Larry Simpson's Thoughts and Musings

Climate Change Denial from Republican Presidential Candidate Santorum

2012-02-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

As I have said before, the Republican Right has a policy of denying human-caused climate warming and even calling it a "hoax". The latest example is the Presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, who thank God has no chance of becoming the president. He is worse than an idiot, since if he knows better and still says this, he is malicious and even evil. And if he really believes that 95% of all climate scientists are wrong, then he is a true idiot and utterly dangerous since he represents the views of a lot of people in the United States.

I copy below a recent article from the Huffington Post blog:

Rick Santorum: I've Never Believed In The 'Hoax Of Global Warming'

First Posted: 02/ 7/2012 1:39 pm Updated: 02/ 7/2012 1:45 pm

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum targeted primary rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich on Tuesday for allegedly buying into the "bogus" science of man-made climate change, while proudly declaring that he himself had never believed in the "hoax of global warming."

At a campaign event in Colorado Springs, Colo., Santorum first took aim at Romney for his support of a regional cap and trade energy pact as Massachusetts governor, a line of attack he previewed over the weekend on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"Governor Romney proudly announced that they were the first state, Massachusetts, to put a cap on CO2 emissions in the state of Massachusetts," Santorum said in Colorado, according to Politico , before turning on Gingrich.

"Speaker Gingrich has supported cap and trade for more than a dozen years. Now, he wants business incentives to go along with cap and trade, but he supported cap and trade, and sat on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and said that global warming had to be addressed by Congress," Santorum continued. "Who is he or who's Governor Romney to be able to go after President Obama? I've never supported even the hoax of global warming."

Gingrich has been battered on the now-notorious spot repeatedly over the course of the campaign. He's gone as far as to call it the "dumbest thing " he's done in the "last four years."

As Think Progress points out , Santorum also gave a more thorough explanation of his views on climate change on Monday.

"If you leave it to Nature, then Nature will do what Nature does, which is boom and bust," Santorum said at an energy summit in Colorado. "We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth's benefit."

He then appeared to give credence to the importance of "science and discovery," but only to prevent the "vagaries of nature" that could damage humans' ability to benefit from the planet.

"We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create," Santorum said.

Read this and weep. I can only surmise that these people want their children and grandchildren to suffer through the worst catastrophe humans will ever face. Maybe with people like this, the human race deserves to be destroyed, but the other life on Earth did not cause this and does not deserve this fate.

A True Revolution of the Mind

2012-01-20T23:16:00.000-08:00

I have been following from a distance the political battle over intellectual property and freedom of the internet, but yesterday something happened that made me sit up and think. There are two bills with the acronyms, SOPA and PIPA, which are being fiercely fought for by the Hollywood Film Studios and their literally thousands of lobbyists loaded with money to grease their passage. And ex Senator Chris Dodd became the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, a lobbying group for the five biggest American film studios. I had had the feeling that the old Senate bull, Dodd, was going over to the dark side during his last days in the Senate, but then Iearned that some of my favorite Democratic Senators and Congress persons, including Barbra Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Franken, Pat Leahy and Harry Reid, among others from both parties, were sponsors of these bills, and my head began to spin.

These bills would allow the US Government to protect copyright infringement by blocking entire websites by manipulating the Domain Name Service or DNS system. A letter to Congress from over 100 law professors stated:
"The Act would allow the government to break the Internet addressing system. The Internet's Domain Name System ("DNS") is a foundational building block upon which the Internet has been built and on which its continued functioning critically depends. The Act will have potentially catastrophic consequences for the stability and security of the DNS."

It would essentially give our government the same power as used and abused by the Chinese government to counter political discontents.

I can appreciate the problems with the online piracy of intellectual property but I also believe that the internet is something special in the intellectual evolution of mankind and exemplifies freedom of speech and freedom of thought as it is rapidly binding the entire world into a single sentient being. Paper news media and other forms of non-digital information must learn to adapt to new ways or vanish in the dustbin of history. And media such as movies, books and music, which can be easily digitized must also somehow find new ways to coexist with the chaotic and all-expansive freedom of the internet.

The power of the internet can be seen in the random appearance of "flash mobs" suddenly coming together in Railroad Stations, city streets and monuments to either make a political point or even to sing song, dance or read poetry. And most famously, the internet was mainly responsible for the "Arab Spring" revolutions which deposed and are still deposing long standing dictatorships. China in fact is so worried about the freedom of the internet that it tries to maintain the type of iron grip now being proposed to be given to the US Government, and is overjoyed that the US is considering these bills.

But suddenly on Wednesday of this week, more than 400 web sites routinely used by millions of people world-wide decided to protest against these bills and simply shut down their sites, while providing users with the phone numbers and emails of all their Federal representatives and Senators. The effect was instant and enormous. The phone systems of almost all the congress people almost collapsed from the irate calls and their email systems overflowed with complaints. And suddenly many congress people turned 180 degrees and decided that these bills were in fact bad and should not be pushed. So in spite of all the financial political contributions from the lobbyists and the power of large corporations and powerful friends, our government representatives saw the power of the people and made up excuses not to vote for these bills. This to me was astounding and opened my eyes to a new way to produce political change in our country.

I would argue that this may provide the way to maintain democracy and achieve goals in the political process. I finally can see a way forward to achieve progress on fighting, for example, the most serious problem of our civilization, climate warming. The overwhelming power of the truly millions of people using the internet can clearly do anything. It is true democracy unblemished by Republican filibusters or Tea Party control of the House. For once I am almost an optimist. We can finally stop racism, religious fanaticism, wars and the invasion of our privacy by the State. Our leaders will be beholden to the people if they want to keep their job, and the people will undergo a learning experience beyond belief.

This is a true revolution of the mind.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

2012-01-05T13:50:00.000-08:00

The recently passed Defense Authorization Bill contained language that will continue allowing our country to grab anyone they want from anywhere in the world and keep them in prison without charges for as long as they want. It also will allow indefinite detention of US citizens. Everyone is concerned with the detention of US citizens, but I feel that the indefinite detention of anyone in the world is much more serious. It attacks the very principles our country was founded on. Although President Obama made a "Signing Statement" that the US detention part would not be enforced during his administration, it said nothing about non-US citizens, and nothing will prevent future Presidents from following this law as written, especially if the Republican right wing extremists gain power.
I copy below a slightly revised article from "Nation of Change" that expresses my sentiments well:

The irony of it all is way more telling than the State of the Union address that we will hear in a few weeks. A constitutional lawyer who was freely elected president signs into law an act that betrays the very principles that the nation he represents was founded on. While the more cautious of us might shy away from the word fascism to describe a nation’s military having the right to detain citizens without trial, it is certainly not hyperbole. There has already been an onslaught of criticism regarding the controversial National Defense Authorization Act that Congress legislated and President Obama signed into law.
Historically, the NDAA was a spending bill that set the annual budget for the US military. Recently, the guaranteed passage of the NDAA has been used by legislators—in spite of vehement rhetorical opposition by progressive and GOP legislators, the bill still passed, unsurprisingly, with overwhelming support (86-13 with one abstaining in the Senate; 322-96 with eleven abstaining in the House)—to craft the policies and politics of the war on terror.
The same day President Obama signed the NDAA, activists with Witness Against Torture (WAT) began preparing for a January 3, 2012 trial to defend themselves against charges stemming from a June 2011 protest when they interrupted House of Representative deliberations on a Defense Appropriations Bill—a precursor to the final NDAA. The reason for WAT’s protest was not the provision that allows the president to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere, which was not included in the early drafts of the 2012 military spending bill. Rather WAT was protesting the provisions in the bill—which did make it into the NDAA—that establish the prison in Guantanamo Bay as a permanent fixture in U.S. foreign policy and seriously question America’s commitment to human and civil rights. Journalist Andy Worthington describes the provisions that make it near impossible to transfer detainees for trial in civilian courts or release them to foreign countries.
The Guardian wrote that, regarding the NDAA’s potential treatment of U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants,” without rights to counsel or trial, in the war on terror is simply the realization of a misguided, immoral, and ineffective domestic and foreign response to terrorism. The chickens are coming home to roost. The American legacy of the 2000s is one of torture, illegal domestic spying, the flouting of international law, and unconscionable detention practices. Meanwhile, nonviolent alternatives for effectively dealing with terrorists—such as a long-stalled potential rehabilitation center for Guantanamo detainees or peer-group centers that challenge and shift the narratives of Islamist terrorism (such as Abdul Haqq Baker and the STREET center that WNV favorite Tina Rosen reported —are not given much official consideration.
Instead, the net of repression continues to grow as it extends across the planet and all its peoples. The U.S. and its people have not been troubled much by the men, women, and even children who languish in its military prisons—secret or otherwise—in Cuba and countless other global locations. As Witness Against Torture activists, whom I am joining, begin an 11-day Fast for Justice on behalf of all those indefinitely detained, will ordinary Americans recognize the global assault on freedom that the Bush and Obama administrations have waged for over a decade?
As Gitmo proves, the policy and practice of indefinite detention is not new.It’s only the latest in a long, ugly succession of unjust detentions ranging from Japanese internment camps to slave plantations and Abu Ghraib. Even if Americans are aghast at the NDAA’s contents that quite clearly contradict the constitutional right of habeas corpus we hold so dear, it is foolish to think this is just a naïve lapse of judgment by the keepers of our best interests. The cat was let out of the bag a long time ago. Recall the famous words of Martin Niemöller , the anti-Nazi pastor and pacifist:

First they came for the communists,and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists,and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

We have failed to speak out for prisoners detained the world over. President Obama enters the final year of his first term, and his landmark executive order to close Guantanamo has been reduced to little more than a prank played on hopeful supporters. 171 men remain imprisoned — more than 60 of whom were cleared for release years ago by President Bush. It is not too late to speak out for them—or ourselves, for that matter—but the sun is setting and the dark night of indefinite detention threatens to rise on friend and foe alike.

A sobering essay from Robert Reich

2011-12-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

I copy below a recent essay by Robert Reich entitled "Why the Republican Crackup is Bad for America." He articulated many of my own thoughts.

Goya - Republicans eating their own:

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican crackup threatens the future of the Grand Old Party more profoundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for America.

The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps making agreements he can’t keep, versus Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who keeps making trouble he can’t control. And not just venerable Republican senators like Indiana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of foreign policy for more than three decades, versus primary challenger state treasurer Richard Mourdock, who apparently misplaced and then rediscovered $320 million in state tax revenues.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.

The underlying conflict lies deep into the nature and structure of the Republican Party. And its roots are very old.

As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority – predominantly Southern, and mainly rural – that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way.

It’s no mere coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most Tea Party representatives in the House are all former members of the Confederacy. Of the Tea Party caucus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Georgia, and three each from South Carolina, Tennessee, and border-state Missouri.

Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. The four Californians in the caucus are from the inland part of the state or Orange County, whose political culture has was shaped by Oklahomans and Southerners who migrated there during the Great Depression.

This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, Southern or rural Republicans – only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.

And the views separating these Republicans from Republicans elsewhere mirror the split between self-described Tea Partiers and other Republicans.

In a poll of Republicans conducted for CNN last September, nearly six in ten who identified themselves with the Tea Party say global warming isn’t a proven fact; most other Republicans say it is.

Six in ten Tea Partiers say evolution is wrong; other Republicans are split on the issue. Tea Party Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and half as likely to support gay marriage.

Tea Partiers are more vehement advocates of states’ rights than other Republicans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abolish the Department of Education; only one in five other Republicans do. And Tea Party Republicans worry more about the federal deficit than jobs, while other Republicans say reducing unemployment is more important than reducing the deficit.

