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” on key witnesses, and legal issues surrounding military commissions. Most of these problems are of the government’s own making, and none of them adequately explains the shameful loss of time in bringing justice to the victims and the country as a whole. Gitmo will forever be associated with the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied.

The second underreported lesson of Gitmo relates to the poisonous effect of partisan politics. No one expected matters as deeply felt as 9/11 to remain entirely outside of partisan politics, but the idea of Gitmo was cast soon after the attack, amid a political campaign. Republicans made it an issue in the midterm elections of 2002, marketing it as a “robust” or “proactive” approach to defending the nation against terrorists. The message worked marvelously, scoring enormous gains for the G.O.P.

Unknown to most Americans, though, just before the fall vote, representatives of the CIA and FBI went to the White House to break the bad news: Gitmo had been filled not with dangerous Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but with a bunch of nobodies. Political considerations plainly dictated the response. The government would not review the prisoners’ cases or grant releases, we were told; instead, “the president has determined that they are all enemy combatants.” Not only did this approach deny facts later borne out in case reviews and habeas petitions, it aggressively demonized the Gitmo population in order to create a sort of political insurance policy.

The Bush Administration’s shameful response continues to distort the domestic political dialogue about Guantánamo, which amounts to an extended effort to avoid accountability for a series of stupid political mistakes. In the end, it has been effective domestic politics. But it has cost America enormously on the global stage, diminishing the country’s influence and degrading its moral image to an unprecedented degree. This, more than any other reason, is why Obama’s pledge to close Gitmo was fundamentally wise, and why Obama should be reminded of that pledge and pressed to bring it to fruition.

David Cole makes similar points, reminding us that the blame falls not only on the previous administration, but Congress and Obama, as well:

President Bush undoubtedly committed the original sin. Had he followed the rules governing wartime detention from the outset, Guantánamo would not be an international embarrassment. It has long been established that in an ongoing war a country may detain the enemy for the conflict’s duration. But the laws of war require that we afford hearings to those whose status is in doubt, that we release them when the conflict ends and that we treat them humanely throughout. Bush refused to provide hearings, asserted the prerogative to hold people during a never-ending “war on terror” and authorized systematic cruel and inhuman treatment. For years, Guantánamo was synonymous with Bush’s defiantly lawless approach to the “war on terror.”

But we can no longer point the finger only at Bush. He’s been out of office for three years, and Guantánamo is still very much with us. Congress, with the support of many Democrats, has adopted a shortsighted “not in my backyard” attitude, making it impossible for President Obama to deliver on his promise to close Guantánamo. In provisions recently renewed in the NDAA, Congress has barred any transfer of Guantánamo detainees to a US prison, even for criminal trial, and radically restricted the president’s authority to transfer detainees to foreign countries, essentially requiring impossible guarantees that they won’t ever pose a threat to the United States. As a result, even though more than half of the remaining detainees—eighty-nine of 171—have been fully cleared for release by a joint review conducted by the military, CIA, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, they remain stuck there. Locking up people we concede need not be held is the very definition of arbitrary detention, but that has become the norm at Guantánamo.

Mark Engler reports from a Guantánamo protest march in Washington:

One protest sign distributed by Amnesty at the march—a sign with black type on a bright yellow background—read, “End Indefinite Detention: Charge or Release!” 

I was left to wonder at how this ever became a demand at a demonstration. The types of things I am used to seeing on protest signs—Repeal NAFTA; Make the CEOs Pay; Medicare for All—all contain at least a hint of utopianism. While they are not impractical suggestions in themselves, one would be surprised to see them enacted in full anytime in the near future. But “Charge or Release”? A demand that those being held as criminals should have the charges against them presented? How have we come to a point where this is something that needs placard space? 

“The sad fact is that demanding very basic principles of American justice is actually a radical demand, given the systematic violation of these principles by our government,” said Jeremy Varon, associate professor of history at the New School for Social Research. Varon is a friend and colleague who is active in Witness Against Torture and with whom I spoke with at the march. “Simple statements like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ or ‘charge or release’—things that should be core parts of any due process framework—have become things that have to be fought for tooth and nail. And, yes, it can feel weird as someone who is actually quite radical to be asking for things that are such basic components of liberalism—in the philosophical sense of the word. But that’s the political situation we’re in.” 

Varon added: “The utopian element is that we want a world beyond torture, beyond coercion, beyond tyranny, and beyond the denial of basic human rights and civil liberties. These shouldn’t be radical propositions, but they need to be defended.”

