Left Side of the Aisle #55 - Part 5

Afghanistan and the advance of the national security state

This past week saw the first anniversary of the execution of Osama bin Laden, an event the Obama crowd has been more that willing to exploit for its own political gain. As Glenn Greenwald recently noted, in the wake of bin Laden's death, there were those who thought that the War on Terror^{(reg.)(c)(pat.pend.)} might wind down some. After all, International Enemy #1 was dead and the minions of the national security state kept going on about how badly al-Qaeda had been damaged, so it would seem logical that we might step back a bit.

As you obviously know, it hasn't worked out that way. In fact, Greenwald came up with a list of things that have happened since the killing of Osama bin Laden:

- Congress renewed, and PHC* signed, the Patriot Act without a single reform. During Senate debate, Harry Reid claimed that anyone seeking reforms was putting the country at risk of a terrorist attack. (Remember when the Patriot Act was controversial?)

- A US citizen was murdered by the CIA on orders from the President. It was done far from any battlefield without a shred of due process or presentation of any evidence. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by the US government.

- The Attorney General gave a speech claiming the President has the legal authority to order US citizens be killed by government agents, with no oversights or checks on that power, based solely on unproven, secret accusations of connections to terrorism.

- With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and PHC* signed, the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains provisions codifying into law the power of a president to order the indefinite detention without trial or charge of any "suspected terrorist" anywhere in the world, including potentially within the US. The bill also contained an expanded statutory definition of the War on Terror^{(reg.)(c)(pat.pend.)}.

- In Utah, construction neared completion for a sprawling new site to enable the National Security Agency to engage is massive domestic surveillance and to achieve what Greenwald accurately called “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”

- PHC* authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, under which the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”

- The US expanded its use of drone attacks in Somalia, even reopening a base in the Seychelles to make it easier.

- The FBI increased aggressive attempts to recruit young Muslim-American males into phony terrorism plots which the FBI concocts, funds, encourages, directs, and enables, and then uses as a pretext to prosecute those it manages to lure in. Meanwhile, more and more American Muslims are being prosecuted for crimes that are about their political views rather than their actions.

- NATO airstrikes have continued to kill Afghan civilians.

Even at that, Greenwald's list is incomplete: It leaves out the continued refusal to prosecute self-admitted war criminals, including those who have publicly acknowledged their crimes during this past year. It leaves out his ignoring of the War Powers Act in Libya and his essentially declaring unilateral control over all war and peace decisions, denying Congress any role at all. It leaves out the continued attacks on whistleblowers. It leaves out the persecution of Bradley Manning. The list could go on for some time.

But that last item on Greenwald's list brings up the recent news from Afghanistan.

So the Great Mr. O zipped into Afghanistan, where we have achieved so much in 12 years of blood, death, and treasure that he had to go in secret into a fortified compound and give his speech to we serfs flanked by armored vehicles.

No matter, he earlier told the assembled troops, there is a light at the end of the tunnel! No, wait, that's not right. A light at the end of the tun- sorry - "there is a light on the horizon." We will withdraw from Afghanistan, he declared, but we must do it "responsibly." "Peace with honor," as we used to call it.

But wait - withdraw? Are we? It now seems we're going to have some as yet unknown number of military "advisors" and "trainers" in Afghanistan for another 12 years - until the end of 2024.

There are 88,000 US troops in country now, a number that is supposed to be down to 68,000 by September. But there are no indications, no announcements, of any more withdrawals after that. Now, all "combat" troops are supposed to be out by the end of 2014 - but "combat troops" has no particular meaning, it's however the military and the White House choose to define the term. There is already talk of some 20,000-25,000 troops (and maybe more) staying after 2014, troops that will "train" Afghan soldiers "and fight alongside them where necessary."

So I hope you enjoy a pleasant little war - because it seems were going to have one for a long time to come.

Enjoy your Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. President.

Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/since_bin_ladens_death/singleton/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/billions-dollars-thousands-lives-lost-afghanistan-war/story?id=16256292#.T6DyFNWpOSo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9240356/Barack-Obama-in-Afghanistan-we-must-finish-the-job.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/opinion/missed-chance.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/04/left-side-of-aisle-52-part-5.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/05/little-more-bad-news-so-is-this.html

Left Side of the Aisle #55 - Part 4

Outrage of the Week: HHS endorses failed right-wing program on teen pregnancy

The Obama administration, like the Shrub administration before it, has a program intended to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy. As part of that, the Department of Health and Human Services maintains a list of supposedly “evidence-based” programs for teenage pregnancy prevention. Until just recently, all of those on the list were after-school programs. But sometime in April, without any notice, without any press release announcing it, HHS added an abstinence-only curriculum to the list.

The curriculum was created by an outfit called Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education, a dim-witted crew whose real-world awareness seems to have stopped at re-runs of Father Knows Best. The program, according to an analysis of it by an independent group, “contains little or no information about puberty, anatomy, sexually transmitted diseases, or sexual behavior.” Nor does it “include information about the health benefits of contraception or condoms.” It relies instead on inaccurate information and fear-based classroom exercises. As proof, here's one of those exercises:

Each student rolls a six-side die; the number that comes up corresponds to a particular consequence arising from premarital sex. Students who roll a one have contracted HIV. Roll a two, you've caught herpes. Roll a three, it's human papillomavirus, which causes genital warts and can cause cancer. A four is an unwanted pregnancy, a five means infertility, and a six represents deep emotional pain.

The program promotes heterosexual marriage as the only happy and healthy life choice, promotes grossly out-of-date gender roles and stereotypes, and entirely ignores the existence of LGBT people.

And what's more, it doesn't work. In fact, none of these abstinence-only programs work. Repeated studies have shown they don't work:

- There was a 2002 study by Advocates for Youth.
- There was a 2004 study by the staff of Rep. Henry Waxman of youngsters participating in federally funded, abstinence-only programs.
- There was a 2005 study of 12,000 adolescents which was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
- There was a 2007 study mandated by Congress.
- There was a 2008 study published in the professional journal Pediatrics.

They all reached the same conclusion, aptly summed up in the finding of that 2007 study that abstinence-only programs "had little or no impact on sexual abstinence or activity."

The teen pregnancy rate in the US has actually going down dramatically but for reasons which do have to do with education and increased availability of birth control but which have nothing to do with abstinence-only programs. In fact, the rate of teen pregnancy is highest in states that focus efforts on that sort of program.

And yet here we have the administration endorsing one that not only doesn't work but is filled with misinformation, fear-mongering, sexism, and homophobia - and doing it essentially in secret. Why? I can think of only one possible reason: to head of potential attacks from the right, and sacrificing to myths and ignorance the children who will be exposed to this crap be damned.

It's another example of what I've come to call preemptive capitulation, the practice of the Obama crowd to surrender to the right wing even before there is a fight. And preemptive capitulation and the idiocy that arises from it is always the Outrage of the Week.

Sources:
http://www.communityactionkit.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=984
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/04/30/he-men-virginity-pledges-and-bridal-dreams-an-hhs-endorsed-curriculum
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/ab_ed_moves_ahead/
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/04/10/461402/teen-pregnancy-sex-education/
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db89.pdf
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/ab_ed_moves_ahead/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/11/we-dont-need-no-stinking-studies.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/12/ignorance-is-bliss-not.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/03/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2007/04/another-success-story-in-keeping-us.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/12/we-already-knew-this.html

Left Side of the Aisle #55 - Part 3

Occupy is back (not that it ever left)

Occupy aggressively reemerged on May 1 with rallies, marches, and other sorts of demonstrations in 115 places around the US. Turnouts ranged from the dozens in some places to the hundreds to the thousands in others to the tens of thousands in a few. The picture is of some of the estimated 20,000 who made their way along 5th Avenue in New York.

Now in these hundreds of protests involving tens of thousands of people, there were of course some incidents, and in the old and dishonorable media tradition of "if it bleeds, it leads," much - much too much - of the coverage made those few incidents a, even the, centerpiece of their coverage. That is, they made much too much out of much too little.

In fact, despite that dishonorable tradition, it sometimes seems there is a deliberate intent to discredit Occupy by putting so much attention on such a small - and, they would reasonably think, unpopular - part of it.