In other words, the radical right wing of today’s GOP isn’t that much different from the social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the Party during the 1990s, and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980s, and, before them, Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”

Through most of these years, though, the GOP managed to contain these white, mainly rural and mostly Southern, radicals. After all, many of them were still Democrats. The conservative mantle of the GOP remained in the West and Midwest – with the libertarian legacies of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, neither of whom was a barn-burner – while the epicenter of the Party remained in New York and the East.

But after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the South began its long shift toward the Republican Party and New York and the East became ever more solidly Democratic, it was only a matter of time. The GOP’s dominant coalition of big business, Wall Street, and Midwest and Western libertarians was losing its grip.

The watershed event was Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Suddenly, it seemed, the GOP had a personality transplant. The gentlemanly conservatism of House Minority Leader Bob Michel was replaced by the bomb-throwing antics of Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.

Almost overnight Washington was transformed from a place where legislators tried to find common ground to a war zone. Compromise was replaced by brinkmanship, bargaining by obstructionism, normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government – which occurred at the end of 1995.

Before then, when I’d testified on the Hill as Secretary of Labor, I had come in for tough questioning from Republican senators and representatives – which was their job. After January 1995, I was verbally assaulted. “Mr. Secretary, are you a socialist?” I recall one of them asking.

But the first concrete sign that white, Southern radicals might take over the Republican Party came in the vote to impeach Bill Clinton, when two-thirds of senators from the South voted for impeachment. (A majority of the Senate, you may recall, voted to acquit.)

America has had a long history of white Southern radicals who will stop at nothing to get their way – seceding from the Union in 1861, refusing to obey Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, shutting the government in 1995, and risking the full faith and credit of the United States in 2010.

Newt Gingrich’s recent assertion that public officials aren’t bound to follow the decisions of federal courts derives from the same tradition.

This stop-at-nothing radicalism is dangerous for the GOP because most Americans recoil from it. Gingrich himself became an object of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Republicans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suffer large losses.

It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way.

Why the Republican Crackup is Bad ForAmerica

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican crackup threatens the future of the Grand Old Party more profoundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for America.

The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps making agreements he can’t keep, versus Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who keeps making trouble he can’t control.

And not just venerable Republican senators like Indiana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of foreign policy for more than three decades, versus primary challenger state treasurer Richard Mourdock, who apparently misplaced and then rediscovered $320 million in state tax revenues.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.

The underlying conflict lies deep into the nature and structure of the Republican Party. And its roots are very old.

This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, Southern or rural Republicans – only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.

And the views separating these Republicans from Republicans elsewhere mirror the split between self-described Tea Partiers and other Republicans.

In a poll of Republicans conducted for CNN last September, nearly six in ten who identified themselves with the Tea Party say global warming isn’t a proven fact; most other Republicans say it is.

Newt Gingrich’s recent assertion that public officials aren’t bound to follow the decisions of federal courts derives from the same tradition.

It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way.

This article was originally posted on Robert Reich's blog .

Truly incredible

2011-12-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

Alan Grayson is one of my political heroes. I sincerely hope he gets elected again.
Following is an email sent from his campaign. Read it - It is truly incredible!

I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage.

Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history.

Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number.

Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank.

Pages 133 & 137 – Some of these “broad-based emergency program” loans were long-term, and some were short-term. But the “term-adjusted borrowing” was equivalent to a total of $1,139,000,000,000 more than one year. That’s more than $1 trillion out the door. Lending for these programs in fact peaked at more than $1 trillion.

Pages 135 & 196 – Sixty percent of the $738 billion “Commercial Paper Funding Facility” went to the subsidiaries of foreign banks. 36% of the $71 billion Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility also went to subsidiaries of foreign banks.

Page 205 – Separate and apart from these “broad-based emergency program” loans were another $10,057,000,000,000 in “currency swaps.” In the “currency swaps,” the Fed handed dollars to foreign central banks, no strings attached, to fund bailouts in other countries. The Fed’s only “collateral” was a corresponding amount of foreign currency, which never left the Fed’s books (even to be deposited to earn interest), plus a promise to repay. But the Fed agreed to give back the foreign currency at the original exchange rate, even if the foreign currency appreciated in value during the period of the swap. These currency swaps and the “broad-based emergency program” loans, together, totaled more than $26 trillion. That’s almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That’s an amount equal to more than seven years of federal spending -- on the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and everything else. And around twice American’s total GNP.

Page 201 – Here again, these “swaps” were of varying length, but on Dec. 4, 2008, there were $588,000,000,000 outstanding. That’s almost $2,000 for every American. All sent to foreign countries. That’s more than twenty times as much as our foreign aid budget.

Page 129 – In October 2008, the Fed gave $60,000,000,000 to the Swiss National Bank with the specific understanding that the money would be used to bail out UBS, a Swiss bank. Not an American bank. A Swiss bank.

Pages 3 & 4 – In addition to the “broad-based programs,” and in addition to the “currency swaps,” there have been hundreds of billions of dollars in Fed loans called “assistance to individual institutions.” This has included Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and “some primary dealers.” The Fed decided unilaterally who received this “assistance,” and who didn’t.

Pages 101 & 173 – You may have heard somewhere that these were riskless transactions, where the Fed always had enough collateral to avoid losses. Not true. The “Maiden Lane I” bailout fund was in the hole for almost two years.

Page 4 – You also may have heard somewhere that all this money was paid back. Not true. The GAO lists five Fed bailout programs that still have amounts outstanding, including $909,000,000,000 (just under a trillion dollars) for the Fed’s Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program alone. That’s almost $3,000 for every American.

Page 126 – In contemporaneous documents, the Fed apparently did not even take a stab at explaining why it helped some banks (like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) and not others. After the fact, the Fed referred vaguely to “strains in the financial markets,” “transitional credit,” and the Fed’s all-time favorite rationale for everything it does, “increasing liquidity.”

81 different places in the GAO report – The Fed applied nothing even resembling a consistent policy toward valuing the assets that it acquired. Sometimes it asked its counterparty to take a “haircut” (discount), sometimes it didn’t. Having read the whole report, I see no rhyme or reason to those decisions, with billions upon billions of dollars at stake.

Page 2 – As massive as these enumerated Fed bailouts were, there were yet more. The GAO did not even endeavor to analyze the Fed’s discount window lending, or its single-tranche term repurchase agreements.

Pages 13 & 14 – And the Fed wasn’t the only one bailing out Wall Street, of course. On top of what the Fed did, there was the $700,000,000,000 TARP program authorized by Congress (which I voted against). The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) also provided a federal guarantee for $600,000,000,000 in bonds issued by Wall Street.

There is one thing that I’d like to add to this, which isn’t in the GAO’s report. All this is something new, very new. For the first 96 years of the Fed’s existence, the Fed’s primary market activities were to buy or sell U.S. Treasury bonds (to change the money supply), and to lend at the “discount window.” Neither of these activities permitted the Fed to play favorites. But the programs that the GAO audited are fundamentally different. They allowed the Fed to choose winners and losers.

So what does all this mean? Here are some short observations:

(1) In the case of TARP, at least The People’s representatives got a vote. In the case of the Fed’s bailouts, which were roughly 20 times as substantial, there was never any vote. Unelected functionaries, with all sorts of ties to Wall Street, handed out trillions of dollars to Wall Street. That’s now how a democracy should function, or even can function.

(2) The notion that this was all without risk, just because the Fed can keep printing money, is both laughable and cryable (if that were a word). Leaving aside the example of Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, we have the more recent examples of Iceland (75% of GNP gone when the central bank took over three failed banks) and Ireland (100% of GNP gone when the central bank tried to rescue property firms).

(3) In the same way that American troops cannot act as police officers for the world, our central bank cannot act as piggy bank for the world. If the European Central Bank wants to bail out UBS, fine. But there is no reason why our money should be involved in that.

(4) For the Fed to pick and choose among aid recipients, and then pick and choose who takes a “haircut” and who doesn’t, is both corporate welfare and socialism. The Fed is a central bank, not a barber shop.

(5) The main, if not the sole, qualification for getting help from the Fed was to have lost huge amounts of money. The Fed bailouts rewarded failure, and penalized success. (If you don’t believe me, ask Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan.) The Fed helped the losers to squander and destroy even more capital.

(6) During all the time that the Fed was stuffing money into the pockets of failed banks, many Americans couldn’t borrow a dime for a home, a car, or anything else. If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there be 24 million Americans today who can’t find a full-time job?

And here’s what bothers me most about all this: it can happen again. I’ve called the GAO report a bailout autopsy. But it’s an autopsy of the undead.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

A Social Misfit

2011-11-19T18:17:00.000-08:00

I must admit that I have always been a true social misfit. After a one night binge many years ago as a Freshman at Princeton, I decided even in the case of peer pressure not to ever drink anything that I use in the lab to kill cells.But I guess I should explain the "binge" comment: Well, one night I decided to see what being drunk was like so I bought a fifth of scotch and several six packs, and my roomates mixed the scotch with beer and I gulped it down and ran up and down the stairs in my dorm to get it into my system quicker. I don't remember much but my roomate told me that I tried to jump out a window at one point saying that I could fly. I woke up the next morning in the shower where my roomies had put me since I was vomiting so much. By the evening I was capable of crawling to the campus Infirmary and telling them I was dying. Not fun at all.

In any case that was my last drink of alcohol. Full disclosure: I have sipped sweet Begium beers and Manichevitz wine once or twice.

Not drinking is a hard thing to do and my friends and colleagues must think I am a nut case when I sip Root Beer at wine-tasting parties. But I long ago stopped worrying what people thought of me. And it has led me to become an expert on the many vintages of Cream Soda and Root Beer. Dick Siegel, a colleague and close friend at UCLA, once held a Cola tasting party. I was not aware that there were so many different varieties of Cola. Dick was careful to decant each and read off the vintage year and bottling location (i.e. Philadelphia, 1998) before having people do the tasting. He offered Cheetos to clean the palate between tastings. This party was incidentally held the same night that another colleague was having a gourmet wine-tasting party.

A digression: I really think that the love affair people have with "good" wines and beers is due to mass hysteria induced by television and books since I cannot believe that anyone sincerely likes the taste of alcohol in a drink. To me, wine-tasting is a cultural affectation, but I figure that as long as it is not harmful to others let them do it.

Another digression: My wife claims that "Root Beer" is also an acquired taste that is uniquely American. She says it smells to her like Ben Gay. It is indeed true that none of my foreign postdocs over the years could stand even the smell of Root Beer. Be that as it may, my favorite always been A & W Root Beer in a frosty mug, but the closely related Birch Beer and IBI Root Beer come close. I will always remember the cross country trip I took coming from Philadelphia to my first job at UCLA, stopping at every A &W along the way. And of course the ultimate drink is Sasparilla, which is a sort of Root Beer but very hard to find. I recently looked up the difference between Sasparilla and Root Beer and here it is if you are interested: Root beer is also flavored with sarsaparilla root but has additional flavorings from "sassafras, anise, burdock, cinnamon, dandelion, ginger, juniper, vanilla and wintergreen". Wow!

OK. I finally got all this off my chest and I will retire in two years with a clear conscience.

The curious mind wants to know...

2011-11-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

Why do people talking on a cell phone make all the hand and arm gesticulations and even the facial expressions normally used when talking to someone in person? Do they think that the person can see them as well as hear them? Or is this the only way they can talk? It is so crazy and yet it has become a socially acceptable behavior. They don't even stop when they are in a crowded elevator forcing everyone to listen to their problems and to watch their grimaces and arm waving.

It almost rivals the other socially acceptable behavior of having little white wires extending from their ears to their Ipods and walking around with a zombie like expression. And some people (usually University students) wear huge earphones connected to the little white wires, and walk with the same zombie like expression. Perhaps the continuous loud music zombifies them and that is why they seldom talk to others as they walk from class to class.

Consider this Blog a silent cry for help in understanding and coming to terms with these behaviors before my head explodes.

Meanwhile the Earth gets Hotter and Hotter - and the Band Plays On!

