The basic issue is that you have order 2-3000 climate scientists of repute worldwide who are behind the global warming consensus, and a literal handful (Richard Lindzen of MIT, Robert Balling of Arizona State, Sallie Baliunas of Harvard, S. Fred Singer of Virginia and George Mason, Pat Michaels of Virginia) who the media has consistently sought out for ``balance'' over the years. To a person, these folks have fossil fuel based funding. You can say that need not bias them, but it is eerily reminiscent of the way big tobacco funded health research.
Now, there is no question that Lindzen has stature-he is, deservedly for the body of work, a member of the National Academy of Science. Baliunas also has stature-but primarily in astronomy research, not climate research.
How to compare to people like Ben Santer and Tom Wigley of Lawrence Livermore Labs, or Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric research in Boulder, who are three of the most notable mainstream climate scientists? A quick pass is provided by the WEb of Science/Citation Index. This counts citations to papers written by given authors, which is an imperfect but legitimate measure of impact. The more a paper is cited, the more that is evidence that this paper has been important. This idea is similar to the way Google ranks sites based upon links. The first pass searching here may miss some citations and papers, but with the same methodology for all the systematic bias should be similar.
This is a well known database in the scientific community, and any good science journalist can and should use it. I have no idea if they do.
What do you measure? Well, total numbers of papers indicates overall productivity. Typical strong scientists in any field produce a minimum of 3-5 per year. A really good scientist should have had at least one or more hits--papers that got several hundred citations a piece. But you can get lucky-sustained impact is measured by the citations per paper, which should be in the 20-30 range at minimum for a strong scientist, and the number of citations per year. This will grow for older scientists if they remain impactful.
Here are some results:
Mainstream side:
Santer: Total papers on Web of Science: 49
Highest cited: 321
Total citations: 1302
Cites per year since PhD (1988): 72
Cites per paper 27
Wigley: Total papers on Web of Science: 160
Highest cited single paper: 420
Total citations: 5129
Cites per year since PhD (1967) 131
Cites per paper 32
Trenberth: Total papers on Web of Science 147
Highest Cited single paper 669
Total citations 5155
Cites per year since Phd (1972) 152
Cites per paper 35
Now, on the skeptic side:
Lindzen: Total papers on Web of Science 187
Highest Cited single paper 860
Total citations 4878
Cites per year since Phd (1972) 116
Cites per paper 26
Michaels : Total papers on Web of Science 52
Highest Cited single paper 24
Total citations 280
Cites per year since Phd (1973) 8
Cites per paper 5
Singer: Total papers on Web of Science 263
Highest Cited single paper 88
Total citations 1401
Cites per year since Phd (1948) 24
Cites per paper 5
Balling: Total papers on Web of Science 118
Highest Cited single paper 59
Total citations 760
Cites per year since Phd (1972) 28
Cites per paper 6
Baliunas: Total papers on Web of Science 79
Highest Cited single paper 535
Total citations 2463
Cites per year since Phd (1979) 91
Cites per paper 31
Climate papers only-9 total, highest
cited-32, total cites 116.
So what do we take from this?
Well, just taking three of the better known but in no way atypical mainstream climate scientists worried about warming, we see that they are al really good by these measures. Remember, these are three of some three thousand worldwide.
On the skeptic side, Singer, Balling, Michaels, have, frankly, not very impressive scientific records by these measures. Lindzen does, and Baliunas does overall, but not for the climate work. Why does this matter? BECAUSE THE MEDIA FOR YEARS HAS BEEN PUTTING PEOPLE LIKE MICHAELS, SINGER, AND BALLING ON THE SAME LEVEL AS SANTER, TRENBERTH, and WIGLEY WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE SCIENCE!!!!
The ONLY one of the skeptics who has a credibly strong record in the area is Lindzen, and I must say that the revelations that he has taken fossil fuel money concern me. It suggests that his mainstream funding may have dried up. Whether that is the case or not, when you look at
RICHARD LINDZEN vs. 2-3000 CREDIBLE SCIENTISTS tell me, oh media, WHY DO YOU CALL THAT BALANCE??????
]]>I am very, very concerned about the notion that bunker buster nukes even work, and that this administration and a number of neocons and right wingnuts want to normalize the use of nuclear weapons. The military has rightly kept nukes--even small tactical nukes like the ``bunker busters''--in a separate category over the years. I do not trust Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield here at all to do the right thing, and I do trust the genuine military officers much more.
The blinking red message at the core of Hersh's piece in the New Yorker is of course about the use of tactical nuclear weapons, specifically the ``B61-11'' bunker busters. The key problem is this: bunker busters are like a perverse neutron bomb, more likely to kill civilians while leaving the bunker targets intact.
Hersh certainly gives no free pass to the danger of using such bombs, but suggests that the reason for going for them is this: conventional weapons won't do the trick.
As Robert W. Nelson, a PhD in theoretical physics who now works on arms control issues at the Union of Concerned Scientists, showed here
and in Physics Today, it just isn't that simple. It is hard to penetrate, make sure the nukes destroy the bunker, and impossible to limit massive fallout.
Nelson's arguments were sufficiently compelling that they led to the withdrawal of funding requests for ``robust nuclear earth penetrators'' by the Bush administration last year. My great concern: The Bushco decision makers simply don't care about this reality!