As an example, consider Seattle: Much was made of some black-clad protestors who broke off from the main march and set about breaking windows - but only one major media outlet of which I'm aware (the San Francisco Chronicle) made mention of fact this was only about a half-dozen people out of whole day of action, out of the whole demonstration. Other reports said there were as many as three dozen, but they seem to have included anyone dressed in black who was present, whether they did anything or not. The video of the event appears to confirm the Chronicle's figure for actual participants in the vandalism.

More to the point, while the media was busy watching this handful of nihilists breaking (or, in what I found an amusing sidebar, often enough futilely trying to break) windows, there was a peaceful rally going on couple of blocks away, which media didn't cover - because it was peaceful. In fact, the coverage of the local paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, mentioned nothing except the vandalism.

Some didn't stop at the protests themselves: ABC News, reporting before most events had started, couldn't even be bothered to report on the plans for the day before breathlessly rushing ahead to report on some "suspicious white powder" - which turned out to be corn starch - mailed to seven locations in New York City (most of them Wells Fargo bank branches). Police were quick to suggest a connection to Occupy, which was echoed and amplified by Reuters, which headlined its article "More white powder incidents in New York; police see Occupy link."

Now, we have to remember is the New York City police, the people who have a "stop and frisk" policy applied overwhelmingly to young black males (because they are all suspected criminals, of course), who can search your belongings before you can get on the subway (because we're all potential suicide bombers), and who have been spying on any pretty much any Muslim within a radius of a couple of hundred miles (because all Muslims are potential terrorists). So consider source.

But more importantly, what does it mean to have a "link" to Occupy? Occupy has no central structure, no membership list, no dues. So what does that mean? Suppose someone defaced a "Romney for President" bumper sticker. How would you feel about a headline that said "police see Obama campaign link?"

And peaking of New York, the New York Times did its part for the Armies of the Empire: Its article on the day's events was headlined "At May Day Demonstrations, Traffic Jams and Arrests." The first three graphs were all about arrests; not until the fifth graph could the Times be bothered to even mention the theme of the actions.

That in turn brings up another thing that gripes me: "What are they about?" We keep hearing pundits saying that, complaining and carping about the movement's "lack of focus," the absence of a clear and specific list of particular demands.

But consider these statements, all taken from major media articles about the May 1 actions:

MSNBC said people turned out "to rally against austerity measures and call for higher wages and more jobs." Later on, the same article noted that Occupy held protests during the spring on issues of student debt and worker rights.

The San Francisco Chronicle had this to say:

Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity and high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts.

And even the New York Times, when it got around to mentioning what drove the protests, said this:

The themes on May Day were the ones that Occupy Wall Street has sounded from the outset of the movement last fall - opposition to big banks and the government that bailed them out after they helped cause the recession.

So what is this "What are they about"crap? There is a clear theme running through those descriptions, which can be summed up is a few words: economic injustice and the corruption of our political process. Yet that same media, despite having reported that, will turn around and in next breath will scratch its collective head and say "what ever do they want?" They do know - or, rather, the corporations that own the media know. They just don't want to hear it.

At the same time, there is one thing the movement is not about: It is not about becoming the pet of the Democratic Party and President Obama’s reelection effort the way the Tea Party, whose initial anger at corporations and the banks had some real overlap with Occupy's vision, has become the tamed pet of the GOPpers.

And no, that does not mean anyone in Occupy wants Witless Romney as president! Don't be stupid. What it means is that the particular benefit of any particular politician or any particular political party is unimportant. What's important is results. Nothing else.


Sources:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/suspicious-white-powder-received-banks-day-protests/story?id=16251936#.T6BVZ9WpOSo
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/us-usa-occupy-powder-idUSBRE84017M20120501?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=71&google_editors_picks=true
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/occupy-movement-returns-for-may-day-protests-in-dc-new-york-and-around-us/2012/05/01/gIQASDqQvT_story.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/01/bloomberg_articlesM3CGZL6S972901-M3DJ6.DTL
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/nyregion/may-day-demonstrations-lead-to-clashes-and-arrests.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/01/11485652-protesters-hit-streets-for-may-day-rallies-violence-flares-in-oakland-seattle
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/01/11485085-battle-for-the-soul-of-occupy-activists-fear-being-pulled-to-the-right-becoming-democratic-pet?lite

Left Side of the Aisle #55 - Part 2

Good news: An ancient pest is on the verge of being eradicated

This is not new, but it's something I came across by chance recently and felt was worth passing on.

The Guinea worm has been known since Old Testament times: It was referred to in Numbers, around 1450 BCE - that is, pushing 3500 years ago - as the "firey serpent."

People in Africa continue to suffer from its effects. They will unknowingly ingest the parasite from infested water. About a year later, the symptoms appear.

In the body, the worm can grow to three feet long. It moves through the subcutaneous tissues until it exits the body through a swollen blister, usually on lower leg. The pain, which is described as feeling like the area around the worm is on fire, can be crippling. The way to remove the worm is to catch it as it starts to exit the wound and then wind it around a stick as you slowly pull it out - slowly in this case meaning meaning very slowly: The process can take weeks to complete. In the 1950s the Guinea worm ravaged the bodies of an estimated 50 million people in Africa, forcing victims to live through months of debilitating pain, making it impossible for them to tend to cows or harvest crops.

In 1986, the Carter Center, yes, the one founded by Jimmy Carter, began a campaign to end the affliction through education about the worm's behavior and improving the availability of means to filter water so that new people don't get infected. At that time, in 1986, the number of people affected was around 3.5 million.

By 2009, the number of cases was down to about 3200. In 2010, there were fewer than 1700 cases. In 2011, fewer than 1100.

The Carter Center has helped erase Guinea worm infection - also called dracunculiasis - in more than 20 countries, and it believes the worm will soon follow smallpox as the next disease to be eradicated from the human population.

This is something don't hear about much - but damn, it's good news. It's "feel good" news and damn straight we can use more of that.

Sources:
http://cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/mini_site/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/25/jimmy-carter-guinea-worm_n_801252.html

Left Side of the Aisle #55 - Part 1

Good news: "Personhood" failure in Oklahoma

I have previously mentioned the so-called "personhood" bills in various states. These bills propose to provide full legal rights to embryos from the moment of conception - so not only fetuses, but embryos and even zygotes would have the same legal status as actual people. Obviously, these laws are meant to ban abortions; some of them go as far as failing to allow exceptions even to protect the life of the pregnant woman.

There was one such bill gliding through the Oklahoma legislature. It had passed the state Senate, it had passed a House committee, the governor said she would sign it. Its prospects in a legislature that had passed more than 30 anti-abortion measures since right wing gained control in 2004 looked golden.

But something happened: Grassroots opposition sprang up and over time became strong enough to move some GOPper legislators in the state to propose amendments to the bill to limit its reach. That drove wedge between these right-wingers and the really right-wingers behind the bill, who opposed any amendments, even ones to protect access to in vitro fertilization and birth control or which would clarify that women with life-threatening pregnancies could still receive medical treatment.

As a result of that wedge, bad blood developed between the bill's outside wacko backers and the legislators - and ultimately the bill was not brought up for vote and time time to do so has now expired. The bill is dead, at least for this session.

Before leaving that bit aside, it's worth noting that the Rev. Paul Coakley, Archbishop of Oklahoma City, sent a letter to all the parishes in the diocese telling the priests to tell their congregations to contact their state legislators to support the bill. How urging specific actions on behalf of a specific piece of legislation does - how does not violate the Church's tax-exempt status is beyond me.

Beyond that, there was more good news. There was to be a "personhood" question on the Oklahoma ballot in the fall which would amend the state Constitution to do via amendment what that bill would do via legislation: Give zygotes the same legal rights as actual people from the moment of fertilization.

On April 30, the Oklahoma state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, struck it off ballot, ruling it "clearly unconstitutional" precisely because it would block a woman's legal right to have an abortion. The Court noted the SCOTUS ruling in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court allowed states to pass some abortion restrictions but prevents them from banning abortion entirely. "The mandate of Casey is as binding on this Court today as it was twenty years ago," the Oklahoma Supreme Court wrote. The initiative "conflicts with Casey and is void on its face and it is hereby ordered stricken."

In an aside that should be filed under Unintentional Humor, the group behind the amendment drive, Personhood USA, says it will appeal to the US Supreme Court, citing as justification for its claim that the Oklahoma court got it wrong the minority opinion, that is, the losing side, in Casey.