2011-10-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

I copy below an article from Joe Rom's Climate Change blog about a recent speech by Jim Hanson, the leading climatologist in the US and perhaps, the world. If this does not scare you, nothing will.

NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable.”

By Joe Romm on Sep 29, 2011 at 5:17 pm

Climatologist Slams Media for “Silent Summer”: Poor Coverage of Link Between Extreme Weather and Human-Caused Climate Change

The nation’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has a new paper out — and he has been speaking out. At 350.org’s Moving Planet event in New York on Saturday, he said:

“Climate change — human-made global warming — is happening. It is already having noticeable impacts…. If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

Hard to argue with that.
The combination of extreme heat, constant Dust-Bowl conditions in the Southwest and South central, the whipsawing from drought to deluge in the Southeast, and decade after decade of sea level rise will create nearly intolerable conditions by century’s end (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impact”). Conditions might look a lot like this:

Oops, that’s the US Drought Monitor for Texas this week! Dark red is “exceptional drought” (covering 86% of the state) — virtually no rain for a year. Red is “extreme drought” (covering 97% of the state) — a Palmer Drought Severity Index of -4 or worse.
Imagine what it will be like when much of the South is like this most of the time (other than the occasional record-smashing deluge) — and temperatures are some 9°F to 11°F warmer on average. It will be the great repopulation of the North.
Hansen also has a new paper out on climate change in which he says:

It is time for all of us to get Tea-Party-angry about what our political system has become and about the intergenerational injustice being perpetrated on young people.

Again, no argument here.
The most interesting part of the paper is his critique of the media coverage (“Silent Summer”), his discussion of the intimidation of climate scientists, and a tantalizing introduction to a forthcoming analysis on extreme weather and attribution to human emissions. Also, he doesn’t like the phrase “global weirding.” Here are the highlights:

Silent Summer
There is ample evidence of growing climate disruption. But despite record or near-record heat and drought in the United States this past summer with simultaneous extreme flooding, and despite comparable extremes in China and elsewhere, there has been little public discussion of the connection of these climate extremes with human-made climate forcing.
The media are partly responsible for the silent summer, as they have mainly chosen not to examine connections between climate anomalies and human-made causes. A cynic may ask whether their silent summer is related to increasing right-wing control of media and large advertising revenues from fossil fuel companies. Regardless of reasons for media silence, should scientists be making more effort to draw public attention to the human role in climate anomalies?
Scientists face one long-standing obstacle to public communication and one new factor. The old difficulty arises from limits on our ability to detect expected change in a chaotic climate system, especially concerning the significance of specific regional events. The new factor is the likelihood of being pilloried for reporting evidence of a human role in climate change.

In a later section, he elaborates on that last sentence:

Character Assassination
There was criticism of my congressional testimony about global warming in the 1980s, but it was mainly normal healthy scientific skepticism (Kerr, 1989). A different sort of criticism, including an element of character assassination, has developed since then and has been leveled most heavily against scientists Ben Santer, Michael Mann and Phil Jones. The approach has included acquiring and digging into personal correspondences of scientists in search of any inappropriate or questionable statements, as well as fine-toothed scrutiny of their scientific analyses in search of any element, however minor, that could be criticized.
The ultimate target of the critics in Santer’s case was a specific sentence that Santer was responsible for as a lead author in the 1995 IPCC report: “Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate.” The target in Mann’s case was the temperature record of the past millennium, which Mann had shown to resemble a “hockey stick”, bending upward into rapid warming in the past century. The target in Jones’ case was his analysis of observations showing the rapid warming of the past century.
The important point I wish to note is that each of these three targets, the scientific conclusions that provoked the critics and which they aimed to destroy or discredit, have been shown in subsequent analyses to have been correct, indeed, dead-on-the-mark.
However, the scientific community is well aware of the toll that these attacks took on the scientists, despite the fact that their work was eventually vindicated and corroborated.
Thus, it would not be surprising if these experiences have an effect on the willingness of other scientists to make statements that draw attention to the likely role of human-made forcings as a contributor to the climate extremes of the past summer.
In any case, there is abundant evidence that the attacks on the science and the scientists have contributed to a pullback in public support for national and international efforts to find a path forward that would lead to the large reductions in emissions that are needed to stabilize climate and provide young people with a promising future.
This is important, because the actions that are required can only be achieved through the political process. That will not happen until the public understands and supports what is needed.

Finally, Hansen has an interesting discussion of extreme weather and attribution to human emissions:

Limits on Detection
Global warming is expected to intensify climate extremes: (1) Warmer air holds more water vapor, and precipitation occurs in more extreme events. ’100-year floods’ and even ’500- year floods’ will become more likely. Storms fueled by water vapor (latent heat), including thunderstorms, tornadoes and tropical storms, will have the potential to be stronger. Storm damage will increase because of increased flooding and stronger winds. (2) Where weather patterns create dry conditions, global warming will intensify the drought, because of increased evaporation and evapotranspiration. Thus fires will be more frequent and burn hotter.
Observations confirm that heat waves and regional drought have become more frequent and intense over the past 50 years. Rainfall in the heaviest downpours has increased about 20 percent. The destructive energy in hurricanes has increased (USGCRP, 2009).
Is the Texas drought related to human-made global warming? There is strong reason to believe that it is. Basic theory and models (Held and Soden, 2006) and empirical evidence (Seidal and Randel, 2006) indicate that the global overturning circulation, air rising in the tropics and subsiding in the subtropics, expands in latitude with global warming. Such expansion tends to make droughts more frequent and severe in the southern United States and the Mediterranean region, for example. Climate simulations, shown in Figure 3 for one of the best climate models, support that expectation.

[JR: I suspect this study underestimates likely drought in the West due to early snow melt and other factors. I'll have to take a look.]

So the occurrence of unusual Texas heat and drought is consistent with expectations for increasing CO2. But is this year’s event just climate ‘noise’? Scientists need to help the public distinguish climate change caused by global warming from natural climate variability.
I used ‘climate dice’ in conjunction with testimony to Congress in 1988 to try to help the public understand that the human-made climate ‘signal’ must be extracted from the large ‘noise’ of natural climate variability. I believe the public can grasp the concept of natural climate variability and its effect on perceptions of climate change.
In an upcoming post (Climate Variability and Climate Change, Hansen, Sato and Ruedy) we try to clarify this matter via simple maps and graphs that show how the odds have changed, allowing comparison of expectations and reality. We believe this is a truer approach than the frequently suggested alternative of dropping the long-standing ‘global warming’ terminology in favor of anything (‘climate disruption’, ‘global weirding’, etc.) that avoids the need to explain the occurrence of unusually cold conditions.
We show that a ‘signal’ due to global warming is already rising out of the climate ‘noise’, even on regional scales. Figure 4 is an example, showing surface air temperature anomalies in the last four Northern Hemisphere summers relative to the climate of 1951-1980, the time when the ‘baby-boomers grew up – it was a time of relatively stable climate, just prior to the rapid global warming of the past three decades.

During 1951-1980 the world had equal areas of blue (cool), white (near average), and red (warm) temperature anomalies. The division 0.43σ, where σ is the local standard deviation about the local 1951-1980 mean, was chosen to yield equal area categories for a normal (‘bell curve’) distribution of temperature anomalies. The other divisions in the figure, 2σ and 3σ, allow us to see the areas that have extreme anomalies relative to climatology. The frequency of an anomaly greater than +2σ is only 2-3 percent in the period of climatology for a normal distribution. The frequency of a +3σ event is normally less than one-half of one percent of the time. The numbers on the upper right corner of each map are the percentages of the global area covered by each of the seven categories of the color bar.
Figure 4 reveals that the area with temperature anomaly greater than +2σ covers 20-40 percent of the planet in these recent years, and the area greater than +3σ is almost 10-20 percent. The United States has been relatively ‘lucky’, with the only +2-3σ areas being the Texas region in 2011 and a smaller area in the Southeast in 2010. However, these events are sufficiently fresh in people’s memories that they provide a useful measure of the practical impact of a 3σ anomaly.
There is no good reason to believe that the United States, or any other region, will continue to be so ‘lucky’. On the contrary, as shown in our upcoming post, there is a clear positive trend to increasing areas of +2-3σ anomalies, consistent with expectations for the climate response to increasing greenhouse gases. If BAU emissions continue, the area with anomalies of +2-3σ and larger will continue to increase.
The chaotic element in climate variability makes it impossible to say exactly where large anomalies will occur in a given year. However, we can say with assurance that the area and magnitude of the anomalies and their practical impact will continue to increase. Clear presentations of the data should help the public appreciate the situation as global warming continues to rise further above the level of natural variability.
However, as Mother Nature makes the dominance of human-made climate change more obvious, proponents of business-as-usual have engaged in another method to stifle communication by scientists about global warming.

Hard to argue with that!

Great news!

2011-08-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

Following is a article by Paul Gipe, a well known writer on environmental energy issues. This is great news for anyone interested in doing something about the coming catastrophe caused by climate warming. "Feed-in tariffs" are when the energy company pays the consumer for any electricity created by residential solar power above their own usage. This is the best way to stimulate the development of decentralized solar power. I sincerely hope that the US follows the lead of Japan and Germany. But as long as the Republicans are in power, I fear this will never happen.

Japan Feed-in Tariff Policy Becomes Law

Japan Plans 30,000 MW of New Renewables in 10 Years

World's Third Largest Economy Adopts FITs

August 27, 2011
By Paul Gipe
In a major breakthrough for the feed-in tariff movement worldwide, Japan's upper chamber has approved a new law implementing a feed-in tariff policy for renewable energy.
The law, which goes into effect next July, sets a target of 30,000 MW of new renewable development within the next decade, nearly five times the 6,500 MW of wind, solar, and geothermal power currently operating in the country.
The move has global implications, as the world's third largest economy follows that of the world's second-largest economy, China, and the world's fourth-largest economy, Germany, in implementing feed-in tariffs in order to rapidly develop renewable energy.
The new law is also a clear sign that Japan plans to reduce its reliance on nuclear power, after the disaster at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukishima 1 plant.
Japan's action, after weeks of bitter debate between renewable energy advocates and Japan's old-guard nuclear industry, follows that of nearby Asian giant China, which this summer announced feed-in tariffs for large solar photovoltaic (solar PV) power plants.
China had previously implemented feed-in tariffs for wind energy that powered the country to world leadership in 2010, when it installed nearly 19,000 MW of new wind turbines--3.4 times the amount installed in the USA.
Germany, Japan's global competitor in heavy machinery, autos, and steel, has used Advanced Renewable Tariffs, a modern system of feed-in tariffs, since the year 2000. Germany's system of renewable tariffs has made the country the overall world leader in renewable energy development, producing rapid growth of wind energy, solar PV, and biogas.
Japan's bold step away from nuclear power could provide impetus to feed-in tariffs in North America, where the policy has been slow to gain traction outside of Ontario, Canada, and the state of Vermont.
Adoption of feed-in tariffs by Japan--a country with an industrial economy built around competitive exports--is a seeming endorsement at the highest international level that rapid development of renewable energy is desirable, if not essential, and that feed-in tariffs are the policy best suited for the task.
Observers say a key feature of the new law is the creation of a special parliamentary committee to determine the details of the program, including specific tariffs. In the past, this function would normally have been assigned to the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
However, the political fallout from the nuclear disaster at Fukishima has led to a dramatic loss of trust in METI, which has opposed both the rapid expansion of renewables, and also the use of feed-in tariffs to do so. Taking program design and pricing away from METI is a major victory for renewable energy advocates in Japan.
While details remain sketchy, the program contains the following features.