And lastly, the always-wonderful Dahlia Lithwick indicts the American people, for their unwillingness to even acknowledge the shameful decade that has been carried out in our names:

The 10-year anniversary was marked today by protests, articles, editorials, letters, personal remembrances, and reminders that Guantanamo itself is only part of the problem with Guantanamo.

In the foreign press they are saying that the camp “weighs heavily on America’s conscience” and that “the shame of Guantanamo remains.” But most Americans are experiencing the anniversary without much conscience or shame; just with the same sense of inevitability and invisibility that has pervaded the entire 10-year existence of the camp itself: inevitability in that we somehow believe the camp was truly necessary and nobody ever really expects the conflict to be resolved; and invisibility in that nobody really knows what’s happening there, or why.

So while the rest of the world experiences this day in terms of how the United States ever got itself into this situation and what it’s all done to America’s reputation abroad, here in the United States the discourse is confined to how we will continue to live with it and why. The paradox of Guantanamo has always been that it’s been invisible to so many Americans, and yet the only thing the rest of the world sees. The whole point of the prison camp there was to create a legal black hole. We’ve fished our wish: The world sees only blackness; we see only a hole.

That’s always been the challenge of Guantanamo: making it seem real to Americans who have tended to think of the Cuban camp as the potted palm in the war on terror. And it’s very difficult to get exercised over a potted palm.

 
The New York Times' readers' advocate is unsure whether or not journalists should do their jobs and fulfill their responsibility to their readers. Perhaps they should just serve as stenographers for the ruling classes, report their blatant distortions, lies, and falsehoods without challenge, and just print lies?:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

No, he was not writing a satirical piece meant to be published in The Onion. In light of this ridiculousness, the only appropriate response is mockery. Former Wonketteer, Juli Wiener, is here for us (h/t Katelyn):

[W]e here at V.F. [are] looking for reader input on whether and when Vanity Fair should spell “words” correctly in the stories we publish.

One example: the word “maintenance” seems like it should only have one “a” in it. It should be “maintenence,” right? But it’s not. So is it our job as reporters and editors to spell it correctly?

Another example: who decides “Michele Bachmann” should be spelled with one “l” in “Michele” and two “n”s in “Bachmann”? I’ve never seen it spelled like that in any other circumstance, so should we print it just because that’s how she spells it? I don’t know.

With much attention being paid to a recent NBER study on the importance of teachers (.pdf), the Albert Shanker Institute chimes in with a plea for a more nuanced, sane response:

What this paper shows – using an extremely detailed dataset and sophisticated, thoroughly-documented methods – is that teachers matter, perhaps in ways that some didn’t realize. What it does not show is how to measure and improve teacher quality, which are still open questions. This is a crucial distinction, one which has been discussed on this blog numerous times (also here and here), as it is frequently obscured or outright ignored in discussions of how research findings should inform concrete education policy.

In addition to the standard finding that teacher effects on test scores vary widely, Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff report two general sets of results. The first pertains to the well-known possibility that value-added and other growth model estimates are biased by non-random classroom assignment. That is, whether some teachers are assigned students with unobserved characteristics (e.g., behavioral issues) that are both associated with testing gains and not picked up by the models. If so, this may mean that some teachers are unfairly penalized (or rewarded) based on the mix of students they get.

[...]

As always, one should interpret these results cautiously – they only apply to a small subset of teachers/students in one district, and they only test these relationships for one particular type of measure (value-added, with all the limitations it entails) – but they do suggest that teacher effects may be longer-lasting – and affect a broader range of outcomes – than has been demonstrated previously.

For instance, prior research has shown that teacher effects on test scores “decay” rapidly (put simply, students don’t retain much of what they learn). This analysis also finds evidence of significant “fade out,” but, using the unusually long time span in the data, Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff conclude that the decline stabilizes after three years, at which time about one-third of the original impact remains. In other words, the achievement gains seem to persist into later life.

The policy implications of this second set of findings, however, are far from clear. The fact that teachers matter is not in dispute. The issues have always been how to measure teacher effectiveness at the individual-level and, more importantly, whether and how it can be improved overall.

On the one hand, the connection between value-added and important future outcomes does suggest that there may be more to test-based teacher productivity measures – at least in a low-stakes context – than may have been previously known. In other words, to whatever degree the findings of this paper can be generalized, these test-based measures may in fact be associated with long-term desired outcomes, such as earnings and college attendance. There is some strong, useful signal there.