Sources:
http://newsok.com/oklahoma-house-fails-to-act-on-personhood-bill/article/3670167
http://www.saintmarknorman.org/assets/files/20120420-archbishop-coakley-letter.pdf
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahmoricebrubaker/5927/lessons_from_the_defeat_of_the_oklahoma_personhood_bill__/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/oklahoma-personhood-fetal-personhood-bill_n_1465657.html
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/personhood-usa-to-appeal-oklahoma-supreme-court-decision-to-us-supreme-court-2012-05-01

Left Side of the Aisle #55

Left Side of the Aisle for the week May 3-9, 2012

This week:

Good news: "personhood" failure in Oklahoma
http://newsok.com/oklahoma-house-fails-to-act-on-personhood-bill/article/3670167
http://www.saintmarknorman.org/assets/files/20120420-archbishop-coakley-letter.pdf
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahmoricebrubaker/5927/lessons_from_the_defeat_of_the_oklahoma_personhood_bill__/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/oklahoma-personhood-fetal-personhood-bill_n_1465657.html
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/personhood-usa-to-appeal-oklahoma-supreme-court-decision-to-us-supreme-court-2012-05-01

Good news: an ancient pest on the verge of being eradicated
http://cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/mini_site/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/25/jimmy-carter-guinea-worm_n_801252.html

Occupy is back (not that it ever left)
http://abcnews.go.com/US/suspicious-white-powder-received-banks-day-protests/story?id=16251936#.T6BVZ9WpOSo
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/us-usa-occupy-powder-idUSBRE84017M20120501?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=71&google_editors_picks=true
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/occupy-movement-returns-for-may-day-protests-in-dc-new-york-and-around-us/2012/05/01/gIQASDqQvT_story.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/01/bloomberg_articlesM3CGZL6S972901-M3DJ6.DTL
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/nyregion/may-day-demonstrations-lead-to-clashes-and-arrests.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/01/11485652-protesters-hit-streets-for-may-day-rallies-violence-flares-in-oakland-seattle
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/01/11485085-battle-for-the-soul-of-occupy-activists-fear-being-pulled-to-the-right-becoming-democratic-pet?lite

Outrage of the Week: HHS endorses failed right-wing program on teen pregnancy
http://www.communityactionkit.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=984
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/04/30/he-men-virginity-pledges-and-bridal-dreams-an-hhs-endorsed-curriculum
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/ab_ed_moves_ahead/
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/04/10/461402/teen-pregnancy-sex-education/
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db89.pdf
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/ab_ed_moves_ahead/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/11/we-dont-need-no-stinking-studies.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/12/ignorance-is-bliss-not.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/03/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2007/04/another-success-story-in-keeping-us.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/12/we-already-knew-this.html

Afghanistan and the advance of the national security state
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/since_bin_ladens_death/singleton/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/billions-dollars-thousands-lives-lost-afghanistan-war/story?id=16256292#.T6DyFNWpOSo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9240356/Barack-Obama-in-Afghanistan-we-must-finish-the-job.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/opinion/missed-chance.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/04/left-side-of-aisle-52-part-5.html

Left Side of the Aisle #54 - Part 3

And Another Thing: Some cool science bits from life on Earth to life among the stars

Sunday, April 22, was the 42nd Earth Day, started in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson. I remember the first Earth Day; I skipped classes - I think integral calculus was one I missed - to spend the day on 14th Street in New York.

Earth Day is a good day to be reminded of how much we have yet to learn about Earth. For one thing, undiscovered species are still out there. Lots of them. Over the past year, researchers have found seven new forest mice species in Philippines, a a “psychedelic” gecko in Vietnam, and a new type of dolphin in Australia. They also found in the Philippines four new species of crab that sport some wild colors: That one over there is not a false color image; the crab really is purple with pink claws.

A purple crab. Now that is cool.

But moving out from Earth, you have probably seen one of the devices pictured here, at least on TV. It's a tricorder, and it was a staple of the Star Trek universe from the original series right through The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and the rest. It was used by Spock, Sulu, Geordi, Data, and the rest, including a good number of redshirts, A truly remarkable instrument, it could do pretty much anything the plot required: It could measure the atmosphere of a new planet, show composition of rocks, and far more. In Sick Bay it could be used to identify diseases and examine injuries.

Well, a tricorder is still a long way in the future, but we might have taken a tiny step closer to one. The picture just below is of a hand-held X-ray machine. Not some big, honking device taking up its own room but one you literally can hold in your hand.

There is a phenomenon in physics that involves producing electromagnetic energy, i.e., some form of light, by purely physical means. You can try it yourself: Take some adhesive tape into a nice dark closet and pull some tape off the roll very hard, very fast. With some luck you might see little flashes of light. Those are not optical illusions, you really have generated light by pulling a piece of adhesive tape. This device, under development, apparently uses a version of the principle to produce X-rays, which are even more energetic than visible light.

Because is so small it can be carried around and it is focused enough to limit dangerous, unnecessary exposure to the X-rays, if successfully developed it could be used in multiple ways: It could, for example, diagnose a bone fracture right on the spot. It could determine the metallic composition of a piece of jewelry. It could find a stud in a wall.

On there other hand, there is a downside: The first experience most of us would have with such a device would likely be seeing it in the hands of a cop who stopped us for speeding or some such thing and now wants to X-ray us and our trunk.

Leave that downer aside for the moment. Since I've already brought up Star Trek, let's move out into space.

The picture on the right is of a galaxy cluster. The blue halo is an overlay showing where the dark matter should be.

Dark matter?

Dark matter. It's one of the great mysteries in cosmology.

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity explains how gravity works. In the simplest possible terms, mass causes space (actually, spacetime) to warp. It's often pictured by imagining a stretched rubber sheet with balls of different weights placed on the sheet, causing it to warp in different ways. At the same time, the warping of space (spacetime) affects the paths bodies take as they move through space(time). Think, for example, how your movement changes going over hilly terrain as opposed to a flat surface. Physicists say that "mass tells spacetime how to warp; spacetime tells mass how to move."

Anyway. The point is that astronomers look at stars in galaxies and at groups of galaxies and observe how they move. Using relativity, they can say how much mass must be present - and therefore how strong gravity must be - to make them move the way they do.

Here's the problem: The amount of mass we can see not enough - not nearly enough - to explain the motion we see. In fact, we can see only about 1/6 of what would be required. That remainder - that 5/6 of stuff which we can't see - is dark matter.

Exactly what dark matter is, we don't know. There have been lots of candidates but they all failed to explain enough. The most generally accepted idea among scientists now is that dark matter is composed of a new type of particle, one that interacts normally with gravity but only very weakly with the other known forces of the universe. That particle has not been found; until and unless it is, dark matter remains a mystery.

And it just got more mysterious.

According to accepted ideas, the neighborhood around the Sun should be filled with dark matter. Billions of these particles should be rushing through us every second. But the most accurate study yet of motions of stars in the Milky Way, recently completed, has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume of space around the Sun. That is, the matter we can see can account for the motion we see, leaving no sign of dark matter.

No one knows why. It could be that a bigger survey, now planned, that will examine the motion of millions of stars instead of just hundreds, will show the evidence of dark matter which this one didn't. On the other hand, it's also possible that the whole idea of dark matter is wrong. The trouble is, none of the alternatives are even as good.

One such alternative, called Modified Newtonian Dynamics, tweaks how gravity works at large scales. But not only does it not explain as much as the idea of dark matter does, it also would be contradicted by these latest observations.

Another alternative is MOG, or "modified gravity." which involves taking relativity and adding three new fields, one of which has mass and therefore an associated particle. The problem here is that instead of invoking a new, unknown particle à la dark matter, it invokes these three new fields and still has to add a previously unknown particle to give mass to one of the new fields.

Then again, it could be that the idea of dark matter is correct but that the particles involved in dark matter behave somewhat differently than thought or are distributed in space somewhat differently than thought.

Or it could be that the latest observations are just wrong.

The thing is, right now, nobody knows - but we do know that current observations challenge the hypothesis, which raises new questions to be answered. It's a good reminder that science is not about knowing the answers, it's about how you find out the answers.