The notion of bunker busters is relatiely simple. First, aim a missile right at the earth and bury the bomb. Second, detonate the bomb. The efficacy of buried nuclear weapons at generating blast shock and damage are sufficiently large that even a ``small'' one kiloton of TNT (1 KT) yield weapon, the nominal number for the B61-11 warhead, can do a lot of damage.
What are the problems with this?
1) Missiles cannot penetrate more than four times their length into the earth There are basic materials problems which inhibit earth penetration. Nelson provides this anecdote about early tests of unarmed B61-11s:
``In two drop tests from approximately 2.5 km (40,000 ft) near Fairbanks, Alaska an unarmed B61-11 penetrated into frozen tundra only 2-3 meters.''
Moreover, Nelson cites
``George Ullrich, the civilian deputy director of the Defense Special Weapons Agency:
`There is a limit to how deep you can get with a conventional unitary penetrator. Fundamentally, you're not going to come up with a magic solution to get 100 feet
or deeper in rock. If you go to higher velocities you reach a fundamental material limit where the penetrator will eat itself up in the process, and in fact that will achieve less penetration than at lower velocity. So you get into these different regimes where you are really just fundamentally limited, physically, in how deep you can get into rock'."
Nelson then goes onto argue in detail that you cannot penetrate to depths of greater than four times the missile length. For a 3m missile, that would be 12m, or about 40 ft. That is probably a reasonable ballpark number for the B61-11. Hersh states that the Iranian bunkers allegedly containing centrifuges for enriching uranium are at depths of greater than 75 feet.
2)The nuclear blast will not do enough damage if the bunkers have enough concrete reinforcement. Here I will just cite Nelson directly:
``A low-yield nuclear EPW would still only be able to destroy facilities relatively close to the surface. Despite the increased coupling of a buried explosion, even a 1-kiloton nuclear weapon cannot destroy a structure protected by more than about 30 m of concrete from the point of detonation.''
In the course of Nelson's article, you will find out that with the kind of penetration of the B61-11, direct blast will not likely reach the Iranian bunkers, but rather if they are destroyed it will be by seismic damage from the blast shock wave moving through the earth. Of course, we don't know the details of the Iranian centrifuge bunkers. In the absence of certainty there is this, a real concern for me since Cheney, Rumsfield, and Bush would be more likely to listen to the Curtis LeMay types than oh, say, JFK was:
``Very large yield ([much larger than]100 KT) weapons are still required to destroy facilities buried under the
equivalent of 100 m of concrete.''
That, you see, is large, in the range of strategic nuclear weapons. If Bush is determined to rout an Iranian threat, why would he hold back?
3) Even if only low yield weapons are used, fallout is large By burying the nukes, you guarantee that a large plasma (fully ionized gas) will blow from the earth and a big crater will be formed, even for a low yield explosion. The much larger than 1 KT blasts at Nagasaki and Hiroshima for example were in air and left no craters. This cratering by even small weapons, and the need to go very deep to contain blasts, were discoveries made in underground tests by the US. Nelson notes that even a 0.1 KT weapon has to be buried at depths of greater than 140 feet to avoid breaking the surface, and as we see above the nominal burial depth for the B61-11 is no better than 40 ft. Hence, there will be a lot of radioactive fallout generated from even rather small blasts. This is much worse than for surface or in air blasts. According to Table 2 of Nelson's paper, an 0.1 KT blast centered 30 m below the surface generated a 31 m radius crater, about 100 ft. A 1.2 KT blast at 5.2m below the surface made an 80 m (260 ft.) radius crater, and the same blast above ground made essentially no crater.
Nelson predicts tens of thousands of resulting deaths from the fallout under typical third world conditions. IN THIS REGARD, PLEASE THEN NOTE: The Natanz enrichment facilities discussed in Hersh's article are close to Eshfahan, a city with a metropolitan area population of about 2.5 million. There could be a lot of damage.
So from my perspective, this are much worse possibilities than what Hersh points out. First, the Iranians are no dummies. They buried the facilities to make them impervious to straightforward attacks by the Israelis or us. Second, the nuke hungry crazies in the pentagon appear to have little or no restraint. Why would they stop with bunker busters?
As Hersh notes, these ``crazies'' include the Defense Science Board, folks who are not leading scientists, in contrast, to say The JASON Group. The Defense Science Board is dominated by defense contractors, consultants, and corporate types. Apart from one or two clear scientists/engineers, this does not look like the kind of group that would offer great technical advice or offer restraint. They are more prone, I would suspect, of not living in the reality based community.
Third, Bush has proven again and again that he has genuine contempt for the strictures of working within the constitutional framework of our government. Given his messianic self image, I see no reason for him to genuinely consult Congress on this, and of course he seems to be only talking to the congressional echo chamber according to Hersh.
Hersh has done the US and world a terrific service by putting this out there. With the window of time available, we should marshall all forces to get the word out that these ideas are simply crazy and in particular the nuke option must be put off the table, as the Joint Chiefs apparently want.
You can imagine if a city of 2.5M muslims is nuked, that the dogs of terrorist warfare will be unleashed--Hezbollah will be let off the leash, and we will be in a much less safe world. Let's go after the Iranian nuclear program in a different way, and urge Reid, Kerry, Boxer, Feingold, Pelosi, Durbin, et al to step up to the plate and constructively raise hell on this issue.