Contract term: 20 years
Technologies: wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, small hydro
Tariffs: cost-based
Target: 30,000 MW within 10 years
Cost recovery: utility ratepayers with reduction for heavy industrial users
Program review: every 3 years

As in Germany, heavy industry can apply for a reduction in the surcharge on electricity to support the program. Similarly, those affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake will not have to pay the surcharge for the program through the end of March 2013, according to the Japan Electric Association.
Reuters reports that a ruling party lawmaker said he expects the tariff for solar PV to start at 40 Yen per kilowatt-hour ($0.50 USD/kWh), and the tariff for wind energy to start at 20 Yen per kilowatt-hour ($0.25 USD/kWh).
If implemented as suggested, the wind energy tariff would be among the highest in the world.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries--a Japanese company and one of the world's leading manufacturers of wind turbines--has installed few wind turbines in its home market. This could change quickly.
The widely expected passage of the new law has unleashed a burst of entrepreneurial activity not seen in Japan for some time.
Japanese firms are already lining up projects to take advantage of the new policy, says Rikkyo University's Andrew Dewitt. He cites as an example Mitsui and Toshiba's plans to build a 50 MW solar PV power plant in Aichi Prefecture by 2013.
It remains to be seen if Japan will open its domestic market to foreign manufacturers of renewable technologies, especially solar PV.
Long the world's leader in solar PV technology, Japanese industry has watched its dominant position quickly eroded by upstarts in Germany and, subsequently, China. Japanese companies are now furiously trying to catch up. The new law will create a dynamic solar market on their home turf, possibly giving Japanese solar companies a new volume edge on the global scene.
Nevertheless, any practices that appear to discriminate against imports in favor of domestic manufacturers will be closely watched, especially by firms in Ontario, Canada. Japan has filed a trade complaint against Ontario's feed-in tariff program for its domestic content provisions.

Until the new feed-in tariff policy is implemented, Japan will remain a laggard in renewable energy development in comparison to leaders such as Germany.
Japan installed about 1,000 MW of solar PV in 2010. Germany installed more than seven times as much, and Italy--the so-called poor man of Europe--installed more than twice as much. And Japan's population is 1.6 times greater than that of Germany and more than twice as large as that of Italy.
In wind energy, Japan's performance has been equally as poor. Based on its population, Japan has installed only 9% of the wind energy capacity installed in Germany.
Nevertheless, with the new feed-in tariff policy out of METI's hands, and with careful implementation of the new policy, Japan could quickly become a leader in domestic renewable energy development and could join Germany in the rapid phase-out of nuclear power.

-End-

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

2011-08-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

I received this from someone and thought it would be really worthwhile to post since I have had similar thoughts. I edited it a little.

"We have just witnessed how poorly Congress works even when dealing with a serious issue like the debt ceiling. The market had its eighth consecutive decline marking its longest losing streak since October 2008. It has lost 6.7% during the skid, dating back to July 22. This is only the sixth time the Dow has dropped eight straight days in more than 30 years. As soon as the Senate vote was completed, Congress went on vacation for the rest of the month. That's almost 4 weeks. This is just one of its many vacations during the year, compounded by the fact that they are typically at work only Tuesday-Thursday when they are in session. Isn't it time something changes?
Congressional Reform Act of 2011
1. No Tenure / No Pension. Congressmen collect a salary while in office and receive no pay when they are out of office.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
5. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
6. (I added this) Supreme Court Justices must also abide by these laws."

End of an Empire?

2011-07-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

I find it ironic that the very people who believe that the "Rapture" is near, when they will go up to heaven and all the rest go you know where, are now about to possibly cause a man-made apocalypse. Their insane refusal to allow an increase of the U.S. dept ceiling will trigger an unparalleled financial melt-down both in this country and throughout the world economy. The resulting sudden rise in interest rates will prevent people from purchasing a house or buying a car, but that is hypothetical since they will lose their entire stock and bond portfolios and those about to retire and those already retired will lose all their retirement savings, so no one except the ultra rich will be able to buy anything anyhow. Unemployment will rise its ugly head much higher than today. The US dollar will decrease in value and will no longer be accepted as the currency of commerce worldwide.

Here I had thought that the climate change produced by overpopulation would be the primary cause of a global disaster but it may turn out to be caused by the crazy religious right racist nut jobs calling themselves "conservative Republicans" who somehow took over the US House of Representatives and are marching the rest of us toward suicide. If this happens, the term "conservative" will probably become a dirty word not to be spoken in polite company and the Republican political party itself will vanish into the dustbin of history since it will be blamed for this disaster. The only good thing I can foresee will be that the US will lose its Empire. It will be forced from lack of funds to bring home its military forces from 135 countries world wide and stop being the world's policeman. On the other hand, the magnitude of the disaster may actually stimulate our military to declare martial law and take over this country. I hope not but they may feel that this would be the only way to prevent the resulting public unrest and to govern this country.

The Republican right wing are out of touch with reality. Many actually deny that anything will happen to this country if we default and that anything bad that may happen will "teach them a lesson". These are the same people who do not believe in Science and deny that man-made climate change is occurring and believe that the world was created six thousands years ago and that evolution is a hoax. But that is not totally true since they do believe in scientific advances in destructive weapons which they can use for wars. They have truly become "domestic terrorists", holding everyone else hostage to advance their ideology.

What can we do besides writing a Blog? We can fight like hell to get these people out of political power in the 2012 elections and we can try to have recall elections at the State level wherever possible as is being done in Wisconsin. Or President Obama could simply surrender to these people and agree to all the spending cuts they demand, including cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, to get them to agree to vote to raise the dept ceiling. I fear that this surrender may already be occurring and that in a way makes me more afraid than I even am of our possible economic "Rapture".

Net Metering and the Demise of Human Civilization

2011-06-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

As readers of my Blog are aware, I am very concerned with the imminent demise of the human species and the destruction of all the marvelous knowledge gained over these last 10,000 or so years of historical civilization as a result of climate change caused by fossil fuel burning, which is of course a natural result of humans overpopulating the earth. In fact recent climate science results suggest that the "tipping point" beyond which the changes inexorably continue increasing no matter what we do may soon be reached if it has not already occurred. Alas, such pessimism leads to depression and inaction, both of which accentuate the downward spiral.

But one must try even in the face of such overwhelming unpleasant facts, and in any case, inaction does not imply cessation of thought. Here goes a small attempt at such thought.

It seems to me that a decentralized energy generation system such as that which would be provided by making it obligatory to include solar panels in all residential and commercial building construction is one way to decrease dependence on fossil fuel. And the rapid progress in efficiency of solar energy conversion that is occurring can only increase the benefits from such a cultural (and political) decision.

However my own recent solar panel installation on the roof of my house made it very apparent to me that there is a real barrier probably resulting from the natural inclinations of giant power monopolies which benefit from cheap fossil fuel usage to relinquish control. This was forcefully brought to my attention when I asked my solar company whether the city (i.e. LADWP) would purchase any energy my system would generate above my own usage. I was aware of the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 regulation that all public energy utilities are required to provide this to all customers upon request. But I am also aware that the implementation of this regulation in the US is inconsistent and differs from State to State and there are no rules determining the energy "payback" rates. In California a recent Bill, AB 510, requires net metering but actually limits the maximum payback amount to 5% of the utilities peak demand. I assume that this is a neat political trick to follow the Federal law in principle but not in reality. And even more amazingly, this Bill excludes the LADWP from having to follow this regulation.

These thoughts were crystallized by an email from the LADWP (Department of Water and Power) asking for "Public Input into the Future LADWP Green Energy Policies". I RSVPed and will attend such a meeting next week. As a residential solar power contributor, I feel empowered to attempt to provide the input of this member of the public to these dignitaries. I want to raise the net metering issue at this public meeting and in particular ask why the LADWP is exempted.

Of course I am very aware that climate change is world wide and that any solutions must also be world wide, but any public discussion awaits another time and place.

End of thought.

Medicare for All!

2011-05-24T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Democrats could, as a response to the current Republican "Destroy Medicare" Ryan budget, immediately make everyone eligible for Medicare, not just people over 65. This could probably be done as a "reconciliation" of the existing Medicare legislation in the Democrat controlled Senate to avoid the certain Republican filibuster in the Senate and the Tea Party controlled House of Representatives.

There would be an immediate administrative saving since Medicare only spends approximately 2-3% on administrative costs versus the 20-25% that private heath care companies spend. Second, Medicare currently determines from the advice of knowledgeable medical people the true cost of medical services and only pays that amount. One might argue that private insurance companies would pay the difference for those with secondary insurance policies, as is currently the case, and this would prevent any downward pressure on costs. However, this would also limit extended medical services to those wealthy enough to afford a secondary insurance policy. The number of people covered is uncertain, but I would estimate it will be no more than 10%. Since everyone else would only be covered by Medicare, this would put an enormous popular pressure on lowering medical costs to those provided by Medicare, including both procedures, the use of expensive medical devices such as imaging and the currently exorbitant charges of medical doctors, especially of medical specialists.

And of course, the way to completely eliminate this pressure value that would continue driving up costs would be to ban all private "for profit" insurance companies from insuring health care at all. I feel strongly that health care is a right of every citizen, not a privilege, and should not be a profit-making business. I wager that the overall cost of medical services would very rapidly decrease dramatically to realistic values.

Of course there must also also be a way to increase Medicare revenues. One easy way to do this would be to simply remove or extend upwards the salary limitations for the FICA (Social Security) taxes (currently 7.65% of salaries up to $106,800) that support the federal system of old age, survivors and disability. Hospital insurance is separately funded by a Medicare tax of 1.45% of the entire salary from the individual. I have read that a moderate increase in salary cap would more than cover the increased Medicare costs of everyone under 65.

Medicare is probably the most popular federal program ever created in this country, as evidenced by recent polls that show more than 80% of the American people want to keep Medicare as it is and not to change it into the voucher system proposed in the Republican bill. And extension of Medicare benefits to everyone will certainly prove to be even more popular than the current over-65 system. Another aspect would be that businesses would no longer be required to pay for health care insurance of their employees. Not only would this certainly be very popular in the business community but also would stimulate the economy by decreasing the cost of doing business and probably increase jobs.

So there you have it. The rest is silence.

The inquisitive mind wants to know

2011-05-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have always wondered why toilets in the US universally have a space under the door whereas toilets in every other country (that I myself have personal knowledge of) do not. For me this ranks up there with quantum entanglement and the Higgs boson. Is there a national urge to be able to see the feet of the poor person trying to pretend he is not there? Or is it due to our national obsession with not allowing hanky panky in the bathroom? Or is it just that this is what American contractors learn at contractor’s school?

It reminds me of my undergraduate days at Princeton University (pre-coed) where Woodrow Wilson had once ruled that a true democracy does not have doors on toilet stalls. This of course made for interesting conversations and made it easy to request a roll of paper when necessary. But it was still sort of gross.

I hope that one of you anonymous readers can enlighten me on this important cultural institution.

The die has been cast.

2011-01-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

I always knew this was coming, and it will get worse. This country never got over slavery and the myth of the West with its guns and frontier justice. The Tea Party people are no better than the Klu Klux Klan and the Southerners who lynched black men and attacked the black children trying to enter all white schools. Except now the Southerners have become us. Racism and religious fundamentalism are a dangerous mixture.

Religion itself is a dangerous phenomenon, as evidenced over history by the witch drownings, the Inquisition tortures, and now the Catholic priests raping little boys. And the combination is many times more lethal.
Now the crazies and their multinational company friends and benefactors are in political power, and have essentially taken over our military as shown by the influence of the evangelicals in places like our Air Force Academy.

But perhaps the most dangerous aspect is the fact that the crazies refuse to believe science except when it provides them with better weapons of mass destruction. This could be either true ignorance or, worse, an intentional deception in order to maintain power and achieve short term benefits, but it is likely a combination of both factors. But this does not matter since the problems of political and ideological violence, and worst of all, the coming world-wide disaster of climate change will affect everyone, even the crazies' families and children. Racism, violence and religious fundamentalism will matter little when coastal cities around the world and even entire countries and are flooded, when millions of displaced Bangladesh start a forced migration to find refuge, when millions of Mexicans unable to find food due to the drought enter the United States only to find that it cannot even provide food for its own people and that its entire financial system is collapsing and martial law has been imposed. Countries that have nuclear weapons will begin to use them out of fright and impotence.