One more leap outward. On Earth, all life is dependent upon the nucleic acids DNA and RNA. The chemical structure of nucleic acids isn't all that complex: It's the now-familiar double helix, consisting of two long polymers of sugars linked together by phosphates. Hanging off each sugar is one of four bases. It's the order of those bases which provides the genetic information.

The question is, did it have to be that way? The perhaps surprising but surely exciting answer is no.

The phosphate can be replaced by a sulfate and the resulting molecule can still transmit genetic info back and forth with regular nucleic acids. You can replace the sugars with related, ring-like structures, and it still works.

Now, this works in the lab but not in actual biological systems because the enzymes that prepare and copy DNA, for example, will only work with the sugars and phosphates. But there is no reason that other enzymes could not work with other chemical structures. Which means we have proof - not a hypothesis, but proof - that life does not have to be life as we know it and life on Earth using sugars and phosphates rather than some other possible combination may have been just by chance.

It also means by increasing the ways that life can function, it also increases the ways it could have started on any given planet. With current estimates of the number of habitable planets - defined as rocky planets neither too cold nor too hot for liquid water - in our galaxy alone running to the tens of billions, the chances there could be a Horta out there somewhere are going up.

And that is even cooler than a purple crab.

Sources:
http://www.livescience.com/19854-purple-crab-discovered.html
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/04/10-things-weve-learned-about-the-earth-since-last-earth-day/
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/future-is-now/palm-sized-star-trek-tech-may-closer-think-210316301.html
http://news.yahoo.com/not-dark-matter-then-114808202.html;_ylt=Ao5FUCgqBwYMToDNdfW7heYPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNuNTJsYzczBG1pdAMEcGtnAzI0MmVkODVjLTY0MTktMzQ5OS05OWQzLWY3MmRiOGI0OGFhNgRwb3MDMTUEc2VjA2xuX1NwYWNlQXN0cm9ub215X2dhbAR2ZXIDYjYzZTE0MDAtOGFkZS0xMWUxLWI1N2QtMGYwNTdiYjZhNTQ3;_ylv=3
http://news.yahoo.com/nearby-dark-matter-mysteriously-missing-140401402.html;_ylt=AshzGu9RB51DwuoUTx5XqjcPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNuNTYyc3E3BG1pdAMEcGtnAzMwZDkzNTIwLTRiYWUtMzNkOS1hOWRmLTY0YjM4NmNhMGYzNwRwb3MDMTgEc2VjA2xuX1NwYWNlQXN0cm9ub215X2dhbAR2ZXIDODQyMjk3OTAtOGEyOC0xMWUxLWIyNWQtY2NmODcxY2RiMjVh;_ylv=3
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/synthetic-dna-substitute-gets-its-own-enzymes-undergoes-evolution.ars?clicked=related_right
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46880631/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/billions-alien-habitable-planets-right-here-our-galaxy/#.T5e4idWpOSo
http://www.livescience.com/19854-purple-crab-discovered.html
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Starfleet_tricorder
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/future-is-now/palm-sized-star-trek-tech-may-closer-think-210316301.html
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Horta
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/23/closing-in-on-dark-matter-another-tentative-step/

Left Side of the Aisle #54 - Part 2

Outrage of the Week: Reuters on voter suppression moves

I have to start with an update: Last week, I noted that Rep. Allen West, the man who puts the wack in wacko, claimed that about 80 Democrats in the House are members of the Communist Party.

It turns out that inanity actually can have some consequences. West was to be the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for his district chapter of the NAACP on April 21 (although why in hell they wanted him I've no idea). The group canceled the event and told West not to come back for the rescheduled date. The reason, a representative of the group said, was "a certain statement he made about Communists."

But you can't keep a good bozo down: On April 23, he criticized the FBI for removing culturally offensive material from a training manual. He called that an act of "cultural suicide" and said it meant that US was taking policy direction from the Muslim Brotherhood.

This week's Outrage comes from a Reuters report on these new laws being pushed and sometimes passed in a number of states that restrict the ability to vote. These go beyond those hideous, anti-democratic, voter photo ID laws I've talked about before. Laws passed in a dozen states have sharply restricted voter-registration drives, which typically focus on young, low-income, and minority voters. Sixteen more are considering bills that in various ways would make it more difficult for people to register to vote.

To show how bad some of these laws are, one enacted in Florida under Governor Voldemort requires groups doing voter registration drives to register with the state - and would subject them to fines of at least $5000 if signed registration forms are not turned in within 48 hours of being collected, a requirement so onerous that even the League of Women Voters is not trying to register voters in Florida this year.

In Wisconsin, land of Governor Walkalloveryou, new laws require that anyone who registers someone else to vote must have a license to do so - and the rules for being licensed vary from town to town.

There are laws eliminating election-day registration, shortening the period for early voting, restricting absentee balloting, and more. All these laws have one thing in common: the people affected are overwhelmingly the poor, students, minorities, and the elderly. And the thing they all have in common is that they are groups who are less likely to vote for right-wingers.

Not so long ago, the discussion about registering and voting was around how we can get more people out to vote, how we can get more people involved, and how shockingly low our turnout rate is. Now, for the right wing, the argument is all about how many roadblocks to voting they can throw in the path of the "wrong" sorts of voters.

But the laws themselves are not the outrage I'm focusing on here, but the opening sentence of the Reuters report:

New state laws designed to fight voter fraud could reduce the number of Americans signing up to vote in this year's presidential election by hundreds of thousands, a potential problem for President Barack Obama's re-election bid.

These laws have noting to do with voter fraud. Voter fraud is a vanishingly small problem. It's tiny, minuscule, hardly big enough to measure. "Voter fraud" is right-wing propaganda desired to push a reactionary agenda to restrict the voting rights of everyone who is not reliably right-wing.

For Reuters to absorb that lie and spew it back out as if it was uncontested truth that "voter fraud" is what these laws are about and that the effect on the poor, students, minorities, the elderly - that is, the very people the right wing wants to disenfranchise - to suggest that that effect is nothing more than an unfortunate side effect is the worst imaginable sort of journalistic malpractice.

The Reuters news agency: the Outrage of the Week

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/allen-west-communists-naacp-event_n_1445242.html?ref=mostpopular
http://thehill.com/video/house/222985-allen-west-says-congress-allowing-muslim-brotherhood-to-influence-us-strategy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/22/voter-id-laws-obama_n_1442338.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/03/left-side-of-aisle-48-part-2.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/11/threat-1.html

Left Side of the Aisle #54 - Part 1

The usual phony doom and gloom about Social Security

The latest report from the Social Security trustees is out - and it was greeted with the usual doomsaying in the media. For example, AP's article on the report started this way:

Social Security is rushing even faster toward insolvency, driven by retiring baby boomers, a weak economy and politicians’ reluctance to take painful action to fix the huge retirement and disability program. The trust funds that support Social Security will run dry in 2033 - three years earlier than previously projected - the government said Monday.

After a couple more paragraphs of doom and gloom, the article declared that

[u]nless Congress acts - and forcefully - payments to millions of Americans could be cut.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has taken to calling Social Security that all-purpose epithet "welfare" that is "slowly and inexorably crowding out the rest of government" and and called opposition to cuts in the program result of "self-centered, shortsighted intransigence" among seniors.

Well, I for one am sick and tired of baby boomers (or, if you prefer, the '60s generation) being blamed for every social and economic ill the country faces. To show how bad it's gotten, did you know, for example, that the rise of the armed right-wing militias of the sort that produced Timothy McVeigh were the fault of the '60s? It's obvious: In the '60s people said "question authority," and these people mistrust government, so, QED, right? That lame argument was actually made in the New York Times several years back.

In any event, getting back to Social Security: Bluntly, the idea that it's in some kind of desperate trouble - that it's "rushing even faster toward insolvency" - is utter crap. It's complete, total, nonsense.

I know I've addressed this before, but I'll keep doing it. Whenever the bilge gets sprayed, I'll call out the spewers for their lies and ignorance.

The fact is, for most of its history Social Security has been "pay as you go." But the baby boomers - the '60s generation, my generation - constitute a demographic bulge. It was realized decades ago that our retirement could strain system. So in 1977 payroll taxes were raised significantly for the specific purpose of creating a surplus that could be drawn on when time came. That's what's happening now: We are tapping the reserves set aside for this very purpose.