]]>* First, I am happy that the crown jewel nuclear lab is not subject to management by a profit making defense company (the competing offer was from Lockheed Martin/U Texas, but Lockheed Martin was the main driver). I happen to feel that nuclear weapons ARE qualitatively different and would much rather see the primary contractor be the University of California (with Bechtel). Lockheed Martin runs Sandia National Labs, also important in the weapons complex though not a principle design/development lab like Los Alamos or Livermore, and has for several years been co-manager of the chief British nuclear weapons lab. I would be rather concerned if they first grabbed Los Alamos and then potentially Livermore.I don't like the idea of one company getting a near monopoly over these things.
*Second, earlier in my career, I despaired over the University of California running Livermore and Los Alamos (what business does this state university have doing it?) But given that the university culture puts science first and profits last, this is good in light of the need to update our existing nuclear weapons. Plutonium has a half life of 25000 years, but given the high energy of the alpha particles emitted on decay, the warheads are strongly damaged as a function of time even on the human scale. Tritium decays away from thermonuclear warheads more rapidly. Accordingly, at the very least, we have to manufacture replacement plutonium `pits' if we want to keep our warheads viable. (Here you can argue, but given that the nuclear cat has long been out of the bag, I consider a viable deterrent force of at least a few hundred warheads probably essential from the realpolitik perspective.) This was formerly done at the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, but contamination closed that site years ago, and it has been restarted in an ad hoc way at Los Alamos.
SO how does this connect? Lockheed wants tomake money and has in the past shown a willingness to sell demonstrably worthless systems to the government (such as the current missile defense program). I don't want a company with that mindset holding the keys to our nuclear program. I can see where that goes--new weapons that make us less safe by their existence and ability to encourage proliferation. No thank you.
*Third, the Bechtel connection might help redress the genuine management problems that beset Los Alamos over the years of complacent UC management. There were many bogus ones-see the last point. I need to be convinced of this, but it is clear UC drives, Bechtel follows in this collaboration, whereas in the other Lockheed drove and Texas was to follow.
*Fourth, there was an obvious set of Rovian dirty poltiics at play trumping up the problems at the lab, all overstated dramatically. It might surprize TPMCafe readers that this administration would want a strong Texas AND industrial connection at Los Alamos. This would further their new nukes ambitions and their desire to step out of nonratified participation in the comprehensive test ban treaty.
This suggests to me that the plate is too filled with scandal and Iraq now for the Bush Co guys to push on this one.
All in all, a day of mixed blessings, but I can smile at least over the fillibuster of ANWR and the Los Alamos management decision.
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Hedges got onto examining Blackwell after he apparently heard a speech by JKB before the Dobson crowd, where Blackwell publicly said he could not support a theocracy, but then gave the audience a giant wink by saying that the overriding principle in his life was the acceptance of Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and that this should be the overriding commitment of all leaders.
So what does it mean to be a person of character or candidate of character? Download the document ``Uncommon Sense'' to see the twenty bullet points at issue. At first glance most read like a nice rather secular cross (no Christian explicitness) between the kind of Christianity centered on what Christ really did and said as espoused by say Jimmy Carter and the kind of American values of freedom and individuality we have come to know and love.
Look at this one, for example:
7. ACCOUNTABILITY: High-character people scrutinize themselves and welcome the scrutiny of others. They acknowledge that human nature compels us toward independence. Our preference for independence results in isolation from one another. Isolation breeds temptation to unethical conduct. Highcharacter people resist this chain reaction by adopting transparent life- and work-styles that invite inspection. They place themselves in relationships that motivate self-examination and encourage constructive critique from others, particularly those they serve. (Observable Virtues: an open, up-front, disclosing spirit)
This doesn't sound so bad, and is something if applied well could do a world of good for the BushCo crowd. However, look at ``those who serve'' and ``welcoming the scrutiny of others,'' then look down the list to:
11. SERVING-LEADERSHIP: High-character people sacrifice themselves for those they lead. Serving-leaders model and mentor high-character conduct and produce an inspiring environment in which their sacrificial example of serving others produces relational harmony, principled reasoning, effective communication, clear mission, constant learning and character- rich decision-making. Leaders of high character produce cultures of character where followers increasingly manifest virtues rather than vices. (Observable Virtues: courage, humility, selflessness)
12. UNITY: High-character people strive to build relationships that foster oneness among others who are bound with them to a common promise, mission or purpose. Ethical organizations seek uniformity in their people`s shared character ethics and unity
14. HONORING AUTHORITY: All people are imperfect, requiring boundaries for behavior. High-character people willingly yield to the authority of those who are charged with upholding those boundaries. They help shape and then abide by the legitimate laws, rules and boundaries established by legitimate authorities and strive to live within those boundaries for the betterment of all people. When those given authority violate conscience-convicting character ethics, high-character people take wise action to justly hold them accountable. (Observable Virtues: yieldedness, submission / “aligned with the mission”) among their otherwise richly diverse people. Without a persevering commitment to shared character ethics, there is no hope for sustainable unity. (Observable Virtue: reconciler)
and add
16. LEARNING & MENTORING: High-character people are lifelong wisdom-seekers and wisdom-advancers. They have both a teachable and a teaching spirit. They impart truth to the uninformed. They reduce ignorance by illuminating the disenfranchised. They multiply character-based people and leaders. They nurture teaching relationships in order to maximize the character and competency of others: they are mentors. Mentors endeavor to invest their lives in others in order to help them help others to attain their greatest potential. (Observable Virtues: curiosity, creativity, teachability, inspiration)
with
18. SEEKING COUNSEL: High-character people seek wise counsel, particularly when confronted with issues that cause tension and/or confusion between two or more character ethics. Because they are guided by their tireless pursuit of truth, they regularly seek the wisdom of others of high character. After they weigh this counsel, they act. The goal of this process is wise action (what is right), rather than popular action (what would make one appear good) or pragmatic action (what might appear to work). The result of a decision made with wise counsel is a clear conscience and the fruit of a clear conscience is contentment. (Observable Virtues: thoughtfulness, patience, discernment, confidence)
19. SUBMISSION TO TRUTH: Truth transforms people only when we submit to it. People who seek truth cannot not transform. Eventually everyone confronts the power of truth. When people of conscience are confronted by what is true, they feel convicted to replace or “put off” their lower character by pursuing and “putting on” high-character ethics. Taking action on this choice can occur over night or over a long and often painful period.