I fear for the future and see no cause for optimism. The die has been cast.

Ode to the Cheese Steak

2010-12-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

I grew up in Philadelphia where the major culinary achievement is the "Cheese Steak" - a huge mound of finely sliced well browned meat cooked on a grill with fried onions and served on a long bun dripping with grease.

The chefs are usually bulky Italian guys with a few tattoes wearing white T shirts.

Cheese is actually optional but if desired, "the sine qua non of cheesesteak connoisseurs" is actually Cheese Whiz. If you want a steak with onions and cheese, you say in true Philly accent "Whiz, Wit".

Cheese steaks are not just for the common man. President Obama visited Reading Terminal just to get a real cheese steak.

Cheese steaks were developed in the 1930's in South Philadelphia and South Philly is still the promised land. I lived on cheese steaks for my entire misspent youth. Unfortunately this cuisine does not travel well, and when I left Philadelphia to make my mark in the world, a lingering nostalgia was all I had left. I once tried ordering Fedexed steaks from Pat's in South Philly for a "Philadelphia brunch" with some old friends now living in LA. But alas, the magic had passed and all that is left is a salivating memory.

M27 or Dumbell Nebula

2010-10-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

Images were taken on October 28, 2010, from my back yard observatory with an RCX400 10 inch telescope using an SBIG ST2000XCM single shot color CCD. Two 8 min images were processed and stacked. M27 is a gas bubble ejected from a star at the end of its life. The gas is glowing from UV light emitted by the star. M27 is around 1000 light years distant.

The End of Things

2010-10-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

The two dolphins swam side by side and carried on a lively discussion using the high pitched sounds known as the Pacific Dolphin language.

“Why do you think the humans became extinct in the 21^st century? They had so much going for them – intelligence, ambition, technical abilities. I know that the environment became degraded and that was the ultimate reason, but what were the real reasons?"

“ Well, they just could not stop breeding and the billions of humans did some pretty bad things – both knowingly and unknowingly. For example, in the early years of the 21^st century, their climate scientists discovered that the production of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” was trapping heat from the sun and causing the temperature of the atmosphere and even the ocean to rise. They predicted with a high level of probability the consequences of this “runaway” greenhouse effect as increased intensity of storms, changes in weather patterns resulting in the loss of regions suitable for agriculture, extinction of animal species such as the coral reefs in the ocean which we used to enjoy visiting, melting of the world’s glaciers that produced most of the fresh water for the billions of humans, and in rising in world-wide ocean levels resulting in flooding of coastal regions and cities and in migrations of millions of people who would be displaced by flooding and loss of fresh water. However, there were people throughout the world, and especially in the United States, who believed more in their crazy religions than in science and their religions told them that Armageddon was coming and they could do nothing about it. These "climate change deniers" in the United States were known as “Republicans”, and they convinced many people and had an enormous amount of power in determining how the country would respond to this crisis. They just closed their minds and let the changes occur, and this behavior had an enormous effect on the rest of the world.”

“In fact the only people who actually understood what was happening and why were the military. They could see that these changes would affect the security of their nations. In a few countries the militaries actually took over the governments and tried to force changes in behavior, but it was already too late. The changes were irreversible. Even the imposition of martial law in the “rich” countries to prevent unwanted immigration simply led to wars with their neighbor countries over the vanishing resources."

“And closely tied in with these changes was the major problem that humans were innately aggressive and loved to fight each other, instead of helping each other as we do. Again, in the United States, there was actually an organization known as the “National Rifle Association” that essentially financially owned or frightened the ruling politicians into believing that guns were not instruments to kill but toys to play with and that everyone should have a gun. This of course, combined with all the disintegration of society that was occurring, led to a vast amount of bloodshed, and this mentality of aggression and selfish nationalism actually led countries to use nuclear weapons before it was impossible to do so, which caused even more environmental degradation and loss of life.”

“Very rapidly the environment became almost uninhabitable due to the lack of water and food and the radioactive destruction of the cities. Cities were abandoned and millions of people migrated northward, destroying other cities and other regions. Even the resulting great kill-off of humans did not solve the problems, and eventually the earth began to look like the hot house planet, Venus. I believe that the last humans died off by the end of the 21^stcentury, at least as far as we could tell."

“We dolphins also suffered greatly but the ocean mitigated many of the worst problems and our ancestors eventually evolved to be able to live in the warm water and began our rapid climb to becoming the next great intelligent tool-using species.”

“Do you think that this sort of thing will happen to the dolphin civilization?”

“It is always possible, but I believe that we have learned some important lessons from the extinction of humans”.

I Felt a Blog Coming On

2010-08-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning and felt a blog coming on. I told my wife, "Wife, I feel a blog coming on." She said "Take a Tums and you will feel better". But after a rousing “Danny Boy” on my violin, the feeling went away and I went to the lab. I spent the day revising my undergraduate course web site
(http://dna.kdna.ucla.edu/168-2010/Default.aspx) and redoing all the links. I even inserted a few edifying secret links for the students to find.

Looks like the University may have me to kick around for another three years as I explore the structure of the RNA editing core complex. The NIH renewal is not yet in hand but it looks good. Life is good but retirement always has that sparkling attractiveness of novelty.

I have been spending evenings out in my telescope shed trying to get everything working together so I can begin imaging again. I can easily recognize almost every star in the visible night sky. But I was put in my place when I went to a “dark site” outside LA and saw the real thing. There were so many stars that I could not even identify a single one. That is what cockiness will get you!

Recommendation

2010-07-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

I just read a great blog that eloquently expresses many of my own thoughts.
It is called "The Secret Life of White-Wing Conservatives" and is at http://deaniemills.com/.
Check it out.

A Disturbing Thought

2010-07-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

There is something disturbing going on in the State of Denmark. First let me stress that I strongly support President Obama and other Democrats. However, there are now a list of actions that I find objectionable:

- Expanding the useless and extremely wasteful war in Afghanistan.
- Keeping people in prison for years without any charges.
- Reinstating the unlawful "Military Commissions" of the dreadful Bush-Cheny years.
- Suspending Habeus Corpus.
- Continuing and even expanding (I think) warrentless wiretapping of US citizens.
- Failure to prosecute Bush and Cheny for illegal actions such as torture, rendition and warentless wiretapping.
- Failure to change the Senate rules to do away with the filibuster

I disagree with all these actions, but I will continue to support Obama because the Republican alternative is so frightening. However recently something appears to be happening that hits me close to home as a practicing scientist. I noticed it soon after the oil spill began in the Gulf. NOAA was going along with everything BP was saying about the oil flow, the lack of underwater dispersed oil plumes, etc. And yet it has come out that BP probably knew all along that the rate of the spill was much higher than they were claiming. And at the same time, some independent scientists were providing rough estimates of the flow from the video that were much higher than that claimed by BP and NOAA. And then I realized that NOAA was not sending oceanographic research ships out in the Gulf to investigate the "plumes" and was actively downgrading the idea that these existed. And now I read in the media that a scientist from a local University had organized several research ships from places such as Woods Hole Oceanographic to begin this investigation as the oil was spilling so that they could have a baseline. They had requested around $8 million to accomplish this but a normal grant request might take over 6 months to a year to go through normal channels. I believe that this has still not been funded on an emergency basis (but I may be wrong). And then it appears that BP (and Coast Guard people) were actively preventing reporters from photographing the spill or talking with the workers.

And now I read in the media that scientists employed by NOAA have been told not to talk with the media about the spill and not to divulge any data already obtained by NOAA research ships. This has a frightening similarity to the previous Bush policies, such as not having let Jim Hanson talk about climate change and having non-scientist Agency heads actually modify his publications. This scares me more than all of the above actions since it appears that science and reason are being replaced by political requirements. I can only guess that the administration wants to play down the effects of the spill for political reasons, but I truly hope that this is not the case.

Please say it ain't so, President Obama!

End the filibuster!

2010-04-04T15:16:00.001-07:00

Here is a copy of a letter I sent VP Biden (and also Ed Shutz and Rachel Maddow):

I am a strong supporter of this administration and President Obama. I have a suggestion on how to finally end Republican obstructionism: End the Senate filibuster by changing the rules.
As you well know, the filibuster is a rule made by the Senate and is not in the Constitution. There was a Supreme Court Ruling in 1892 - United States versus Ballin - which found that changes to Senate rules could be achieved by a simple majority. Changing the rule to a simple majority would restore democracy to the US Senate and allow elections to have some meaning. This is necessary since the Republican Party plans to stop any legislation from passing the Senate.
I remind you of the rules to change the filibuster:
(from Wikipedia)
A senator makes a point of order calling for an immediate vote on the measure before the body, outlining what circumstances allow for this. The presiding officer of the Senate, usually the vice president of the United States or the president pro tempore, makes a parliamentary ruling upholding the senator's point of order. The Constitution is cited at this point, since otherwise the presiding officer is bound by precedent. A supporter of the filibuster may challenge the ruling by asking, "Is the decision of the Chair to stand as the judgment of the Senate?" This is referred to as "appealing from the Chair." An opponent of the filibuster will then move to table the appeal. As tabling is non-debatable, a vote is held immediately. A simple majority decides the issue. If the appeal is successfully tabled, then the presiding officer's ruling that the filibuster is unconstitutional is thereby upheld. Thus a simple majority is able to cut off debate, and the Senate moves to a vote on the substantive issue under consideration. The effect of the nuclear option is not limited to the single question under consideration, as it would be in a cloture vote. Rather, the nuclear option effects a change in the operational rules of the Senate, so that the filibuster or dilatory tactic would thereafter be barred by the new precedent.
It is time to change this rule and return the Senate to a real democracy. Only then can President Obama's initiatives be made into law.

What a Concept!

2010-02-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

Soon I must decide on whether I will retire. What a concept! I never thought I would not have a lab to go to every day and play with instruments,ideas and my little Leishmania buggers. But the time comes for anyone and I do feel an obligation to young researchers not to hog limited resources for too long. What will I do, I ask myself. Well, I do enjoy taking astroimages at night with my backyard telescope, playing the violin, working with computers and programs, taking on line courses on history, science, art and music, hiking in the mountains or by the ocean, playing with my dogs, reading voraciously and traveling (although traveling these days is a chore not a pleasure anymore). And most of all I enjoy thinking and writing. But is that enough? Time will tell. And in the large view of things, this is so unmomentous. I doubt Argentina will cry for me and also not even Brazil. But last year a funny thing happened – I got really interested in a new research project and decided to try to pursue it for a little longer. Ahha, but research needs money and researchers and my 41 year old NIH grant is finally expiring in April. So I guess it comes down to whether my renewal gets funded or not. Times are tough and NIH money is really limited so I am not very optimistic. But I will try and perhaps can continue playing with instruments, ideas and my little buggers for a little longer.

December 31, 2010 - Grant update: Well my NIH grant was funded for three more years. My lab is really small now with just two postdocs and I have stopped accepting graduate students. It's actually more cozy this way. It will be fun to try to solve the structure of the editing complex at a high enough resolution to be able to learn something about the mechanism.