And by the way, who paid for that surplus through those increased taxes? We did - the baby boomers who are now being accused of sucking the life out of the system.

Here's another thing: When the doomsayers tell us that "the trust funds will run dry," what they actually means is that the surplus - the one created to deal with the baby boomer bulge - will be used up and Social Security will go back to the "pay as you go" system it has used for most of its existence. At that point, that is, in 2033, if do nothing at all in the interim, the system will be able to pay about 75% of scheduled benefits for as far out into future as the trustees calculate.

"Scheduled" is an important word here: The trustees make calculations of future costs and benefits based on various scenarios of how the economy might play out over the years. Initial benefits for a new retiree are calculated on a wage base. The thing is, over time, wages tend to rise a bit faster than inflation. Which means projected - that is, "scheduled" - initial benefits also rise a bit faster than inflation. The bottom line is that 75% of scheduled benefits in 2033 will provide about the same standard of living as current benefits do today.

That standard of living provided by those benefits not great; the average Social Security benefit is approximately $14,800 per year. But to say the system being able to provide the same standard of living in 2033 as it does now equals the system being "insolvent" or "busted" at that point is transparent nonsense.

If want avoid those reductions and provide full scheduled benefits - that is, to "fix" Social Security, we can. In fact, it has been tweaked any number of times over history. Indeed, in 1983, the trust fund was not 21 years away from running out of its surplus, it was a few months away from it - but some tweaking based on recommendations from the Federal Reserve fixed the problem. That was a far worse situation that anything faced now and now almost no one even remembers it. Dealt with and done.

Of course, the simplest and best way to fix the system for as far into the future as anyone cares to calculate (about 75 years) is to remove the ceiling on income subject to payroll taxes. In fact, you wouldn't even have to remove it (although I would desire that). The ceiling was traditionally set at a level to "capture" - that is, make subject to the levy - about 90% of wage income. The current level is considerably below that. Just raising the ceiling to the traditional level would solve any problem.

Oh, and there is another scare tactic being used: The ration of workers to retirees. Over the next decades, the number of workers compared to the number of retirees is predicted to shrink - that is, there will be fewer workers to support retirees. That, we're told in the darkest tones possible, will bring an intolerable burden on "ordinary wage earners" and thus the economy.

But workers don't just support retired people, they support all non-workers, including their children and their spouse or partner if they don't work. Even as the number of retirees is growing, family size is shrinking. So over those next few decades, even as the ratio of workers to retirees is expected to go down, the ratio of workers to non-workers is expected to go up. The burden on workers will be much that same, it's just that in effect, some portion of that burden will have shifted from supporting their children to supporting their parents.

Social Security is under no danger of collapse. Period. Not unless we are stampeded by ignorant, sloppy, lazy media driven by fear-mongering politicians and their 1% paymasters into undermining it. And make no mistake, that's what we're seeing: As far back as 1983, a plan was hatched at a conference at the Heritage Foundation with the avowed intention of wrecking Social Security. The right wing hates Social Security; it always has - because it works, it has worked for 77 years, and it will continue to work into the future. And the only thing the right wing hates more than taxes is government programs that work.

I have to say, though, that the fear mongering has had an impact; the steady drumbeat of impending disaster has had an effect. Gallup polls over the past six decades have consistently shown that some 70% of the public strongly supports Social Security. But increasing numbers of young folks are becoming convinced that the system will not be there for them when they retire and so - and this has been part of the plan all along - their commitment to the program is weakened, making it easier to dismantle it entirely.

So I want to say to anyone out there who has absorbed the meme that Social Security won't be there for you when you want to retire is that the people telling you that either don't know what they're talking about or they are lying through their teeth.

Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health_care/social-security-medicare-strained-by-slow-economic-recovery-aging-workforce/2012/04/23/gIQAFWoLbT_story.html
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/how_the_media_has_shaped_the_s.php?page=all
http://zfacts.com/p/486.html
http://zfacts.com/p/784.html
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2012/04/gop-is-lying-about-social-security.html

Left Side of the Aisle #54

Left Side of the Aisle for April 26 - May 2, 2010

This week:

The usual phony doom and gloom about Social Security
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health_care/social-security-medicare-strained-by-slow-economic-recovery-aging-workforce/2012/04/23/gIQAFWoLbT_story.html
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/how_the_media_has_shaped_the_s.php?page=all
http://zfacts.com/p/486.html
http://zfacts.com/p/784.html
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2012/04/gop-is-lying-about-social-security.html

Outrage of the Week: Reuters on voter suppression moves
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/allen-west-communists-naacp-event_n_1445242.html?ref=mostpopular
http://thehill.com/video/house/222985-allen-west-says-congress-allowing-muslim-brotherhood-to-influence-us-strategy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/22/voter-id-laws-obama_n_1442338.html

And Another Thing: Some cool science bits from life on Earth to life among the stars
http://www.livescience.com/19854-purple-crab-discovered.html
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/04/10-things-weve-learned-about-the-earth-since-last-earth-day/
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/future-is-now/palm-sized-star-trek-tech-may-closer-think-210316301.html
http://news.yahoo.com/not-dark-matter-then-114808202.html;_ylt=Ao5FUCgqBwYMToDNdfW7heYPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNuNTJsYzczBG1pdAMEcGtnAzI0MmVkODVjLTY0MTktMzQ5OS05OWQzLWY3MmRiOGI0OGFhNgRwb3MDMTUEc2VjA2xuX1NwYWNlQXN0cm9ub215X2dhbAR2ZXIDYjYzZTE0MDAtOGFkZS0xMWUxLWI1N2QtMGYwNTdiYjZhNTQ3;_ylv=3
http://news.yahoo.com/nearby-dark-matter-mysteriously-missing-140401402.html;_ylt=AshzGu9RB51DwuoUTx5XqjcPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNuNTYyc3E3BG1pdAMEcGtnAzMwZDkzNTIwLTRiYWUtMzNkOS1hOWRmLTY0YjM4NmNhMGYzNwRwb3MDMTgEc2VjA2xuX1NwYWNlQXN0cm9ub215X2dhbAR2ZXIDODQyMjk3OTAtOGEyOC0xMWUxLWIyNWQtY2NmODcxY2RiMjVh;_ylv=3
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/synthetic-dna-substitute-gets-its-own-enzymes-undergoes-evolution.ars?clicked=related_right
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46880631/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/billions-alien-habitable-planets-right-here-our-galaxy/#.T5e4idWpOSo
http://www.livescience.com/19854-purple-crab-discovered.html
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Starfleet_tricorder
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/future-is-now/palm-sized-star-trek-tech-may-closer-think-210316301.html
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Horta
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/23/closing-in-on-dark-matter-another-tentative-step/

Left Side of the Aisle #53 - Part 5

Who am I and why am I doing this?

I said at the top of this week's show that it's number 53. So we've completed 52 shows in 52 weeks and now are doing number 53. So that makes this the first anniversary show of Left Side of the Aisle. So Happy Anniversary to me!

To note the event, I'm going to reprise some of what I said about myself on the first show, which I did avowedly so viewers could put what I said in some sort of context. So here it is:

I am, in many ways, a child of "the 60s," having come to political awareness during that brief (and, some would have it, mythical) time marked at one end by the Sgt. Pepper summer and at the other by Altamont - or, if you prefer to measure it politically, by Flower Power and the Days of Rage. Like most (at least male) members of my generation, it was Vietnam that initially drew me beyond vague "concern" into concrete involvement: Even for those of us "safe" with draft deferments - and if you don't know what I mean by that, good and I hope you never do - but even for those of us "safe," the war was always there, swirling around us like a fog, tugging at us like an undertow, threading in and out of our consciousness, ignored only by being repressed. And each "answer" our government offered to the whens, wherefores, and, most importantly, whys of the war seemed to raise at least two new questions.

I had been to that time what I now call a "right wing liberal," what people sometimes now call a "liberal warhawk," that species of American political animal that's clearly liberal on domestic issues and clearly conservative on foreign policy, a type whose philosophy I later summed up as "hooray for justice, beauty, truth, and Kill Commies." But increasing alienation as the war dragged on amid repeated promises that it was, really, already over and mounting evidence of what the governments we supported in South Vietnam were really like eventually prompted me to - very shyly - attend a meeting of a local peace group. (I still recall being greeted with "Welcome" by a tall man with a beard and a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, he later added a mustache because he was tired of the Lincoln jokes.) That was, if memory serves, in the fall of 1968.