Who then is responsible for the scrutiny? Leaders and mentors of course. WE have to serve them, defer to them, respect them. The mentors network becomes the kind of internalized authoritarian network for self scrutiny we have seen in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Baathist Iraq, or your garden variety religious cult. Who would counsel? The leaders of course. What truth would we submit to? Not that which we arrive at ourselves, but that provided by the leaders.
Look, Blackwell could be the Huey Long of the new millenium. He has shown that he is totally unafraid to appropriate power, and we also see from this that any setbacks wih BushCo are minor compared to the determination of the Dobson crowd to keep at this transformation of America. Of course, this kind of servile public is just what corporations want as well.
Why is Ohio so susceptible? I lived there 10 years and can speculate. The economy is going down, and the Coingate crowd had no interest in fixing it. I saw then and see now no effort to attract the kind of new economy industries that will help transform the place. Where California has given us biotech and Silicon Valley, Ohio was most famous as a generator of fast food franchises. Ohio is intrinsically provincial-I knew many people who had never left the place to live, a few who had just never left, and there is a general attachment to place that seems unusual for those of us who have criss-crossed coast-to-coast. There is a general skepticism about the newish idea (global warming is a hard sell there, for example) and a resistance to change. I used to joke that Cleveland is stuck in the NEw Deal era, Columbus in the Eisenhower era, and Cincinnati in the reconstruction era. IN short, there is a deep rooted sense of traditionalism coupled to a bleak looking future. That doesn't sound so far from what young people face in islamic countries, and to complete my glib theorizing, the traditional values to reach for in Ohio are of course predominantly Christian ones. Hence, Ohio went for its version of intelligent design in the schools a few years ago. Hence, Dobson and Blackwell see Ohio as ripe for theocratic transformation.
The way to keep Ohio a battleground state in this important way is to put a spotlight focus on the activities of Blackwell and crew, and get the national media to out this Character Program for what it is.
Check it out! Let's follow Chris Hedges' lead and embarass the media into covering this important story.
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Emergence refers to phenomena on a given scale of length or time which are not immediately predictable from those phenomena at either a larger or smaller scale. For example, the remarkable theory of the strong nuclear force based upon quarks and gluons cannot at present be used to produce a comprehensive description of a proton (although it can capture many qualitative details, reinforcing confidence in the underlying correctness of the quark theory). No theory of individual molecules (or neurons) can at present account for the ability of certain collections of molecules to think about molecules (consciousness).
The central intellectual question in this is whether emergence is of a weak form (we simply await a better theory) or strong (there is no way to make the leap). The latter would be on an intellectual par with Goedel's proof if it can shown to be true in any sense, because it would place fences around the scales of observation, and dictate a democracy of theories much as Goedel dictated a democracy of axiomatic systems. Notably, it would limit the activity of science to developing organizing principles for given length and time scales. I personally doubt that we can do other but formulate strong emergence as a hypothesis and test it in certain cases, such as whether certain formulations of the Schroedinger equation can predict the existence of the high temperature superconductivity phenomenon discovered twenty years ago. At present, the answer appears to be no, but this is merely consistent with strong emergence as a meta-principle.
Natural selection is a remarkable example of such an organizing principle that has spanned many length and time scales, from the smallest organisms at the earliest times of the planet to blue whales and, well, us. It is at the level of a hypothesis by extension that some form of selection underlies both the production of DNA at the molecular level and the immune system at the cellular level. Behe is right to say that we don't know this.
The immune system may be `crackable', in that a few groups have succeeded in generating simple models with natural selection built in that can actually be practically applied to problems such as optimizing flu vaccines or cancer therapy. (Google, for example, `statistical mechanics + flu shot'.)
For DNA, a big part of the problem is that we have no ``molecular fossil record'' . In the lab, the famous efforts of Urey and collaborators succeeded in generating amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in experiments which mimicked the conditions of the primordial earth soup, and other experiments have verified the potential for the self assembly of amino acids into protein chains which can initiate the process of natural selection at a higher level of organization than individual amino acids. Namely, those sequences of amino acids which can fold into useful shapes for yet higher organization are selected out, and those proteins which cannot aren't. However, there have been no lab successes at generating nucleic acids from a model primordial soup. Possibilities abound--perhaps proteins came first and then RNA and then DNA, but at the moment it is all hypothesis with no test through direct lab experiment or observation and no richness of hypothesis generation.