On the other hand, this report’s findings do not really address important questions about the proper role for these estimates in measuring teacher “quality” at the individual level (as previously discussed here), particularly the critical details (e.g., the type of model used, addressing random error) that many states and districts using these estimates seem to be ignoring. Nor do they assess the appropriate relative role of alternative measures, such as principal observations, which provide important information about teacher effectiveness not captured by growth model estimates.

Most importantly, the results do not really speak directly to how teacher quality is best improved, except insofar as it adds to the body of compelling evidence that teachers are important and that successful methods for improving teacher quality – if and when they are identified and implemented – could yield benefits for a broad range of outcomes over the long-term.

Despite these issues, many people — including the authors themselves — are quick to make policy recommendations that go well beyond what the data suggests. Maria Bustillos at The Awl takes the authors to task for their cold-hearted approach to educational reform:

The authors might argue that they are aiming to influence policy by focusing on the accrued financial benefits to millions of students over time, rather than suggesting that each individual student might make a little more money in "x" or "y" circumstances. But analyzing past data doesn't necessarily mean you can isolate and amplify whatever bit of the results you like. And the big question, is this even a legitimate method of guiding education policy? Monetizing not eyeballs, but minds?

Here's what they told Annie Lowrey at The Times:

The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, and to remove the lowest performers, despite the disruption and uncertainty involved.

"The message is to fire people sooner rather than later," Professor Friedman said.

Professor Chetty acknowledged, "Of course there are going to be mistakes — teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired." But he said that using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more.

That is easy for Professor Chetty to say. He's 32 years old, and some kind of a wunderkind who is apparently very comfortable dictating the fates of lesser souls. I can't help but think that someone with just a little more imagination would have recommended instead, if these claims are true, that it might be a good idea to find out exactly how the "better" teachers achieve their results, and then teach those techniques to everybody else. But no! They want to "fire people sooner, rather than later."

I would just love to know how Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff would like it if economists, too, had to be standardized-tested, and stood to lose their jobs every year if their recommendations didn't result in a measurable increase in GDP, or if their predictions were off by half a percent. Would we have even one economist left? Keynes maybe, oh whoops, he's dead.

What is glaringly obvious to those of us who've actually spent some time in schools is that teachers in this country are already hamstrung by excessive testing requirements and all the rest of the crazy demands of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that does our students far more harm than good. To these already ludicrous teaching conditions we are meant now to add a new burden, the fear that you're going to get canned because you aren't raising test scores year after year.

Clarence Thomas is as unsympathetic, cruel man who has little-to-no interest in seeing that justice is served. As we learned last year, prosecutorial misconduct doesn't bother him in the least. And now we are reminded yet again that he doesn't really care that the  accused are treated fairly.

ProPublica takes a look at the controversy swirling around the Elsevier-funded Research Works Act, which would seek to once again privatize taxpayer-funded research.

The reality-deniers at the Chamber of Commerce want to burn all the world's carbon-based energy sources. Hmm, you'd think the extinction of the human race would be bad for corporate profits, no?

A new world's smallest vertebrate.

The best headline written this year.

Catch limits are coming to all US managed fisheries.

A new, delightfully hilarious tune from Stephin Merritt, from the new Magnetic Fields record (The Bottom Of The Sea, due out on March 6) :

1/11

Alex Steffen says the key to revitalizing our economy is through building greener cities:

Cities at the cutting edge of this kind of development, like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, aim to be carbon-neutral within 20 years. Change at that speed means not just doing things differently but doing different things and starting now. Top of the list: avoiding big investments in outdated projects such as highway construction in favor of concentrating resources on transforming key neighborhoods, extending transit systems, and upgrading infrastructure.

Carbon-neutral cities will also help uncage urban innovation, given that making them carbon-zero will involve a million opportunities to do things better in nearly every industry. I suggest new innovation zones: specific parts of cities (perhaps currently underutilized or abandoned) that can be turned over to small- and mid-scale experiments in carbon-zero work, commerce, and living. Think of them as seedbeds for new urban ways of life. Guided by clear, basic rules and fast-tracked permitting, and encouraged by connections with local industry and universities, such zones could quickly become hothouses for growing the kinds of city-building businesses that will feed the global economy as it surges into this urban century. If they bloom, they will draw the kind of creative young people every city is fighting for; what many of the brightest of the next generation want most of all is to participate in making a better future.

The People of Ecuador vs. Chevron:

During the plaintiffs’ portion of the tour, a local man named Donald Moncayo showed me around. Wearing white surgical gloves, he dug up a fistful of black mud and held it so that the sunlight caught the telltale blue-orange tint of petroleum. At one fetid pit in a jungle glade, he stepped gingerly onto the surface of the pool, where the solid matter in the produced water had congealed into a tarlike crust that was sturdy enough to support him. Smiling a little, Moncayo shifted his weight from one foot to the other, until the whole surface began to undulate beneath him. He looked like a kid on a waterbed. According to the plaintiffs, there are nearly a thousand of these pits in the Oriente, scattered across an area the size of Rhode Island.