You can relax; it's over now. I've no intention of inflicting my autobiography on you. But knowing the roots of my involvement in the movement may help to explain where I've wound up: As I say here in the right-hand column,

I'm an aging hippie, an educator, and a political activist, the terms' order of presentation depending on circumstances and my mood of the moment. I'm also a democratic socialist/green with an anarchist bent and a civil liberties absolutist who has, by both logical conclusion and moral compulsion, a commitment to active nonviolence. The only isms I wholeheartedly endorse are skepticism and eclecticism.

In a different context I have called myself a socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclecticist-iconoclast.

I'm guided by four, if you will, "editorial" principles:

1) "To thine own self be true." (Shakespeare)
2) "The US isn't the worst - but it is the biggest." (Joan Baez)
3) "Sometimes a bit of humor contains more inner truth than the most serious seriousness." (chess grandmaster Aron Nimzovich)
4) "No one but no one, no matter their ideology, political perspective, or status as 'left' or 'right,' 'revolutionary' or 'counter-revolutionary' can be by that reason exempt from either criticism or praise." (me)

I've always believed that in any political movement, everyone has some skill they can use, some skill they can contribute. Mine happens to be words.

So this, ultimately, is just another way I think I can be of use, another way to help advance the cause of justice, another if you will candle in the rain.

Left Side of the Aisle #53 - Part 4

Thousands of temperature records set in North America in March

A quick note about global warming: The last time I was talking about it I said that there was a week in March when over 1000 heat records were broken in North America. Turns out I was a little off: For the entire month, over 15,000 local heat records were broken. This was the warmest March in the US in our recorded weather history, which dates back over 115 years.

Now, this does not prove global warming: I've said many times that one hot spell no more proves global warming than one cold spell disproves it. Global warming is about the trend over time, not about short-term variations in local weather. But what it is, is one more data point in an ever-growing mountain of data points.

Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist with NOAA, described it well: He likened it to a baseball player on steroids. You can't say that any given home run he hits is due to the steroids and would not have happened otherwise, but you can say with great confidence that the fact he hit 25 more this year than last year does have to do with the steroids. So it is with our weather data.

Sources:
http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/record-temperatures-melt-away-giving-meteorologists-uneasy-feeling-2293225.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/us/weather-record-warm-march/index.html

Left Side of the Aisle #53 - Part 3

Outrage of the Week: Three right-wing idiots

For the Outrage of the Week we consider recent nonsense from a troika of turnip-brains.

First up is Rep. Allen West, Republican of Looney Tunes. He told constituents at a recent town hall event that he's "heard" that around 80 Democrats in the House of Representatives are members of the Communist Party.

It turned out that the people he was referring to are the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. According to West's office, "The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies."

The best response came from the Communist Party itself, which replied that it agreed with the Caucus on some things but that hardly makes them commies. In fact, they went on to say, the CP supports public parks and they assume West does, too - which by his own logic makes him a communist. The only shortcoming in that response is that I'm not sure Allen West does support public parks.

Next we have Newt Grinch. He was speaking to the NRA convention last week and he told those assembled they had been "too timid" - yes, that the NRA had been "too timid" - in promoting gun rights. He said the US should push the United Nations to adopt a treaty giving everyone on the planet the right to bear firearms.

Leaving aside the bizarre notion of Newt Grinch and the NRA pushing for UN action, Cenk Uygur had the best response: "We've already tried that. It's called Somalia."

Finally, we have Senator James "Rocks in his head" Inhofe. This one is a bit old but it fits here.

Not long ago he was on a Christian radio program during which he argued that human-driven climate change is impossible because “God’s still up there.” He cited Genesis 8:22, which in the King James version reads “while the earth remaineth seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."

Now, no one says that global warming will cause day and night or summer or winter or whatever to cease, but rather that it will make life very unpleasant for a very large number of us. So what is the relevance of the quote? It doesn't even say that the climate can't change.

So I have no clue why Inhofe says this proves humans can't change the climate - unless, that it, he believes the climate can't change, period, not even through natural processes. In which case, does James Inhofe believe in ice ages?

By the way, he also quoted Romans 1:25 to criticize people who accept the scientific reality of climate change as "worshiping the creation instead of the creator." The unseen connection is again assumed.

These people are idiots - and they are, collectively, the Outrage of the Week.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/allen-west-democrats-communist-party_n_1417279.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/barney-frank-allen-west_n_1418537.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/13/newt-gingrich-nra_n_1424782.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30799.htm

Left Side of the Aisle #53 - Part 2

Bigotry visible in reactions to Travon Martin case and John Derbyshire article

I said last week I was going to talk more about bigotry, especially as revealed in the reactions to the Trayvon Martin case and a recent bit of slime spewed out by right-wing jackass - but I repeat myself - right-wing jackass John Derbyshire.

I'll note at the top that, again, I'm looking at the reactions to these events, not so much at the events themselves.

But I have to start by correcting myself. When I first talked about Trayvon Martin, I asked what would have happened if everything had been the same except that the colors of their skin were reversed. "You know the answer to that question," I said.

Apparently, I was wrong:

According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, only 33% of non-Hispanic whites said George Zimmerman would have been arrested had Trayvon Martin been white. Fully half of non-Hispanic whites said it would have made no difference. Admittedly, the poll only asked what if Trayvon Martin had been white, not if in addition Zimmerman was black, but still: What country have you people been living in for the past 50 years? Are you really telling me you have learned nothing in that time?

Maybe you haven't: Roy Edroso, who writes a column about the right-wing blogosphere for The Village Voice (and to who I'm indebted for good number of the following quotes) wrote recently that

[o]ne of the enduring myths of American conservatism is that there's still racism in this country - and it's suffered by white people at the hands of blacks and white liberal race-traitors.

Think he's exaggerating? The American Thinker, a leading right-wing blog, recently said this:

The truth of the matter is that "civil rights" cases are often little more than reverse lynch mobs. ... Certainly it's true that in the past, blacks have been victims of whites.  But today the reality is quite different.

The right wing did everything it could to minimize and (you'll pardon the expression) whitewash the obvious truth of what went down in this case. A lot was made of the fact that George Zimmerman "looks Hispanic" as if that was supposed to make a difference for some who knows what reason. Actually, Zimmerman is half-Hispanic; his mother is white, his father is Hispanic. But so what? And even before that was confirmed, there was all this "he looks Hispanic" as if that was supposed to prove racism was not part of this. I still don't see how, but then again logical argument was never a strong point with the bigots.

It gets weirder. Dan Riehl, a leading right-wing blogger, whined about "the race-based ignorance" of blacks who criticized him for an attempted smear of Trayvon Martin, "when they should be criticizing the media." He was not clear about for what.

Weirder still: Neal Boortz agreed in a post that Trayvon Martin would not have been killed were it not for the color of his skin. He also wrote that he believed that George Zimmerman saw a young black male in his neighborhood at night and just immediately assumed that he was some kind of criminal - and then went on to say that the real problem is not the shooting, it's that "the entire situation is now being used by various race pimps to grab a little publicity while agitating the crowd." Because we all know how dangerous it is to rile up them black folks.

It also gets more vicious; Powerline, one of top-ranked right-wing blogs by traffic, resorted to the "black murder rate" meme - although what that has to do with the murder of an unarmed black teenager, not surprisingly, goes unexplained.

Meanwhile, a captain of the Miami-Dade Fire-Rescue Department posted on Facebook that he could "rewrite the book" on our "urban youth" - gee, I wonder who he meant by that - who were "products of their failed, shitbag, ignorant, pathetic, welfare dependent excuses for parents." No racism there, nosiree.

Sometime back I talked about my list of "right-wing rules of debate."  One of them was "When facts are undeniable, change the subject." Another was "Denounce 'the left' using the form 'What about...,' being sure to include words 'hypocrites' and/or 'hypocrisy.'"

This whole business was chock-a-block full of examples. There, for example, were typical and classic right-wing attempts to change the subject. Case in point: Redstate.com, another leading right-wing blog, demanded to know why everyone wasn't focusing on the real issue, which according to them is "incursions into the U.S. by Mexican drug cartels."