Haiti – A Premonition of What is to Come

2010-01-16T23:26:00.000-08:00

The earthquake in Haiti reminds us that, although we are very sophisticated and intelligent and have marvelous machines, we are essentially powerless in regard to geological events of that magnitude. All we can do is to build better buildings and wait for the movements of the plates.
The catastrophe in Haiti is terrible but is, I believe, merely a premonition of what is to come with the climatic changes we have wrought. It is clear by now that countries today do not have the political will or foresight to accomplish the lowering of greenhouse gases required to ameliorate the coming disasters before the point of no return is reached. The consequences are horrific. Flooding of the major Eastern river deltas from the inevitable rise in ocean level will displace, if not outright kill, millions of people in the poorest countries in the world, resulting in vast migrations of refugees and putting tremendous pressure on neighboring countries if not causing open warfare. At the same time, the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas will lead to major decreases in the Indus River in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, the Mekong in Southeast Asia, the Irrawaddy in Myanmar and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of China, all of which supply water for billions of people. In the United States, severe droughts in the Southwest will result in the drying of the Colorado River and the loss of this key water supply for the major cities of Arizona and Southern California. The drought in the California Central Valley, which has already begun, will essentially cause all agriculture in that breadbasket of the country to come to a halt. People will begin to migrate away from Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas into the Northwest and Midwest. But cities in the Midwest will have their own problems and soon will begin to limit immigration. The corn and wheat fields will dry up, forcing farming to move north where there is still enough water. Inevitably Canada will also be blocking immigration from the United States leading to inevitable conflict between the United States and its northern neighbor. Major coastal cities throughout the world will be flooded by the increase in ocean levels and no system of dikes will realistically be economically or physically able to prevent this. The loss of New York will be a major blow to the entire economic system of the United States from which it will never recover. The flooding of Washington will force a migration of the American government to higher ground, and inevitably lead to increasing chaos with the result being martial law. Florida will essentially cease to exist as a functioning state. The European countries will begin to limit immigration of the refugees from the east, initially by laws and then by force. Piece by piece, what we know as civilization will begin to break down. Trains will stop running, highways and bridges will not be repaired and the entire system of supply begin to fail.
Sadly, we will look back on the Haitian disaster with horror and sadness as the beginning of the end.

Kabuki Seating

2010-01-15T21:46:00.000-08:00

Every time I enter an airplane to go on a trip, I wonder why the passenger seats do not face towards the back. It is so very obvious that in a crash, one’s body goes forward, so that the well constructed seats with their impressive (and uncomfortable) headrests serve no purpose except to act as a hard barrier to the person behind. I am reminded of this absurdity every time the Stewardess goes through the Kabuki theater of telling passengers to bring their seats to an upright position and make sure the seats are fully in the upright position. They in fact do a walk through the cabin to see if these rules are being followed. I often feel like asking the Stewardess what is the purpose of this ritual but then remember what happens to anyone who complains on an airliner these days. The same situation occurs on a train (of course in Europe where passenger trains really exist), except that on trains some people actually have backward facing seats and will probably survive a crash.
If you do a simple Google search on “airline seats facing forward” you can easily obtain multiple articles on this problem. Turns out that I am not the first to recognize this. There is a long history. In fact, all military airplanes have seats facing towards the back. Obviously the military wants its soldiers to have the best chance of surviving a crash whereas domestic airlines clearly do not care about the safety of the passengers. It seems that one strong reason for this lack of concern is economic, in that backward facing seats would have to be greatly reinforced since most of the impact force is higher on the seat and this would involve substantial costs to the airline! Another economic reason is that the airlines think that passengers prefer facing forward. And yet another is that most passengers have never thought of this problem at all and airlines prefer to keep it a secret.Substantial research has been performed on this safety issue with the universal conclusion that survival is better in rear-facing seats. For example, Richard Snyder, a scientist studying airplane crash protection published a paper in 1983 with the title” Impact protection in Air Transport Seat Design” which had this conclusion.
Of course it is irrational to except that any profit-making company would on its own increase passenger safety when money is involved and when most people do not even know the problem exists. Just look at the history of seat belts and air bags in cars. But I am an optimist (except in the case of human-caused climatic warming!) and hope that this will happen in my lifetime.

Finally action

2009-12-02T15:15:00.000-08:00

Way back on July 22, 2009, I posted a blog on an idea I had of where to site large solar plants without concern for damaging the environment. I suggested using already environmentally degraded sites such as the Owens Dry Lake in California's Owens Valley.

Today there was a article in the LA Times stating that the DWP Commissioners approved a 600 acre pilot project to do just that. It made my heart beat a little faster.

A Crisis in Public Education

2009-11-20T20:38:00.000-08:00

One could not help but notice that my University has been making the headlines lately but not entirely for the right reasons. When I first came to UCLA there was no tuition for California residents and this led to a renaissance of learning without relevance to financial status and a concomitant immense benefit to the state. I would in fact trace as one example the development of the Silicon Valley innovativeness in computer and web technology directly to this far sighted altruistic mentality. But then came Governor Ronald Reagan and a newly instituted tuition underwent a inexorable increase every year. But this year the increase reached the incredible value of 32% and the students have revolted.

The students might be interested in a small fruitless battle I led recently attempting to convince the UCLA administration not to misallocate the scarce resources of the State. I copy the letter I sent to the UCLA Chancellor below:

“I am a Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics and have been at UCLA for the last 41 years. I find it hard to believe that UCLA is going forward with a $185 million renovation of Pauley Pavillon at a time when courses are being eliminated and faculty and staff salaries are being cut. The article in UCLA Today states that, out of the required $185 million, "..we have $52 million that has been committed to date toward that goal..", and that the remainder of the funding will come from "..$15 million in Student Programs, Activities and Resources Center fees and $10 million in Student Seismic fees.." and "..$60 million in external financing..". The article attempts to justify this expenditure by stating that ".. this is an important symbol of UCLA's overall reputation for excellence.." However, the symbol of excellence for a great University is the quality of its faculty in teaching and research, not athletics and public events and concerts. … This is a true misallocation of scarce resources at this time of financial crisis and should be reversed.”

About the same time, there was a Letter to the Editor of the LA Times by the ex Chair of the committee involved in the Pauley renovation project, who was fired when he complained about the proposed huge increase in costs. This letter provided additional factual information which made my letter seem a drop in the bucket.

I received in due course a response from the "Vice Chancellor for External Affairs" which attempted to justify these planned expenditures but succeeded only in strengthening my objections. At that point I saw the futility of it all and let it ride. But now it would appear that this misallocation of scare resources has come home to roost.

Shedding Light on Solar

2009-10-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

I feel strongly that one way for our civilization to survive in the face of the major climate changes we have ourselves created is to create alternate sources of energy production that do not produce greenhouse gases. There are a few options such as wind, geothermal, ocean waves and solar. I really don't like the look and sound of wind farms with their giant turbines, geothermal has its own problems, and harnessing the energy of the ocean and its tides is feasible but not yet practical. Generation of electric energy directly from sunlight using solar panels seems to me to be by far the best method, both in terms of ecological considerations and general acceptance by the populace. I realize that as yet the energy conversion is fairly low, around 22%, and that solar concentration methods (ie heating a liquid) can reach efficiencies as high as 40%. But I feel confident that the direct conversion efficiency of panels will dramatically increase as the best minds of our civilization work on this and that the price of these panels will dramatically decrease due to mass production. Also, solar concentration involves massive power plants similar to our current coal- and gas-driven power plants with all the problems that entails, whereas a solar panel on every house will provide a completely decentralized production method which avoids the trap of having giant utility companies destroying the ecology and determining our fate.
To do my little part, I have finally decided to get solar panels installed on the roof of our house. The electricity generated will be sent into the grid and the electric company will deduct this from our bill. And therein lies the rub! Any electricity generated by my solar panels over and above what we use in the house is gladly taken by the electric company with no recompensation or even a thank you. This, I feel is one of the major non-technological stumbling blocks to universal decentralized solar power. Beyond the normal and customary bureaucratic madness, I can only surmise that the electric company wants to maintain a monopoly on the generation of electric power and feels threatened by this new zeitgeist. It is a no-brainer that paying residents for residential energy production will greatly stimulate its adaption and utilization. Of course, there remains the problem of energy transmission and temporal variability of production when it depends on the sun shining through the clouds. I have read that so-called "smart grids" could be able to solve these problems, but that is another story.
The astute reader of my blog will notice that I have not mentioned nuclear energy. True, nuclear energy does not produce greenhouse gases, but it produces something even worse, the high level radioactive waste that cannot be safely stored anywhere for the requisite tens and even hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Remember, human civilization only began several thousand years ago when hunter-gatherers formed cities and began growing their food and domesticating animals, and the industrial age only began in the 19th century! No, I did not mention nuclear energy since I feel it is a problem and not a solution.

Some musings on health Care

2009-08-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

One often but not always learns best by comparisons with others. For example, in every other civilized industrialized country in this world, health care is a right, not a privilege, and is provided by the government to everyone in that country, even to visitors. By this reasoning, I came to the conclusion years ago (especially in the last 8 years) that our country must not be civilized, at least from this point of view. But then Obama was elected and I saw some hope on the horizon. I must admit that he has not been perfect. He appears to have been swayed too much by the intelligence agencies and military in such policies as continuing warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, in not prosecuting people at the top who broke the law in the previous administration, in not releasing the latest torture photos, in not pushing for gun control, in not yet completely leaving Iraq, and more recently, in not pushing for Medicare for everyone as the solution to health care reform. But in most other areas, he has been great and has returned our country to the status of an almost civilized country.

The Health Care controversy has once again made me have some doubt about the level of civilization in our country. Why on earth would anyone be against providing health care for everyone and stopping the predatory practices of the health insurance companies who now rule our medical lives? It can not be the shouted out argument that government should not run health care or even pay for it, since the popular Medicare program is government run and is very efficient and successful. Even those opposing health care reforms would not give up Medicare and also would not return those checks from Social Security they receive each month when they turn 65. So why is this occurring? The only reason I can think of is that this reform would hurt the profits of the giant health care insurance companies so they are paying huge sums of money to prevent this. This money is spent both in advertising to sway public opinion and in "campaign contributions" to the very members of Congress and the Senate who will have to vote on this type of bill. To connect the company money with opposition to reform implies that these politicians will be swayed (i.e. bribed) by the contributions to vote however the companies desire, but this unfortunately appears to be the case. There can be no other reason. And the politicians do not have to worry about health care since they are covered by a government financed program and will be covered their whole lives (I believe).

Oh, and I forgot that another reason is that the opposition political party (i.e. Republican Party) appears to want to damage the Obama administration by any means, even it involves damaging the health of their constituents. This is political suicide, but nevertheless the result may prove to be an absence of health care reform in the near future. I truly hope not. I like living in a civilized country.

The lights in the sky are stars

2009-08-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

"Seeing the blindness and misery of man, and looking over the muteness of the entire universe, and man without any light, abandoned and alone in this corner of the universe, without knowing who placed him there, what he has come to do, what will happen to him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything at all, I am seized with fear, like a man who has been carried in his sleep onto a desert island and who wakes up without knowing where he is, without any means of escape." Blaise Pascal - Pensees

Any time I feel cocky and start thinking what a great teacher and scientist I am, I look up to the stars and realize that we and the entire earth we live on are simply a tiny, tiny, tiny blip in the Universe. The light actually left the stars years or even thousands of years ago and just now arrived here. And the panorama of stars one sees (if one is lucky enough not to live in Los Angeles) does not really exist, but represents slices of history, with each star releasing its light at different times in the past, with some probably not even existing anymore. And the light from the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies was emitted millions to billions of years ago and has endured the most incredible trip one could imagine to get to us here on earth. Sometimes this is too just much to comprehend, so I start out by trying to visualize distances. I start with the understandable - the distance from here to the other side of my yard, then from my city to another city and from my country to another country. I understand this because I have walked across the yard and have stared out the small window of an airplane flying several miles above the earth for 10 hours. Looking at my flight from here to London on a globe gives me a feeling for the size of the earth. To get to the moon, it would take my jet plane around 16 days since it is around 30 earth-diameters distant; it even took the Apollo astronauts 3-4 days with a much bigger jet plane. I can see the moon and can easily grasp this distance with some stretching of the imagination and can even imagine that I see the lunar lander left behind when the astronauts departed. But then things get a little hairy. Light from the nearest non-sun star, Proxima Centauri, which I can easily see with my 10 inch telescope, took 4.2 years to reach me, and light travels really fast - around 670 million miles per hour. Now I am struggling with the concept, but worse is yet to come. Light from our closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, took 2.5 million light years to arrive here, and light from the farthest object yet observed, a stellar explosion that released an immense amount of gamma-rays, took 13 billion years to arrive here. Now it is just numbers, but numbers do have meaning and the meaning is that I myself am meaningless in the immensity of it all and am properly chastened.