DNA is definitely an emergent phenomenon, and whether it is of the strong or weak sort only time will tell. But Behe and his crowd have found a niche living between observations and taking potshots at those attempting to construct an overarching and coherent narrative using the tools of science. They offer only a pallid deconstruction.
What is the lesson then? The positive aspect of the IDers work is to provide those who research and teach science with genuine frontier questions to stimulate young minds. There is no question that the understanding of the immune system or the demonstration that evolution at the molecular level can produce DNA would be remarkable scientific accomplishments. To this we can add efforts to unite quantum mechanics and gravity, or to explain consciousness. As a mature and successful field of human endeavor, science can, in the classroom or research lab, acknowledge the limits to our explanatory power now and draw upon past examples of successes in eliminating examples of weak emergence (incomplete understanding).
When they (the ID crowd) play deceptive games we can and must call them out. However, we can also assimilate those who might fall under the sway of their critiques of evolution by inviting them to work on the questions the IDers identify by using the methods of rigorous science instead of chalking that up as a win for the big Designer. We need to carry this discourse into the public arena, and it is of course hard. It is incumbent upon scientists to work at it.
The lengthy focus upon emergence above is an effort to point a way. The trouble with a merely harsh reaction against ID is that we trample all over their appeal to mystery. It seems to me that there is a duality in us all of wanting to know reasons and yet loving it when we bump up against mystery. Organized religion obviously lives with that tension, and so should science. When religion oversteps the bounds of cultivating this lovely dualism and into prescriptive practice, the tendency is towards rebellion, as evidenced in the enlightenment and the founding of our republic. There is certainly a concern amongst the populace that science can become overly prescriptive and circumscribing about the nature of reality as well, and the IDers know this and are exploiting it.
By healthily embracing mystery within a conceptual framework such as emergence that does not demand we leave the scientific realm but find a way to live with mystery within it, we can beat the IDers at their own game and garner new recruits and supporters in the larger world.
Postscript: Behe cites one peer reviewed article on ID in Protein Science. The paper is publicly available at this site. It contains a mathematical model (`it is just a theory!') and appears to be an effort to bound the efficacy of point mutations (one amino acid in a protein) to engender larger scale adaptive change. I will provide a non-technical synopsis of this on this site later for the afficionados. A quick observation--the paper nowhere mentions ID.
```We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective. Achieing the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support'.''
Apparently on legal ethics:
```We must end collective acceptance of inappropriate conduct and increase education in professionalism.'''
Brooks notes:
``I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Mier's prose.''
and suggests, very reasonably, that we should
``Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and incisively. Miers' columns provide no evidence of that. ''
In E.J. Dionne's admiration column for William Buckley the other day and the discussion which ensued on this site, we were reminded that the Buckleys, Brooks, and Kristols of this world fancy themselves as deep thinkers in their salon rooms, whatever the meager evidence for that in the public realm. To them, this nomination is a major slap in the face.
It is, of course, a slap to all of us and so I endorse the above remarks by Brooks. Strategically, though, before we insert higher standards into the discussion we ought to let them have at each other a bit more. When they pull out their long knives inside their big tent, they are apt to slice a few more holes in it.
]]>There is also the question of education; surely many are couples with fertility problems arising at youth. However, for those who simply chose to wait, should we publicly subsidize their decision? A woman who was interviewed for the piece who is over 40 lobbied hard for the law but was devastated by the limit on age. I can understand the deep grief she feels, particularly since she has probably been pushing for this for some time, perhaps from before she was 40. However, she went on to claim that the age limit (which insurance companies lobbied for) was tantamount to the insurance companies dictating how to lead her private life. Frankly, I took offense to this. When my wife and I went through a process of exploring fertility, we knew full well that our choices had led us to this and accepted the rather high cost. I do not know whether this woman was rendered infertile by age or other, but there is no doubt that the combination will conspire to give exceptionally low odds to the fertility outcome, even more so than the dim prospects offered by age reduced viability of ova.
The other troubling aspect to all of this from my personal perspective is that while many friends have successfully undergone in vitro and have lovely families and children, there is the issue of adoption. That was our initial choice, which we then temporarily abandoned in pursuit of the fertility dream after a number of our friends succeeded, and which we ultimately returned to after our fertility efforts came to naught. Had we succeeded with the fertility efforts, we probably would not have come to know the two exceptional little kids that run around our house and brighten our lives, and we cannot imagine that we would have done better were those children the product of our own genes. Having said this, though, I cannot deny the imposing desire of seeing my own genes running out in the world in my children, but I also cannot deny the profound sense of ease that came into both my wife and I when we returned to our original choice of adoption. A multitude of anxieties simply lifted away.
And, of course, adoption is not cheap either.
What I would thus favor is some extension of tax breaks or vouchers for adoption that are means tested, and for those with limited financial access who have infertility issues not associated solely with age that there be some limited form of mandatory coverage.