Watching Moncayo, I had a sense of déjà vu. He is the regular master of ceremonies on the toxic tour; I had read accounts of his routine, and had seen it enacted, in nearly identical fashion, in “Crude,” the Berlinger documentary. But, if Moncayo’s cadences were rote, there was nothing feigned about his indignation. He led me down a steep ravine to a creek. In the gauzy light filtering through the canopy, the water, which was only a foot deep, looked crystalline. Moncayo drove a stick into the creek bed and churned the mud until the water grew clouded by sediment. At his encouragement, I skimmed my hand across the surface of the creek. My palm was coated in an acrid film.

Moncayo watched me with grim satisfaction. “We tell Chevron, ‘If you think this is O.K. for human consumption, then why don’t you drink from it?’ ” he said.

Jim Craig, a Chevron spokesman, took me around Lago Agrio. He told me that the company has taken its own water samples in the Oriente, and has never identified a positive reading for hydrocarbon contamination. He speculated that, in some cases, the plaintiffs may have “spiked” local water sources after Chevron did its tests.

Craig told me that the skin infections and gastrointestinal problems attributed by the plaintiffs to oil pollution were more likely caused by sewer lines that run into local streams and rivers. “You can imagine all kinds of stomach problems arising from the ingestion of that crap,” he said.

A few miles outside Lago Agrio, we stood on the lip of a waste pit, and Craig told me that the vile-looking residue on its surface was only a few inches thick. To illustrate this point, he picked up a rock and lobbed it into the pit. It landed, with a sickly thud, on the surface. “If we had a bigger rock . . .” he said, and threw a much larger one. It, too, failed to sink.

The rest of the piece details Chevron's absolutely brutal legal strategy (which seems to be nothing more than brute intimidation), which somehow is convincing enough to district judge Lewis Kaplan to force the plaintiffs to turn over nearly all their personal records to the company. (The pollution of Ecuador is covered in detail in Joe Berlinger's film “Crude,” which is definitely worth seeing.)


The prison at Guantánamo turns 10 years old today. Mohammad el Gorani details his detention:

For months, I didn’t know where I was. Some brothers said Europe. No, others told: ‘It’s the weather of Oman.’ Others told Brazil, also because of the weather. We arrived in February, but it was so hot in comparison to Kandahar. There we shivered night and day, especially when we were naked. After a few months, an interrogator told me: ‘We’re in Cuba.’ It was the first time I heard this name. ‘An island in the middle of the ocean. Nobody can run away from here and you’ll be here for ever.’ The older detainees knew of Cuba, but didn’t know there was an American base. I’d seen a lot of American movies, and arrested people always said: ‘I have the right to a lawyer!’ The interrogators laughed at me: ‘Not here in Guantánamo! You got no rights here!’

The night I arrived, I was still tired from the flight, I had a first interrogation. The old man started by saying: ‘We have two faces, one nice and one ugly. We don’t want to show you the ugly one.’ He carried on with questions: ‘What were you doing in Afghanistan? Are you from al-Qaida? Are you a Taliban? Have you been in training camps?’ My answers were just: no, no, no! He started to shout and he sent me back to my cell. I was tired and scared. Prisoners were tortured somewhere. When you heard them crying, you were really scared – you thought you’d be next.In the beginning there were interrogations every night. They tortured me with electricity, mostly on the toes. The nails of my big toes fell off. Sometimes they hung you up like a chicken and hit your back. Sometimes they chained you, with your head on the ground. You couldn’t move for 16 or 17 hours. You peed on yourself.

A fellow victim of Gitmo, Murat Kurnaz, describes his experience there in the NYTimes:

I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness. The interrogations continued always with the same questions. I told my story over and over — my name, my family, why I was in Pakistan. Nothing I said satisfied them. I realized my interrogators were not interested in the truth.

Despite all this, I looked for ways to feel human. I have always loved animals. I started hiding a piece of bread from my meals and feeding the iguanas that came to the fence. When officials discovered this, I was punished with 30 days in isolation and darkness.