A modest proposal

2009-07-22T14:47:00.001-07:00

I have a suggestion for the siting of a large solar power plant in the Mojave desert: Use the Owens Lake bed, which is a 200 sq mile dry lake between Olancha and Lone Pine in California which was created by the removal of water for Los Angeles through the construction of the LA Aqueduct. It is one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States and contributes around 8% of the country’s total particulate matter pollution. Although Los Angeles is legally obligated to solve this problem, nothing in reality will ever be accomplished as long as a growing city of 10 million people requires water. Totally covering this lake with a solar plant could probably solve two problems at the same time - It would solve the dust pollution problem by covering the dry lake bed with the necessary solar energy equipment and would provide a site for solar plant siting which is already environmentally damaged and therefore would not cause any environmental opposition. This would avoid having to site new solar plants on environmentally sensitive areas of the Mojave desert as is currently planned.

And in the near future another such site will unfortunately become available by the inevitable drying of the Salton Sea.

Postscript added on Aug. 17.
I don't want to brag but I just read a news article about covering the Owens dry lake with solar collectors (http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/state&id=6966498). In addition to the above Blog posting, I had written the Department of Energy and also a solar company that plans to open a large solar plant in the Mojave desert (with no responses of course). In any case, I am sure that this idea was so obvious that it occurred to many people previously.

Science is a hard mistress

2009-07-22T13:53:00.001-07:00

To do research is to have a series of incredible highs interspersed with often as many daunting lows. The highs arise from those infrequent discoveries that come after months if not years of grueling work in the lab when things suddenly fit together and a door to the future opens. The lows come from those times when you realize that the data you have obtained with all that work just do not fit your favorite hypothesis and you must reject it. It seems paradoxical but the lows are what it is all about. Unlike any other field of human endeavor, scientific research demands a basic humility in the face of facts, a humility that flies in the face of human nature. Everyone wants to be respected and even famous and to reach a position of power and influence, and these human desires often lead to the avoidance of inconvenient facts either consciously or subconsciously. The researcher however must look at the data and interpret them in terms of the best model even if it means rejecting your own hypothesis.
I myself have experienced both types of emotions in my research career. The high came in 1990 when we suddenly realized that we could explain the extremely enigmatic and even disturbing phenomenon of uridine insertion/deletion RNA editing in trypanosomes that was causing serious scientists to speculate that the genetic dogma of information flow from DNA to RNA to protein was incomplete. We and others had found that multiple transcripts of the maxicircle mitochondrial DNA in trypanosome mitochondria could not be translated due to the absence of open reading frames, and that these transcripts were somehow corrected after transcription by the insertion and occasional deletion of uridine residues at specific sites thereby eliminating the encoded frame shifts and producing mRNAs with open reading frames that encoded conserved mitochondrial proteins. Initially the phenomenon was thought to involve a few U’s at a few sites, but soon it blossomed into cases of hundreds of U’s at hundreds of sites, in essence creating genes de novo.
The overriding question was where did the information come from that told the U’s to be inserted and deleted at these precise sites. The information did not appear to be encoded anywhere in the mitochondrial genome, which was in itself quite bizarre in that it consisted of around 50 maxicircles catenated with thousands of minicircles into a single giant network of DNA. Not giving up on the central dogma we were looking for RNAs that could base pair with mature edited sequences and thereby provide the information by this well tested mechanism. We speculated that perhaps the reason no one had seen this sequence information was that it was in short segments. Having asked our friendly lab computer to search for short sequences anywhere in the maxicircle genome that could base pair with the mature edited sequences and thereby encode the insertions and deletions of U’s, it was at first disappointing that there were no such antisense sequences. But a closer examination of the results showed that the mismatches were always transitions and suddenly we realized that if we took off our Watson Crick blindfolds and simply allowed G-U base pairs in addition to G-C and A-U base pairs, the computer was telling us that there were short complementary sequences in the maxicircle DNA that could encode the editing information. A few days later we obtained some direct evidence for the existence of a novel class of small RNAs with these sequences (and also with 3’ non-encoded oligo U tails!) and we named them “guide RNAs”.
The next high came when we (i.e Nancy Sturm, my graduate student) realized that the thousands of minicircles also actually encoded the majority of guide RNAs and that this was finally the long sought after solution to the genetic function of minicircles. Suddenly we had two mitochondrial genomes in the same cell, one with cryptogenes and another one with complementary guide RNA genes. Immediately this discovery led to a mechanism in which the gRNAs formed an anchor duplex with the pre-edited mRNA just downstream of the editing site and recruited a cadre of specific enzymes to the editing site. We proposed a nuclease that cleaved the pre-edited mRNA at the editing site, a 3’ terminal uridylyltransferase that added U’s or an 3’-5’ U-specific exonuclease that deleted U’s, and finally an RNA ligase that religated the cleavage fragments. Like all good models it was very satisfying since it explained a number of previous observations such as the 3’ – 5’ polarity of editing. This was a definite high in the life of my lab.
But my Swiss postdoc, Beat Blum, had the habit of thinking too much and soon came up with another model - in which the U’s were transferred from the known 3’ oligo U tail of the gRNAs to the editing sites by a transesterification mechanism such as employed in RNA splicing. This model had an easily testable prediction – that there were chimeric intermediates in which the 3’ end of the gRNA was covalently linked to the mRNA 3’ cleavage fragment at an editing site. When this was rapidly confirmed, the lab entered another high, albeit with a low level of anxiety and chagrin that we had just proposed another seemingly viable model and now were saying that this was wrong. The transesterification model became the flavor of the week and even the Nobel laureate, Tom Cech, independently proposed an identical hypothesis. The new vistas opened were awesome: Editing was now a type of RNA splicing and was a very ancient phenomenon indeed!
But then evidence slowly accumulated drip by drip that the chimeric intermediates were artifacts of cleavage ligation and that our original theory was correct and not the awesome transesterification model. Again a beautiful theory crashed on the hard rocks of inconvenient facts, but the inevitable low was tempered by the high that remained from the fact that our original model was indeed correct.
A few years have passed since those exciting days but the memories linger.

From Protist (2009) In press.

My personal epiphany

2009-07-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

I will never forget the first time as a PhD student I did a growth curve on Leishmania cells in culture. As I began to plot the data I found that the number of cells increased at around 9 h doubling time and then began to slow down and finally level off and actually decrease as the cells died. When I plotted the number on a semilog scale against time, I suddenly realized what was meant by ‘‘exponential growth’’ and why Malthus had concern. This was a true epiphany for me as I ran through simple calculations showing what would happen if the cell growth did not slow down and continued doubling every 9 h. The numbers of cells and the space they would occupy blasted my mind when I tried to compare the Leishmania cells with larger animals and with humans. In the case of Leishmania the natural slow down, whether it be caused by nutrient deprivation or more exotic physiological reasons, is what has saved the world from being covered with Leishmania. In the case of humans, it remains to be seen what causes will slow down the exponential growth. The two alternatives are to decrease the rate of increase, i.e. the number of offspring per family until this rate equals the death rate. Or to experience a catastrophe such as a major rapid die off from a disease, a nuclear holocaust or a world-wide famine (‘‘famine, distress, havoc and dismay’’ in the words of Malthus) or a slower die off from the degradation of life produced by the loss of an essential resource required for modern civilization such as oil. Why do I bring up this ancient epiphany (that I am sure each person at one time experiences) in the pages of this journal? My main reason is that this journal exists within a civilization and culture and even scientists doing research on protists must be cognizant of possible oncoming doom. There is great concern recently about climatic warming and how human activities have contributed to this phenomenon by increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The appearance of a huge hole in the life-preserving ozone layer in the atmosphere over Antarctica is another recent concern since this may allow UV irradiation to affect phytoplankton in the ocean at the base of the world’s food chain. Failures of most of the world’s fisheries have occurred. Species are being extinguished due to habitat encroachment by humans at a rate greater than during any of the major extinctions seen in the fossil record. The price of oil is rising rapidly and may skyrocket as supplies are depleted in the near future. The supply of clean water is running out in many places. The common theme underlying all these dramatic events and those yet to come is exponential growth of the human population. Yet no one talks about this and religions and governments, at least in the United States and apparently elsewhere also, actually almost forbid any rational discussion. Yes climatic warming is occurring and will cause major disasters, but even if we decrease the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, the real underlying problem will not be touched — exponential growth. Sure one can simply ignore this and live from day to day studying our protists and let our children and grandchildren find a solution (or suffer the catastrophe). But I myself feel we should take a lesson from the Leishmania cells growing in culture and somehow decrease our growth rate.

From Protist (2007) 158, 3.

Musings on the real problems

2009-07-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

I realize that Protist is a journal for the science of protozoa, not for musings on the future of humanity (and of protistologists!), but please give me leave to attempt to articulate my thoughts. We too often get flustered and concerned about current problems, be they personal or international, and leave festering in the dark corners of our minds the real problems. I agree that the loss of my (and others) retirements savings invested in stocks is serious and close to a personal and even international calamity. I agree that the election of an intelligent, rational and less bellicose American President is important and serious. I agree that anti-intellectualism and the rise of religious fundamentalism has been and is a serious and distressing and recurring problem in all societies. I agree that the continued existence of thousands of horrible nuclear weapons by multiple countries is a serious and perhaps fatal problem.
But the certainty of the universal devastation which will be, and amazingly, is already starting to be being reeked by human-caused climate change throughout this world of ours is to my mind the most serious and consequential problem that Homo sapiens has ever faced. The various scenarios modeled by the most eminent climatologists are frightening and bode ill for civilization as we know it now. The certainty of rises in ocean levels which will inundate island nations and flood costal cities world-wide, combined with the certainty of changes in weather patterns and sources of water have extreme consequential predictions. These changes will produce starvation, increase disease and cause massive emigration of millions upon millions of people world-wide. The eventual pressure on highly industrialized countries to decide whether to accept the massive immigration of poor starving people or to build Berlin-walls to keep them out and try to preserve their own devastated infrastructures and crumbling economic frameworks produced by the loss of major cities will be one of the most important ethical and moral decisions ever made. But the walls will be to no avail and this influx and the destruction of societies will forever change the industrialized societies in irreversible ways. An immediate result will be the use of military power to either obtain newly fertile regions for agriculture or to fight against the movements of peoples. The resulting wars will devastate more counties and weapons that were created never to be used perhaps will finally be used. Finally the economic and social framework and the very fabric of modern societies will collapse. The further consequences can not even be imagined by my feeble imagination.
Of course it is clear to anyone who can think rationally that the ultimate underlying cause of these horrible scenarios is overpopulation, which appears for multiple fundamental reasons to be impossible for the human species to change. But there are of course more immediate causes that actually can be remediated somewhat. A mandated world-wide severe decrease in the output of carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels would by all the models begin to decrease the rate of change, but this also appears to be beyond the abilities of humans (if our leaders and politicians are indeed human).
I myself will probably not experience the worst of this but our children and their children certainly will. Perhaps our species’ evolutionary time span has been reached, but I truly hope not. The intelligence, ingenuity and resourcefulness of humans will perhaps reverse these trends and leave the protistologists a little more time to study our little beasties.

From Protist (2009) 160, 1.

What is Science and Why do I do It?