Finally, I close on what might be the positive side of this law: my astute wife offered the perspective that this law (and the similar ones on the books in eleven other states) might help lower the costs of treatment by the insurance companies wrangling with doctors on costs. If so, that would be a good thing. ( I am not convinced, however. The director of the Yale fertility clinic was interviewed and he said he considered the age limit a policy tragedy. Call me cynical, but the fact that his potential market was considerably reduced by the age limit did not go unnoticed.)
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.... AS LONG AS WE RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH
Is there room to debate whether or not the federal taxpayers ought to pick up the tab for rebuilding New Orleans? Of course, and we'll have those conversations. Why, for instance, should the taxpayers step forward to rebuild a home that was (a) located behind a levee and sitting below sea level, and (b) wasn't adequately insured? Actually, though, there are going to be two debates. The first is over whether or not it is the taxpayer's responsibility to foot the bill, and the second will be over whether or not taxes ought to be raised to cover the tab.
Democrats have been trying for years to increase taxes on the evil and hated rich. Liberalism appeals to those who have not achieved. Liberalism is the philosophy of anti-individualism. Individual achievement and excellence must, then, be discouraged and punished. What better way to punish evil individuals who dare to rise above the masses than to simply seize the fruits of their labors? In the world of Democrats and liberalism accomplishment, achievement and individualism must be punished. This is why Democrats will work hard to make sure that taxes are increased to pay for Katrina recovery. Not taxes on everybody, mind you .. but taxes on the wicked rich.
The alternative, of course, is to run a deficit. Democrats now tell us that deficits are bad. A few decades ago Democrats were arguing just the opposite, that deficits were simply a byproduct of government doing what government needs to do ... care for it's citizens. Democrats weren't so eager to hike taxes in those days, perhaps because those tax cuts hit people who vote for Democrats. Now that Democrats have managed to shift almost the entire tax burden on the upper 30% of income earners -- people who are more likely to vote Republican -- tax hikes are the only way to go.
Deficits aren't necessarily evil. If Americans had to pay the entire purchase price for a home the year they bought it, nobody would own homes. During the year in which you buy a home, or a car for that matter, you will probably spend more than you take in. You'll run a deficit. You'll finance that deficit over the course of the coming years. There is no problem with the federal government financing the cost of this recovery effort over several years .... IF, and it's a big if, the government will show some financial responsibilty in other spending.
KILL THE PORK!
Now it's time to see if our legislators in DC have the guts to do what each and every one of us knows, whether we'll admit it or not, is the right thing to do .. and that is to kill pork spending in the current budget to come up with some money for Katrina relief. This highway bill that was passed several weeks ago should be scrapped, and that includes that $250 million dollar bridge in Alaska to that island with 50 inhabitants. Senator Ted Stevens at work. Rather than punishing achievement, how about punishing the pork masters in DC?
THEY DANCED WITH WHO BRUNG THEM
During the past week I read story after story about how so many of New Orleans' middle and upper income residents were able to flee the city as Katrina approached, but the poor were left to fend for themselves. The difference here wasn't money. The difference here was attitude. It was the self-sufficient vs. the dependent. The evil rich and middle-income residents fled New Orleans because they are used to accepting the responsibility for their own welfare and safety. The poor stayed behind because they're mired in the sludge of generation after generation of dependency on government. The accomplished class knows that they bear the responsibility for meeting their own needs and providing for their safety. The poor by-and-large bear no such responsibility. To them, it's the government's job. Instead of taking responsibility for their own safety --- they just sat there, waiting for government to come and save them. The achievement-oriented residents of New Orleans were spared the horrors of the violence and filth that followed the flooding because they kept doing what they had been doing all along -- accepting responsibility. The poor were subjected to the violence and filth because they also kept doing what they had been doing all along -- depending on government.
Hurricane Katrina illustrated the truth behind the contention that poverty is a behavioral disorder.
JUST THE SAME ... IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT
Now here's something you probably didn't know about Louisiana and Hurricane Katrina. At the very time Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, there were several top-level officials in the very department of Louisiana government that prepares for emergencies such as Katrina sitting around and waiting for their trial. Trial, you say? Trial for what? Let's try corruption and throw in a bit of fraud.
It seems that these Louisiana officials either misspent or misplaced or ... worse ... about 60 million federal taxpayer bucks. Here are some details ...
In March of this year -- that's about five months before Katrina -- FEMA was asking for the return of $30.4 million that the federal government had sent to Louisiana for emergency planning and preparedness. Most of this money was sent to some state office called the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Wait .. it gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, much of that money was sent to Louisiana under some federal program called the Hazard Mitigation Grant program. That is a program that is, in part, supposed to help states improve flood control facilities. Flood? Did someone say flood?
Hazard mitigation would have been a great idea in New Orleans, don't you think? Especially that "improve flood control facilities" part, but nobody seems to know where the money went! OK ... let's follow the trail of $15.4 million dollars that was spent by the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. The $15.4 million was part of a $40.5 million grant of your money that was sent to Louisiana for the Hazard Mitigation Program. You know ... flood control and all that. Oops! Hold on a second here. It seems we can't follow that $15.4 million.. You see, the Louisiana officials say that they awarded that money to subcontractors for 19 major hazard mitigation programs, but they just can't seem to find any receipts to account of 97% of the funds. Ninety-seven percent of $15.4 million, my friends. No receipts. That's $14.94 million .. gone, and nobody can trace it.