Another innocent victim of torture, Lakhdar Boumediene, discusses his unjust imprisonment and treatment:

The fact that the United States had made a mistake was clear from the beginning. Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

I still had faith in American justice. I believed my captors would quickly realize their mistake and let me go. But when I would not give the interrogators the answers they wanted — how could I, when I had done nothing wrong? — they became more and more brutal. I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

And, of course, all three were wrongly imprisoned and eventually released since they weren't terrorist threats. But since Congress is being intrasigent and has given in to NIMBY concerns, the answer to ending this sad, shameful chapter in American history may be to give Guantánamo back to the Cubans:

In the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility — or make it permanent — has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.

[...]

If President Obama were to acknowledge this history and initiate the process of returning Guantánamo to Cuba, he could begin to put the mistakes of the last 10 years behind us, not to mention fulfill a campaign pledge. (Given Congressional intransigence, there might be no better way to close the detention camp than to turn over the rest of the naval base along with it.) It would rectify an age-old grievance and lay the groundwork for new relations with Cuba and other countries in the Western Hemisphere and around the globe. Finally, it would send an unmistakable message that integrity, self-scrutiny and candor are not evidence of weakness, but indispensable attributes of leadership in an ever changing world. Surely there would be no fitter way to observe today’s grim anniversary than to stand up for the principles Guantánamo has undermined for over a century.

Glenn Greenwald has some powerful words about the gross injustice of indefinite detention. And an ACLU infographic shows just how wrong-headed Guantánamo has been. (h/t Parady the Elder) Amy Davidson also rounds up some links of interest on the Gitmo anniversary here.


The death penalty isn't just wrong, but it's also carried out with complete arbitrariness:

In 2011, the number of new death sentences imposed in the United States fell by 25 percent to 78, the lowest number since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. This “freakishly” rare application — among the thousands of murder cases a year — is strong evidence that every state system is arbitrary and capricious. 

A look back at Cesar Chavez and the UFW and why the UFW is no longer a major player:

What is the significance of this story for what’s left of the labor movement today?

There’s no substitute for democracy. That’s the major lesson of the UFW experience. Democracy inside unions might be difficult and seem like a waste of time, but it’s only through democratic debate that people build the kind of commitment that is necessary to stand together. The UFW had no locals. That was a tremendous mistake. There’s no substitute for face to face debate, people having direct control over their local union affairs. That’s the way you build strength.

A long piece in Outside examines the somewhat questionable expenditures of Lance Armstrong's Livestrong Foundation:

Livestrong prides iteself on the fact that—on paper, anyway—it spends 81 percent of every dollar on programs. This is a big improvement over 2005, when the American Institute of Philanthropy took Livestrong to task for spending 45 cents of every dollar on fundraising. Now AIP gives Livestrong an A-minus, while Charity Navigator rates it three stars out of four.

But the foundation’s financial reports from 2009 and 2010 show that Livestrong’s resources pay for a very large amount of marketing and PR. During those years, the foundation raised $84 million and spent just over $60 million. (The rest went into a reserve of cash and assets that now tops $100 million.)

A surprising $4.2 million of that went straight to advertising, including large expenditures for banner ads and optimal search-engine placement. Outsourcing is the order of the day: $14 million of total spending, or more than 20 percent, went to outside consultants and professionals. That figure includes $2 million for construction, but much of the money went to independent organizations that actually run Livestrong programs. For example, Livestrong paid $1 million to a Boston–based public-health consulting firm to manage its campaigns in Mexico and South Africa against cancer stigma—the perception that cancer is contagious or invariably fatal.

Livestrong touts its stigma programs, but it spent more than triple that, $3.5 million in 2010 alone, for merchandise giveaways and order fulfillment. Curiously, on Livestrong’s tax return most of those merchandise costs were categorized as “program” expenses. CFO Greg Lee says donating the wristbands counts as a program because “it raises awareness.”

This kind of spending dwarfs Livestrong’s outlays for its direct services and patient-focused programs like Livestrong at the YMCA, an exercise routine tailored to cancer survivors available at YMCAs nationwide ($424,000 in 2010). There’s also a Livestrong at School program, offered in conjunction with Scholastic magazine ($630,000 in 2010). “Explain to students that Lance was very sick with cancer but that he was treated and got better,” begins one sample lesson plan for grades three through six.

Livestrong spends as much on legal bills as on these two programs combined: $1.8 million in 2009–10, mainly to protect its trademarks. In one memorable case, its lawyers shut down a man in Oklahoma who was selling Barkstrong dog collars. Meanwhile, “benefits to donors” (also merchandise, as well as travel expenses for Livestrong Challenge fundraisers) accounted for another $1.4 million in spending in 2010.