2009-07-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I try to step back from the ongoing little emergencies and exigencies of lab research and think about the meaning of it all. Why is it at all important to learn exactly how a biological phenomenon occurs and has evolved, how molecules interact, what are the rules that govern the behavior of matter at all levels, how our universe evolved and even how mathematical truths exist. Any why does Society pay us and (sometimes even respect us) to try to learn these things? The second question is easier to answer, especially for biomedical research. Clearly humans desire long healthy, happy lives and human societies want to perpetrate themselves and this knowledge may aid in achieving these desires. The first question however is difficult and has no easy answers or perhaps any answers at all. I myself feel that knowledge and understanding of the world around us has an inherent worth beyond that of the welfare and happiness of individual humans and groups of humans, although it indeed may prove incredibly important for the very survival of our species, without which knowledge in any sense is meaningless. Knowledge is also self gratifying and pragmatically useful for future behavior but that is hardly the real reason to do research. But what is this “inherent worth” of knowledge? I equate it with the sense of wonder and beauty that one feels when one finally understands how recalcitrant facts fit into conceptual frameworks and new facts are then predicted. This sense of wonder must be tempered by the realization that the theories almost certainly will change and the “facts” reinterpreted, but for that small period of one’s life the wonder and beauty of it all glistens and all striving and daily routines are subsumed. It may sound presumptuous, but that is why I do Science.

From Protist (2008) 159, 3.

The Best of Times

2009-07-21T16:05:00.001-07:00

This is my final web alert in a continuous series, mainly due to having culled most of the interesting protist sites. But since the web is dynamic and always changing, I am sure that new valuable sites will appear and I hope to present web alerts sporadically when appropriate. However, since this is the song of my swan, I would like to request your indulgence (and that of our fearless Editor-in-Chief) for a little philosophical waxing and waning. I started this series with an article entitled “Protists on the Web” in which I stated that the web was a true revolution in communication. Today I am convinced that this was an understatement and that the web is perhaps the next step in the evolution of our species. It represents the beginning of instant and continuous communication between all humans, which in a way is the annealing of our species into a super-organism. Of course this simplified system that exists today is limited to one way communication and is barely interactive but it will evolve into totally interactive, totally encompassing communication. Every person will have instant access, perhaps through chip implants, to all accumulated human knowledge, and be able to add their intellectual and even emotional and political contributions to this pool with ease. At this time we can not even conceive of such a system but the beginnings are there and cannot be impeded. The question of whether this is a good thing is an important one and ethical concerns should help steer the technology and avoid dangerous avenues. But the history of our species shows that change can not be stopped and will ooze out of all walls put up to block it. Ethical concerns should help avoid the dark scenarios in which dictatorial governments by means of this technology have complete knowledge of the location, genetic composition, speech and perhaps even thoughts of its subjects. But the light scenarios are more compelling and marvelous to think about. I do have however one overriding fear and that is that our species may destroy itself together with this marvelous communication system, and that would be a real shame. Malthus was right and any species, be it protist or human, cannot increase exponentially with limited resources of food, water and energy. Too many people inhabit this earth already and it is getting worse. This is the underlying reason for all human problems, including famines, wars and terrorism. We have intentionally and inadvertently initiated the most massive extinction of species in evolutionary history and have again, intentionally and inadvertently, made macro changes in the earth’s various normally self-regulating systems such as climate and atmospheric composition. I don’t want to end this musing on such a dark note. Let me instead discuss why I am in this crazy business. Imagine (my mother would say), grown men spending all their time studying little creatures that no one can see! I would respond, if she were here, that this is the best of times – grown men (and women) are paid by society to simply discover new knowledge about the world, its creatures and the universe in which we live. This is truly the best of times.

From Protist (2002) 153, 365.

Death of the "ologies"

2009-07-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

It is my sad duty to report on the death of one of academics’ most cherished institutions – the “ologies”. Way back before we knew so much and understood so little, Universities compartmentalized knowledge by the addition of the Greek logos, meaning the 'study of', 'specialty in' or 'art of' a given field to the end of the word. I did a Google search on “ologies” and the winner (http://phrontistery.info/sciences.html) had 633 different fields with this suffix. There is also an entire book on this subject called ”Ologies and Isms : A Dictionary of Word Beginnings and Endings” by Michael Quinion for those who want to delve further. The purist should note that the “o” is superfluous, with the true suffix being “logy”, which had led to a few “alogies” as pretenders to the “logy” throne.
This compartmentalization was quite successful and led to the creation of many departments of “-logies”, each with a separate supposed set of goals that survive to this day in all major centers of higher learning. It also led to the creation of innumerable tenure-level jobs for Chairs, Directors, Deans and the like, each with their own fiefdom of administrators and budgets and also a few researchers or professors.
Generalizations and attacks on the status quo are dangerous and lead to shrill counter attacks by those affected, but I feel it is clear that the growth of modern science has led to the death of this venerable institution. Let me illustrate this in the field I am familiar with – modern biological research. Yes there are still Departments of Biology, Physiology and even Botany, Zoology and Protistology, but everyone in these Departments is doing the same thing and this has nothing to do with the ”ology” that pays their salary. They are studying interesting problems from every point of view at every possible level. The Protistologist, say, is interested in the motility of a particular protist. He or she however is interested in not only the molecular mechanisms involved down to the level of the molecules and energetics, but also the comparative aspects of motility in other related protists and even metazoans, the evolution and origin of this mechanism (and the cell itself), the morphological aspects, the natural history of this phenomenon, and even the role of this phenomenon in eco-communities of cells, and from a selfish anthropomorphic point of view, the possible biomedical significance, including the immunological aspect and interaction with the host if they are parasites. Each aspect of this study could be called by a different “ology” and therefore the existing nomenclature fails to communicate the existing reality.
One sign of the death throes of the “ologies” is the desire of almost all University Departments in the Life Sciences to include the word, Molecular, in their title. At my University, UCLA, it began with the creation of an interdepartmental Institute of Molecular Biology almost 42 years ago. Then the powerful techniques of molecular biology diffused to the existing “ology” Departments and there was a recurring scramble to rename the existing Departments and to wage the turf battles with the Institute that resulted. Even clinical Departments in the UCLA School of Medicine began hiring basic researchers who used recombinant DNA techniques and the great name change race was on. The final result as of today is that the venerable Molecular Biology Institute is a place where one eats a free lunch on Tuesdays while listening to seminars, and every Department is the same with a heterogeneous group of people all using every possible research technique ranging from molecular to organismal to ecological to study basic problems in the life sciences and biomedicine. But they still advertise themselves as different, claim to have specific goals and still teach courses with different names, but this is like whistling into the winds of change.
Another sign of the death throes is the emergence of entirely new fields derived from amalgamation of existing fields and exhibiting new “emerging properties”, such as, for example, Systems Biology or Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. I myself find that I utilize examples in my courses of, for example, the discovery of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe from Astronomy as metaphors for the discovery of the World of Small RNAs in Biology.
I make no value judgment on this paradigm-changing change in academic organization, except to say that it makes life much more interesting but at the same time more confusing. Politicians, Universities, students and even faculty like compartments and get disoriented when faced with the chaos of real life. But perhaps the death of the “ologies” may lead to a deeper appreciation of the true goals of modern science and academics – an answer to the really big questions of what life is, where it came from and how it works, who we are and where we came from, and what is existence and the nature of things.

From Protist (2006) 157, 361

Who am I?

2009-07-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

I introduce a discussion of parasitism and symbiosis in my undergraduate course by asking some poor student happening to be sitting in the first row — ‘‘Who are you?’’. She answers of course — ‘‘I am so and so.’’ I then persist with ‘‘What do you mean by ‘‘I’’?’’ and the student begins to give me a quizzical look, perhaps starting to realize that I am actually asking one of the most important and profound questions of the human experience. We then jointly attempt to define more precisely the nature of ‘‘I’’ — a body with arms, legs and head that respond to one’s wishes, or is it a brain in this body that has inputs from the senses and somehow has long term and short term memories, or is it the actual possibly holographic memories and thoughts themselves which represent the ultimate emerging character of complex neocortical neuronal activity. I then ask what about the bacteria in her gut, hundreds of species representing over 1 kg of biotic material, or the mites (Demodex folliculorum ) inhabiting her eye lash follicules, or the Toxoplasma bradyzoites hibernating within cysts in her brain (if she has eaten steak tartare frequently). These organisms are certainly part of her body and some are even essential for her normal development and physiology. Are they included within the ‘‘I’’? And if we delve even deeper into her cells, are the nuclei in the billion of cells or the subcellular organelles part of ‘‘I’’? It gets even murkier if we remember that the mitochondrion evolved from endosymbiotic purple non-sulfur bacteria and perhaps the nucleus evolved from archaeobacteria. Does my student’s ‘‘I’’ include these evolutionary memories? Or is the ‘‘I’’ her nuclear genetic information which in fact is full of evolutionary remnants of lateral gene transfer events as well? Or are her DNA sequences merely an operational and trivial forensic defnition of self? This is the stuff of plays (e.g. ‘‘On Ego’’ by Paul Brooks currently in the Soho Theater in London) but is it in the realm of science? I believe so since we are indeed the sum of a multitude of symbiotic relationships, both commensual, mutalistic and parasitic in nature, between our own cells and many eubacterial, archael and even metazoan creatures that inhabit our universe of self. My students and I never really reach any conclusion about the definition of ‘‘I’’, but the discussion certainly illuminates the nature of symbiotic relationships between organisms and leads directly to a discussion of those relationships which have not yet reached an evolutionary equilibrium and are termed ‘‘parasitic’’. I myself feel gratifed if I have merely stimulated some of those reverberating neuronal circuits of my students and made them stop and think whenever they say ‘‘I am so and so.’’ Such are the small but poignant rewards of teaching.

From Protist (2006) 157, 89.

Larry Simpson's Thoughts and Musings

Climate Change Denial from Republican Presidential Candidate Santorum

Rick Santorum: I've Never Believed In The 'Hoax Of Global Warming'

A True Revolution of the Mind

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

A sobering essay from Robert Reich

Two weeks be­fore the Iowa cau­cuses, the Re­pub­li­can crackup threat­ens the fu­ture of the Grand Old Party more pro­foundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for Amer­ica.

The crackup isn’t just Rom­ney the smooth ver­sus Gin­grich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Re­pub­li­cans who just scotched the deal to con­tinue pay­roll tax re­lief and ex­tended un­em­ploy­ment in­sur­ance ben­e­fits be­yond the end of the year, ver­sus Sen­ate Re­pub­li­cans who voted over­whelm­ingly for it.

Why the Republican Crackup is Bad ForAmerica

Truly incredible

A Social Misfit

The curious mind wants to know...

Meanwhile the Earth gets Hotter and Hotter - and the Band Plays On!

NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable.”

Climatologist Slams Media for “Silent Summer”: Poor Coverage of Link Between Extreme Weather and Human-Caused Climate Change

Silent Summer

Character Assassination

Limits on Detection

Great news!

Japan Feed-in Tariff Policy Becomes Law

Japan Plans 30,000 MW of New Renewables in 10 Years

World's Third Largest Economy Adopts FITs

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

End of an Empire?

Net Metering and the Demise of Human Civilization

Medicare for All!

The inquisitive mind wants to know

The die has been cast.

Ode to the Cheese Steak

M27 or Dumbell Nebula

The End of Things

I Felt a Blog Coming On

Recommendation

A Disturbing Thought

End the filibuster!

What a Concept!

Haiti – A Premonition of What is to Come

Kabuki Seating

Finally action

A Crisis in Public Education

Shedding Light on Solar

Some musings on health Care

The lights in the sky are stars

A modest proposal

Science is a hard mistress

My personal epiphany

Musings on the real problems

What is Science and Why do I do It?

The Best of Times

Death of the "ologies"

Who am I?

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican crackup threatens the future of the Grand Old Party more profoundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for America.

The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.