Do any of you think that something good might have been done with some of this money? Lives saved? Flooding prevented? If you're thinking that, remember ... we're talking Hurricane Katrina here, and we all know that every bad thing that happened in Hurricane Katrina was --- all together now ---- Bush's Fault!
Perhaps if these Louisiana officials ever actually go to trial now they will be able to use the "Blame Bush" defense.
AND THAT'S NOT ALL .....
Let's see ... what else have we learned in the past week about the response to Katrina.
Doctors from across the United States poured into Louisiana to offer their services in shelters and hospitals treating Katrina's victims. They could do nothing. They just sat. You see, they weren't licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana. It took the amazing Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, five days to sign a waiver to allow these doctors to practice medicine in Louisiana. Five days, while people were suffering and dying. Don't blame Blanco, though. It was clearly Bush's fault.
On the Saturday before the hurricane New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin received a call from Amtrak. There was a passenger train sitting in the New Orleans station with 900 empty seats. Did the Mayor want to put some evacuees in those seats? No thanks. The train left nearly empty. You cannot blame Mayor Nagin for this decision, that clearly would be racist. It just has to be Bush's fault.
In 1997 the U.S. Congress appropriated $500,000 of your money -- not federal money, taxpayer's money -- to the State of Louisiana. The money was set aside to create a "comprehensive analysis and plan of all evacuation alternatives for New Orleans." Now correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the big deal here, isn't it? New Orleans didn't get evacuated, right? Well, for two years nothing happened. Then the Congress demanded of Louisiana a plan for evacuation in the event of a category 3 story, a levee break, a flood or some other natural disaster. The $500,000 of your money got to Louisiana .. but then what? It was spent by the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission, not on an evacuation plan, but things that needed to be done to the Lake Pontchatrain causeway over the next fifteen years or so. What does the incredible Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness have to say about the funds and the causeway study? The spokesman says that they can't find any information. Actually, we shouldn't be holding the Louisiana emergency preparedness folks or the state responsible for this ... not when we all know it was Bush's fault.
Speaking of flood control. You did know, didn't you, that in 1996 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was going to raise and strengthen the very levees that failed in New Orleans. They were going to, but they didn't. And why not? Because of a lawsuit, that's why. The plaintiff in the lawsuit didn't want the work done until extensive and expensive environmental impact statements were prepared by the Corps of Engineers and approved by the EPA. And who filed that lawsuit? Why .. it was the Sierra Club. The very same Sierra Club, by the way, that listened with rapt attention in San Francisco on September 9th while Al Gore told them that the leaders of this country ought to be held accountable for the flooding in New Orleans. Now, some of us might be so twisted as to think that the very Sierra Club that was so enthralled by Gore's rantings should bear some of the blame here ... but that's only because we just don't realize that it was all Bush's fault. Oh .. and by the way. Why haven't we heard more about this Sierra Club lawsuit in the mainstream media? Remember the template.
Mayor Ray Nagin is inviting residents of some areas of New Orleans to come back to their homes and businesses and begin the cleanup process. There's another possible hurricane bearing down on the Florida Keys --- a tropical storm that could become a hurricane and could head toward New Orleans. Now it's possible that if over 100,000 residents return to New Orleans and are further victimized by another hurricane and another flood .. will it be Mayor Ray Nagin's fault? Of course not, you idiot! It will be George Bush's fault! Haven't you been paying attention?
I don't want to excuse Mayor Nagin or Gov. Bianco from questions--such as `Who set up the checkpoint outside the convention center?' that was prominently mentioned by Shepard Smith in the now famous Hannity and Colmes show where Hannity lost control of his reporters, or `why couldn't the school buses have been mobilized?' At the same time, it is clear Bianco called the emergency in advance, recognised the potential for devastation, and asked for help.
Indeed, we cannot forget that this enormous storm afected a large region of the country, and that without effective involvement of the federal government and its vast resources this disaster was inevitable.
So when the comparisons, explicit or implicit, are trotted out and the Rovian blame game thrown at local officials, I hope all of us will do our collective best to smack it down. It is far too easy for the Lou Dobbs of the world to take pot shots, for the ``balance oriented'' media to say, well, yes maybe local officials should be looked at, and to lose focus on the fact that when this happened Bush and most of his key players were on vacation. Don't let the media forget!
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If we get WIFI in the same category as public water, power, etc, we win big time. It is obvious. And as with public power (say Sacramento Municipal Utility District), running WIFI nonprofit will most assuredly level costs and access (the Morning Edition piece quoted Philly's estimated WIFI access costs at 1/4 what the local phone company is charging for broadband).
Dean and Kerry proved that small contributions from lots of people can level the playing field. Hackett proved just yesterday that fast moving internet action can make a big difference to a campaign. If we get full WIFI access in this country, it is not unrealistic to see say 40 million people give 10 to 20 bucks to a progressive campaign and you can see where that goes.
We need to really get behind Rasiej, Philly, and, yes, in this case, Friedman. To keep democracy in the hands of the people, lets block the efforts of industry paid politicos to close the digital commons. Let's get the municipal WIFI movement front and center in the left leaning blogosphere.
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Next, I must put on my hat as political/conspiracy speculator.