There’s still a research department, but now it focuses on things like quality-of-life surveys of cancer survivors. During my visit, I was plied with glossy reports and brochures, which are cranked out by the truckload. The foundation’s 2010 copying-and-printing bill came to almost $1.5 million.

But Livestrong’s largest single project in 2009—indeed, the main focus of Armstrong’s comeback—was the Livestrong Global Cancer Summit, held in Dublin in August. The summit ate up close to 20 percent of the foundation’s $30 million in program spending that year.

[...]

In one case, Armstrong himself stood to profit from the sale of a major Livestrong asset: its name. Most people are unaware that there are two Livestrong websites. Livestrong.org is the site for the nonprofit Lance Armstrong Foundation, while Livestrong.com is a somewhat similar-looking page that features the same Livestrong logo and design but is actually a for-profit content farm owned by Demand Media.

In 2008, the foundation licensed the Livestrong brand name to Demand, the online media company behind eHow and Cracked.com, among other properties. Livestrong.com was positioned as a “health, fitness, and wellness community,” offering an online calorie counter, exercise and yoga videos, and articles about such topics as “What Are the Signs and Symptoms of Rejecting Belly Button Rings?”

As compensation for the use of its name, the foundation received about 183,000 shares of stock, which it sold for $3.1 million when the company went public in January 2011. Armstrong also received 156,000 shares of his own as part of a spokesperson agreement. (His agents, Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs, also received shares.) After the deal was criticized in the media, Armstrong donated his initial sale proceeds—roughly $1.2 million—to the foundation and said he planned to donate the rest, too.

Livestrong executives describe the deal as good for everyone, a way to spread their message of healthy lifestyles to a wider audience. Under the agreement, Armstrong provided blog entries, videos, and other content to Livestrong.com. “I actually have to do work for them,” he told me in an interview.

Adds Ulman: “They guaranteed us certain levels of traffic. They said, ‘We will build a site, and we will ultimately send people to the foundation.’ ” But traffic to the for-profit Demand Media site has surged, in part thanks to Lance’s promotional work, while the foundation’s traffic has remained essentially flat. And it was the foundation that paid to defend their joint trademark against the Barkstrong dog-collar salesman.

“It’s definitely questionable,” says Mark Zimbelman, the Brigham Young University professor behind Fraudbytes. “Imagine if the American Red Cross sold its name to Americanredcross.com, and you can go there and buy vitamins. You think you’re donating or helping the American Red Cross, but you’re really not. It’s unheard of.”

Willard Mittens Romney, Job Creator? Not so much. Of course, creating jobs was never the point; Mitt's job was "wealth creation," not job creation. To make money, it was always about screwing over employees and anyone else — taking money from others and calling it his own was what Mitt's callous version of capitalism always was:

For 15 years, Romney had been in the business of creative destruction and wealth creation. But what about his claims of job creation? Though Bain Capital surely helped expand some companies that had created jobs, the layoffs and closures at other firms would lead Romney’s political opponents to say that he had amassed a fortune in part by putting people out of work. The lucrative deals that made Romney wealthy could exact a cost. Maximizing financial return to investors could mean slashing jobs, closing plants, and moving production overseas. It could also mean clashing with union workers, serving on the board of a company that ran afoul of federal laws, and loading up already struggling companies with debt.

There is a difference between companies run by buyout firms and those rooted in their communities, according to Ross Gittell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics. When it comes to buyout firms, he said, “the objective is: Make money for investors. It’s not to maximize jobs.” Romney, in fact, had a fiduciary duty to investors to make as much money as possible. Sometimes everything worked out perfectly; a change in strategy might lead to cost savings and higher profits, and Bain cashed in. Sometimes jobs were lost, and Bain cashed in or lost part or all of its investment. In the end, Romney’s winners outweighed his losers on the Bain balance sheet. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain partner who worked with Romney on many deals, said the discussion at buyout companies typically does not focus on whether jobs will be created. “It’s the opposite—what jobs we can cut,” Wolpow said. “Because you had to document how you were going to create value. Eliminating redundancy, or the elimination of people, is a very valid way. Businesses will die if you don’t do that. I think the way Mitt should explain it is, if we didn’t buy these businesses and impose efficiencies on them, the market would have done it with disastrous consequences.”