Comments on these blogs and others were full of "refutations" of charges of racism along the lines of "what about Marion Berry" (Seriously!) or a link to some account of some crime committed by some black somewhere.

I've already mentioned Dan Riehl's sniffling that real problem is the media. He wasn't the only one. We also had Wayne "Il Duce" LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association,
saying it's all the media's fault for reporting the story.

The media is ignoring crimes against "everyday victims," he declared.

Everyday victims aren't celebrities. They don't draw ratings, don't draw sponsors. But sensational reporting from Florida does.

Now, until that moment I wasn't aware that Trayvon Martin was a celebrity. Still, Il Duce is right: Not every crime case gets national attention. Here's one example:

In February 2005, four white Chicago cops stopped black man named Howard Morgan for going the wrong way on a one-way street. Morgan was an off-duty cop, working as a detective for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad.

The cops claim that for some never-determined reason, Morgan, outnumbered four to one, just opened fire with his service weapon when the cops tried to arrest him. They responded by shooting him 28 times.

Amazingly, he survived - and was charged with attempted murder of the cops. In his first trial, he was acquitted on three counts, including firing his gun. But the jury deadlocked on a charge of attempted murder, which seems strange to me, as it means that some jurors were saying he was guilty of attempted murder even as they agreed he didn't fire his gun. Even so, he was retried on the deadlocked charges at the end of 2011.

Consider: Not only are we to accept that an individual black man suddenly, inexplicably, started shooting at four cops, but:

- His van was crushed and destroyed without notice or cause without any forensic investigation being done.
- He was never tested for gun residue to see if he actually fired his gun.
- One cop testified that Morgan fired at him and it hit his bullet-proof vest. The State, the prosecution, never produced that vest; it only produced a replica.

Despite that, in January Howard Morgan was convicted on four counts of attempted murder. On April 9, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison - which essentially is a life sentence, as Morgan is 61.

There's a crime case that hasn't made the national news. But I really doubt that's the kind of case that our gun nut Pepe LePew was thinking of.

And we still have John Derbyshire. Just as a quick reminder, he wrote a column about "the talk" he would have with his children about dealing with black people. The advice included:

- Avoid groups of blacks.
- Stay out of black neighborhoods.
- If you're at a public event and the number of blacks swells, leave immediately.
- Do not settle in a city with a black mayor.
- Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.

And he claimed that the average black person is “much less intelligent” than the average white.

The piece contained links to sources supposedly backing up his claims - but he apparently relied on the adage that people don't follow the links, because if you did, you found that his sources didn't say what he claimed they did. Except, that is, for one that linked to an overt racist and white nationalist.

This was too much even for National Review. They fired him.

And right-wing blogs flipped out. How dare they fire him! The cowards! He's a martyr to truth!

One called the piece "honest" and "brave" and Derbyshire's firing a matter of that all-purpose right-wing bumpersticker "political correctness." Because, as Roy Edroso remarked, this guy could find no racism in the idea that white people should avoid black people because if they don't, they'll be killed.

Another, who goes by the name of Vox Day, called the bucket of raw sewage Derbyshire sloshed all over the Internet a "profile in intellectual courage" and ranted how disgusting it was that some right-wingers rejected his brand of overt racism. He declared that "Racial equality is a failed myth," that segregation is the natural state of affairs, and - get this - we had better start a government program of re-segregation or face the increasing level of violence "that will eventually be required to recreate the historic balances that were originally brought about by the natural processes of group behavior." I fully expected to see some noble incantations of "the white man's burden." Except he probably thinks of that as too liberal.

Understand: I am not talking about the undercurrent of racism that ripples through our society and stains our entire political spectrum from right to left and back again. I'm not talking about the casual racism, the ignorant racism, the racism expressed in the offhand remark made without thinking of what it actually means, the remark you don't realize how hurtful it is until someone points it out to you; I'm not talking about the racism that embarrasses you, that upsets you, when you discover it in yourself, the kind you try to eliminate from yourself once you're aware of it. That is an important issue that deserves discussion - but that’s not what this is about.

This is not about ignorant racists. It's not about casual racists. It's about people who are racist to their very marrow. These don't want to eliminate racism, they embrace it, they celebrate it as if it were, even regard it as, some sort of revealed truth.

We have to realize that in dealing with a significant part of the American right, we are not dealing with rational people. We are dealing with committed bigots.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/15/nra-trayvon-martin-media_n_1426637.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/03/howard-morgan-ex-cop-shot_n_1399834.html
http://www.austinweeklynews.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=3682
http://www.change.org/petitions/please-help-us-free-howard-morgan
http://www.freehowardmorgan.com/Home_Page.php#
https://twitter.com/#!/thinkprogress/status/183229789153411072/photo/1
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/03/rightbloggers_f_8.php
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/what_if_trayvon_had_been_white_and_the_shooter_black.html
http://www.people-press.org/2012/04/03/wide-racial-partisan-gaps-in-reactions-to-trayvon-martin-coverage/1/
http://www.gallup.com/poll/153776/Blacks-Nonblacks-Hold-Sharply-Different-Views-Martin-Case.aspx
http://m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/blogs/lookout/poll-shows-big-racial-divide-opinion-trayvon-martin-144923024.html
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2012/03/charles-johnsons-ignorance-over-trayvon-photo-flap-tops-memeorandum.html
http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuze/2012/mar/21/treyvon-martin/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/03/no-justice-no-agitation.php
http://www.thegrio.com/specials/trayvon-martin/miami-dade-fire-captain-on-zimmerman-charges-blame-shtbag-parents-of-our-urban-youth.php
http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2012/03/20/trayvon-martin-and-perspective/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire#axzz1rflvuJxj
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/04/racist_with_an.php
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/06/10588739-racial-divide-minority-students-face-more-discipline-data-reveals
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29055.html
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/into-the-mainstream?page=0,1#12
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=39245
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/04/profiles-in-intellectual-courage.html

Left Side of the Aisle #53 - Part 1

Good news: Connecticut ends death penalty; ALEC loses sponsors

Two bits of good news to share:

First, the Connecticut legislature has passed a bill to end the death penalty in the state. Gov. Dannel Malloy says he will sign the bill as soon as it reaches desk, which should be in about a week. That will make Connecticut the 17th state, and the fifth state in the past five years, to eliminate the death penalty.

I am delighted that this symbol of savagery, this badge of brutality, will be gone from yet another state. I got involved in politics at time when "law and order" - or "lawn ordure," if you prefer - was the cry of the day and death penalty opponents were fighting a losing battle against a tide of "fry 'em" spreading across the country. So I am glad to see that tide now flowing in the opposite direction.

But I am also old enough - I wasn't really aware of it at the time but I can remember - the case of Caryl Chessman. If you don't know the case, you should look it up.

The other good news is that ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council, which exists to bring together right-wing state legislators with right-wing corporations and right-wing lobbyists to push right-wing legislation at the state level has lost a number of its corporate sponsors in face of a campaign by Color of Change.org and several other progressive organizations.

ALEC has announced the it is shutting down its Task Force on  Public safety and Elections, the one that has pushed both the infamous "stand your ground" laws and restrictive voter ID laws.

And it has been hilarious to watch the right wing sputter, fume, and froth about the "fascist tactics" - and that was the term used - about the "fascist tactic" used by these groups; those fascist tactics consisting of telling corporations that we're going to tell your customers where your money is going. Fascism!