2011 was not a good year for a woman's right to control her own body. And it could get even worse, as Republican candidates are now questioning the right to privacy established by Griswold; so much for small government conservatism:

Over the years the modern Republican Party has reflected both libertarian and authoritarian tendencies. Both survive, in a way. When it comes to taxes and regulation, the libertarian side of the party is ascendant. Even the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism has faded from view. But with regard to civil liberties, the G.O.P. has embraced state power with a vengeance. Whether it’s the rights of wartime detainees, or abortion rights, or the rights of gay people to marry (or to be free from discrimination), contemporary Republican leaders reflect clear moral disapproval. (Even Ron Paul, who is often described as a libertarian, is a fierce opponent of a woman’s right to choose abortion. And Rick Perry recently announced that he’s against a right to abortion even in cases of rape or incest.) Privacy is often described as “the right to be left alone,” but that’s not a value that seems terribly important in the G.O.P. right now.


The old cases of Pierce and Meyer show how important that right is. Though we may live in sex-obsessed times, these cases serve as useful reminders that an overbearing state can also assert itself in other ways. Republicans, and conservatives of all kinds, should be especially attuned to the possibility of governmental overreach. As Romney and Santorum illustrated last weekend, they’re not.

An excellent round-up of recent posts on scholarly publishing, Open Access, and the odious Research Works Act. It's a shame to see that a bipartisan group of legislators is willing to carry Elsevier's water for them. (h/t Andy J.) Michael Eisen takes the case against the Research Works Act to the pages on the NYTimes op-ed page and calls on both Congress and scientists and the rest of the academic community to take action to preserve the open dissemination of scientific research:

Rather than rolling back public access, Congress should move to enshrine a simple principle in United States law: if taxpayers paid for it, they own it. This is already the case for scientific papers published by researchers at the N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Md., whose work, as government employees, has been explicitly excluded from copyright protection since 1976. It would be easy to extend this coverage to all works funded by the federal government.

But it is not just Congress that should act. For too long scientists, libraries and research institutions have supported the publishing status quo out of a combination of tradition and convenience. But the latest effort to overturn the N.I.H.’s public access policy should dispel any remaining illusions that commercial publishers are serving the interests of the scientific community and public.

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication.

These steps would not only accomplish an important public good — unlimited access to the latest scientific and medical findings — but they would also send a powerful sign of gratitude to the taxpayers, on whose continued support our research depends.

The fascinating history of Crisco. (h/t Katelyn)

A joint a week won't hurt you. Occasionally smoking weed might even help your lungs:

In fact, those occasional pot smokers actually had improvements in some measurements of lung function. That may be due in part to the stretching involved in the deep tokes typical of marijuana use. By contrast, both past and present cigarette smokers had impaired lung function.

 It's all in your head, or is it?: an ontology of color. (h/t Katelyn)

Recording and the production of knowledge. (h/t Benny)

Nick Zammuto, formerly of The Books, has a new band. Hear their new EP, Idiom Wind, below:


Speaking of new streaming music, Leonard Cohen shares a second tune from his new record:


In shameless self-promotion news, after a brief hiatus, my song-of-the-day blog is back in business.

And in Heather's Happy Link of the Day, Wifey discovers the joy of roasted carrots and declares 2012 to be The Year of the Vegetable.

1/10/2012: Back To Blogging

After a lovely winter break and brief blogging hiatus, we return to your regularly-scheduled depressing internet links...

First though, a brief note from me; despite the various health-related difficulties of the past year, I'm thankful for all our you wonderful people in my life. More sappiness here.

Speaking of break, it was a nice and relaxing — perhaps because I didn't spend my entire time online and actually relaxed and took the time to slow down:

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. 

The Department of Interior decides that 500 new jobs versus potentially poisoning the water source of 26 million Americans isn't worth it. Republicans respond with their usual scorn; if policy doesn't advance the interests of the businesses that line the pockets of the GOP's campaign coffers, it's anti-American:

"It is unconscionable that the administration has yet again caved to political pressure from radical special interest groups rather than standing up for the American people," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. "Banning access to the most uranium-rich land in the United States will be overwhelmingly detrimental to both jobs in Utah and Arizona and our nation's domestic energy security."

Bishop, McCain and other GOP lawmakers back legislation that would prevent the Interior Department from imposing the 20-year ban.

Using modern techniques, mining does not affect drinking water from the Colorado River, the GOP lawmakers said.

The Bureau of Land Management said the 20-year ban on new mining claims would reduce overall uranium production by about 6 percent of current U.S. demand.

State, local and federal governments are expected to lose an estimated $16.6 million in annual tax revenue, and 465 jobs would not materialize.

The Center for American Progress notes who the real winners and losers are.


Meanwhile, continuing with our look at the EPA's new pollution regulations, we get another report that not all energy companies buy into the lie that curbing pollution is evil. Sure, they're driven by their own business interests in this battle, but at least they are making it clear that compliance with pollution regulations can be profitable:

Pointing out that it took only three years to install the scrubbing technology, completing construction in 2009, Constellation argues that other utilities could have been getting ready, too.

Its criticism of other utilities is part of “a very clear, longstanding split” between companies that made the leap and those that deferred the investment or even challenged the rules in court, said John Walke, a coal expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But the laggards, he said, should have seen it coming.

[...]

Some experts say that Constellation’s motivations should not be confused with altruism. Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who headed the E.P.A.’s air office from 2001 to 2005 and now does legal work for utility companies, said that Constellation’s argument that “we stepped up and did the right thing, and now everybody else should” is misleading.

“They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart — they did it because they were required to,” under the Maryland Healthy Air Act, Mr. Holmstead said.

And power plants that survive under the new rules will benefit from the closure of competitors, he and others have pointed out. They will run for more hours of the year and fetch higher prices in daily electricity auctions.

And more of the disingenuous false dichotomy of EPA vs. Jobs, presented by the pollution-loving GOP. Krugman sums up some of the nonsense in a recent column here. ThinkProgress notes that pollution rules actually create a lot more jobs than Keystone XL ever will, not to mention that protects human health and wildlife, while the other destroys it. The editorial board at the NYTimes chimes in, as well, challenging Obama to more forcefully make the case for the job-creating power of curbing pollution and transitioning to a clean energy economy. ClimateProgress points out that cleaning the polluted Chesapeake Bay also creates more jobs than Keystone XL. But no matter, the lies from the GOP will continue to come. Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum decides that the best way to consider costs and benefits is to ignore the benefits altogether. And why stop there? Frothy Mix is now a climate scientist, apparently, and has decided that there's no way a trace gas could ever affect the climate system. Well done, Rick!



If the Repubs win the White House in November, what happens to the environment? Grist's Dave Roberts tries to answer that question. (Part of a larger set of what-if-Obama-loses pieces from the Washington Monthly; be sure to also check out the piece by the always-wonderful Mike Konczal.)

A drier, hotter future: that's where we're headed. The question is what we're going to do. Two new reviews of recent books on the Southwest's sustainability problem ponder that very question.

Those hoping to prop up our unsustainable car-based suburbs that thrive on water we'll no longer have might want to remember that empires fall when water disappears.

The FDA takes on antibiotics in agriculture. Well, sort of. Some antibiotics. Bittman calls it a token gesture; as he pointed out earlier, the FDA has repeatedly shirked its responsibility. Barry Estabrook cuts through the bullshit and rightly notes that the new regs are little more than a cheap stunt. One step forward, but two steps back seems to sum up the situation pretty well.

Peter Gleick takes on the climate change deniers, and labels the GOP's presidential pack the worst of the bunch.

Will the GOP's racist rhetoric come to an end anytime soon? Probably not so long as racists are a key block of the party. But until then, you'll be hearing plenty of paeans to the gloriousness of hard-working whites, while Newt and Frothy Mix get all up in arms about people of color receiving government benefits:

Rick Santorum – son of a beneficiary of the GI Bill (the veterans’ New Deal, you know) and a man who wouldn’t exist were it not for the government program that employed his parents, brought them together and housed them to boot – now says (when he can’t stop himself saying it) that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

Which is to say, when affirmative action was white, it was great, but now …

This is what I call class warfare.

Does Beethoven's progression towards deafness show up in his work? Dutch researchers, analyzing his remarkable string quartets, which are truly sui generis, say yes.

Can you recognize the difference in sound between a Strad and a non-Strad? Try it yourself. More interesting coverage here and here.

Advice on living a life without regrets:

Almost to a person, the elders viewed happiness as a choice, not the result of how life treats you.

A 75-year-old man said, “You are not responsible for all the things that happen to you, but you are completely in control of your attitude and your reactions to them.” An 84-year-old said, “Adopt a policy of being joyful.”

The 90-year-old daughter of divorced parents who had lived a hardscrabble life said, “I learned to be grateful for what I have, and no longer bemoan what I don’t have or can’t do.”

Even if their lives were nine decades long, the elders saw life as too short to waste on pessimism, boredom and disillusionment.

Zombies! Brains! Parasitic mind control!

Funny ha-ha: the year's best humor writing.

That favorite songs of 2011 playlist I made on Spotify just got even larger. Check out 103 great tunes (mostly indie, with a healthy does of modern classical and a small smattering of jazz) released in 2011 here.

And everyone's favorite feature, Heather's Happy Link of the Day, takes us to the Shel Silverstein archives.