Sources:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-connecticut-death-penalty-20120412,0,6052264.story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/12/connecticut-death-penalty-repeal_n_1419597.html
http://www.gadflyonline.com/10-29-01/ftr-caryl-chessman.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/alec-cuts-controversial-task-force/256038/
http://www.alternet.org/story/155036/right-wing_alec_retreats_on_most_controversial_issues/

Left Side of the Aisle #53

Left Side of the Aisle for the week of April 19-25, 2012

This week:
Good news: Connecticut ends death penalty; ALEC loses sponsors
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-connecticut-death-penalty-20120412,0,6052264.story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/12/connecticut-death-penalty-repeal_n_1419597.html
http://www.gadflyonline.com/10-29-01/ftr-caryl-chessman.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/alec-cuts-controversial-task-force/256038/
http://www.alternet.org/story/155036/right-wing_alec_retreats_on_most_controversial_issues/

Bigotry visible in reactions to Travon Martin case and John Derbyshire article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/15/nra-trayvon-martin-media_n_1426637.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/03/howard-morgan-ex-cop-shot_n_1399834.html
http://www.austinweeklynews.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=3682
http://www.change.org/petitions/please-help-us-free-howard-morgan
http://www.freehowardmorgan.com/Home_Page.php#
https://twitter.com/#!/thinkprogress/status/183229789153411072/photo/1
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/03/rightbloggers_f_8.php
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/what_if_trayvon_had_been_white_and_the_shooter_black.html
http://www.people-press.org/2012/04/03/wide-racial-partisan-gaps-in-reactions-to-trayvon-martin-coverage/1/
http://www.gallup.com/poll/153776/Blacks-Nonblacks-Hold-Sharply-Different-Views-Martin-Case.aspx
http://m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/blogs/lookout/poll-shows-big-racial-divide-opinion-trayvon-martin-144923024.html
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2012/03/charles-johnsons-ignorance-over-trayvon-photo-flap-tops-memeorandum.html
http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuze/2012/mar/21/treyvon-martin/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/03/no-justice-no-agitation.php
http://www.thegrio.com/specials/trayvon-martin/miami-dade-fire-captain-on-zimmerman-charges-blame-shtbag-parents-of-our-urban-youth.php
http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2012/03/20/trayvon-martin-and-perspective/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire#axzz1rflvuJxj
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/04/racist_with_an.php
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/06/10588739-racial-divide-minority-students-face-more-discipline-data-reveals
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29055.html
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/into-the-mainstream?page=0,1#12
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=39245
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/04/profiles-in-intellectual-courage.html

Outrage of the Week: Three right-wing idiots
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/allen-west-democrats-communist-party_n_1417279.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/barney-frank-allen-west_n_1418537.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/13/newt-gingrich-nra_n_1424782.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30799.htm

Thousands of temperature records set in North America in March
http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/record-temperatures-melt-away-giving-meteorologists-uneasy-feeling-2293225.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/us/weather-record-warm-march/index.html

Who am I and why am I doing this?

Left Side of the Aisle #52 - Part 7

Why do we resist recognizing racism?

Updated On April 6, five apparently randomly-chosen black men were shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three are dead. Police arrested two white suspects on Sunday and say are investigating whether the shootings were a hate crime.

Um, excuse me? They are "considering the possibility" this was racially-motivated? Now, all props to the police: They acted quickly to follow up on tips to arrest the two suspects. But, come on: "considering the possibility?" Now one guy, assuming these guys are guilty, may have snapped: His father was killed two years ago and a few months ago his girlfriend killed herself right in front of him, leaving him with their 6-month child to care for. So he may have snapped. But it's also true he described the man who killed his father as a "fucking nigger"* - and police are "considering the possibility" of a racial motive?

Again, props to the cops for their investigative work - but why is it so hard for us to face the reality of bigotry?

It stares us in the face all the time, everywhere we look. It stares at us from the poverty figures. It stares at us from the unemployment figures. It stares at us from repeated psychological studies revealing discrimination in everything from job applications to everyday encounters.

We can even see it in hacked highway signs.

And we can see it in open view: John Derbyshire is a right-wing writer formerly with the righty rag National Review. He recently wrote a truly noxious piece about "the talk" he would have with his children about dealing with black people. Among his bits of advice, beyond saying that the average black person is much less intelligent than the average white person, were these:

- Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
- Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
- Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
- If you are a public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.
- Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.
- Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.
- If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

This was too much even for National Review; he was fired. But even more revealing than Derbyshire's words are the supportive reactions they got from a number of quarters. I'll be talking about that next week. In the meantime, we need to keep thinking about that question: Why do we resist recognizing racism?

Update: The men were charged with a hate crime, but hadn't been at the time of taping.

*Cleaned up as "an effing n-word" for airing.

Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/08/us/oklahoma-shootings/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/08/oklahoma-shooting-spree-arrests_n_1410828.html
http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages/Careers/articles/hicks_name_discrimination.asp
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-01-07/health/racism.study_1_psychology-new-study-black-people?_s=PM:HEALTH
http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire#axzz1rflvuJxj
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/national-review-writer-race_n_1409413.html

Left Side of the Aisle #52 - Part 6

Everything You Need to Know: about income inequality in the US in just two graphics.

I've talked numerous times about how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - and so are the rest of us. Just last week, for example, I mentioned that the average pay for a CEO is now about 1000 times that of an average worker; as recently as 1970, it was just 40 times.

There is something called the GINI coefficient. It is a standard measure of income inequality in a society or a country. It's set up so that if the coefficient is zero, it would mean that everyone has exactly the same amount of money; if it's one, then one person has all the money. Obviously no nation fits either description and the rankings generally run from 0.23 at the most equal end to 0.70 at the most unequal end.

Here's graphic one: It's a world map showing nations of the world arranged and color-coded by their GINI coefficients. (The nations in gray are ones where there is not enough data to make a judgment.)

I know that graphic is a little confusing, a little hard to read, so I'll make make it simple: The next graphic shows the nations that are more unequal than US, that have a worse, a less fair, distribution of income than the US, in red. Those nations that are less unequal, that have a more equal, a fairer, distribution of income than the US are in blue. Here it is:

And that is Everything You Need to Know.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Left Side of the Aisle #52 - Part 5

CISPA and the threat to privacy

There is a bill in Congress scheduled to be voted on during the week of April 23, which is being pitched as "Cybersecurity Week." The bill is called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, and it could obliterate any semblance of online privacy in the United States.

The supposed aim of the bill is to prevent theft of "government information" and "intellectual property" - but it also could enable ISPs to block your access to the whole Internet. That is not likely to happen, but the things that are more likely to happen aren't any better.

The bill does one straightforward thing, which I won't say is a good thing for reasons I'll get to in a second: The NSA has what are called cyber threat indicators, technological indicators of cyber attacks. The bill would allow NSA to share that information with corporations and ISPs looking to protect the security of their own networks. Those corporations and ISPs could also share cybersecurity-related info with each other and with the government. Which is why I say it's not an unalloyed good, not in the face of the knowledge about government and corporate secrets we have gained over time via hackers. At the same time, we have to balance that against the current risk to such as our credit card data. The point is at least arguable.

Regardless of that point, there are very real problems with the law:

For one, it makes no effort to list specific categories of cyber threat indicators that may be shared. Instead, it contains a definition of what can be shared that is almost unlimited: It allows companies to share - with each other and with the government - any information "pertaining to the protection of" a system or network. But any digital communication could contain a cyber attack, and ISPs and other communications providers routinely scan all their traffic to protect their networks. Put those together, and the law clearly appears to allow all of that traffic to be shared with government, because it "pertains to the protection" of that network.

At same time, the bill creates a sweeping "cybersecurity exception" to every federal and state law, including all privacy laws. This law trumps everything: every law, every protection. The net effect is to allow private companies holding our private communications to share them not only with each other, but with the NSA, with other intelligence and defense agencies, and in fact all other agencies of the federal government.

And once shared, there is nothing in the bill to limit the use of that information to issues of cybersecurity. The data, once obtained, could be used for just about anything. Corporations could use it for ad placements. The government could use it to investigate groups or individuals without having to worry about icky things like search warrants or probable cause or any of that: You don't have to search for the information, you already have it.

And it could be used to establish and keep a record of everything you say, do, read, write, or look at online.

Our rights being stripped away - and the only screeching we hear is about the one that's under the least threat: your freaking guns. No - no one is coming for your guns. No one is going to take them away. There are no black helicopters flying over your house. No one is going to pry your gun from your cold, dead fingers.

Meanwhile, our ability to vote is being restricted, especially if you are poor, minority, or elderly. Our control over our political future is being eroded by the power of corporations and the 1%. Our privacy is being stripped to the bone by corporations and the government. Our rights and freedoms, including our freedom of speech, our freedom of assembly, are being restricted in the name of "security." Almost any action taken against us becomes justified by the courts if it's done by a cop. And again, the only one not under threat is the one being screeched about the most.

Hey, memo to everyone out there, including myself: Maybe there's a connection between the amount of screeching and the lack of a threat?

Sources:
http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/cispa/
https://www.cdt.org/cispa-resource-page
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/cyber-security-civil-liberties-threatened-effort-protect-internet/story?id=16104680#.T4SnSNVnChN