1) I dismiss this one, but here goes: Olson, consummate loyalist to the conservative cause, is edged into this role by Rove to offer further protection for his endangered rear. I consider this unlikely because Time and Cooper are way too savvy to be such patsies, and because as yesterday's NYT report and the amazing press conference with McLellan show, real PR damage was done to Bush/Rove as a result of Cooper's agreement to testify.
2) Olson wants the big bucks from Time-Warner, but also has it in for Rove and perhaps W. Here is why I might think this.
No true blue loyalist could have let this debacle to the Bush administration happen on his watch, even putting the interests of what is probably a lucrative client (given the resources or Time Warner!) above the most right wing administration ever. But, a grieving husband who experienced true loss and watched this administration pervert that day of loss into an ill informed adventure in Iraq might justifiably be happy to have the opportunity to turn the dagger once it was put in his hands.
Is there other evidence to bolster this speculation? Other apparent turns for Olson? Well, I have the impression that Olson is one of those principled true conservatives--his late wife may have been a talk show shrieker, but one must acknowledge a sophisticated intelligence at work with Olson (as well as acknowleding his partisan hackery tendencies in pushing the Arkansas Project and in arguing for Cheney's right to energy committee privacy before the SCOTUS).
So it is helpful to have at least another example of his speaking out against the follies of this administration and their partners in overreach, shown here in his argument against the impeachment of judges (this quote found here and drawn from the Wall Street Journal OpEd pages):
Calls to investigate judges who have made unpopular decisions are particularly misguided, and if actually pursued, would undermine the independence that is vital to the integrity of judicial systems. If a judge's decisions are corrupt or tainted, there are lawful recourses (prosecution or impeachment); but congressional interrogations of life-tenured judges, presumably under oath, as to why a particular decision was rendered, would constitute interference with - and intimidation of - the judicial process. And there is no logical stopping point once this power is exercised.
This is far from proof of speculation (2), but I have a very hard time believing that an old partisan warrior like Olson would so suddenly allow a Bush administration PR debacle happen of the scale of last week even as it served his client and would keep the Time-Warner money flowing.
But a husband who lost his much younger, much beloved wife to brutal terrorists and saw her loss not fully avenged might smolder with some deep, deep anger at those who devalued her life by treating too lightly the real villains.
Just wondering....
]]> Also, has any serious journalism professor done a quantitative study on the value of anonymous sources. I have this unproven hunch that Deep Throat is the blanket covering a lot of media manipulation and hackery, and Judy Miller's execrable record along with the ludicrous anonymous sourcing about the upcoming SCOTUS nomination today only serves to confirm that for me.
View this as a companion piece to the lengthy NYT screed about Abramoff's restaurant Signatures (mostly a den of Republican iniquity but occasionally beloved by dems like Moynihan and Breaux) and you immediately understand how Matalin and Carville are soulmates, how so many entrenched Dems in Washington cave to the repubs, why Dean irritates the DC Dems, and why it is oh so clear he is a great choice to lead the party to something new.
Scientists are always open to practical approaches which actually work and bear up to testing. To this end, I offer two metaphors for ways in which open-source technology/culture is carving out a niche at the expense of closed source, drawn from my experience as a working research scientist.
Linux vs Windows and commercial Unix
I realize this is an overused comparison, but it works. Linux is by far a more reliable and stable system that works because of the linux community. When I started as a scientist in the 80s, unix based workstations were the gold standard for desktop computing. Faster chips for pcs and Linux have lowered the cost and obliterated that market. As you well know, Windows is looking nervously over its shoulder at Linux, and think tank types are even writing articles about the possibility of it overtaking Windows. It has pretty well annihilated commercial Unix and is making enough inroads on Windows for think tank types to consider it overrunning it in recent articles. The analogy of ``Linux is to the blogosphere as Windows is to the MSM'' is sufficiently well known here for me to go on to-
Open Market scientific literature vs refereed journals
Just as MSM fact checking and editorial standards are supposed to confer a level of quality control over articles, the vaunted scientific practice of anonymous peer review is supposed to add a layer of quality control to our product, research articles. Well, it is the best we have, and I do participate and subscribe to it, but the fact is that it is breaking down under similar pressures as the MSM journalism system: fiscal pressures (the need to be productive in research to get research funding) and the exponential growth in both the amount and diversity of information.
The refereeing process is, too often, broken by (i) negligence--busy researchers acting as unpaid refereesproduce sloppy reports or decline to review due to the cost in time and intellectual energy to do so; (ii) incompetence--just as for journalists in the MSM, some badly trained scientists do make it through the system; (iii) complexity--much of the cutting edge research is at the boundaries between disciplines (eg, physics and biology) and there are relatively few practitioners skilled in judging such bridging efforts; (iv) the dark side--papers/proposals can and will be spiked by competitors, and sociopaths find ways to exploit the system for their own gain as noted below.
When you add to this the substantial costs that journals charge for subscriptions and articles, you begin to understand why there is a revolt well underway.
The organic response within the community is something very much like blogs or Wikipedia or Linux. There is a movement towards preprint servers which get articles out there and expose them towards the same kind of open source advancement and testing you find in the blogosphere and Linux world. (Check out, for example, the preferred server for mathematicians and physicists, arxiv.org.)
The driving philosophy of the open-source science movement is very much like Linus Torvalds and the blogosphere: put it out there and let it stand the test of time. If it is interesting, people will pick it up, test it as per Descartes or Bacon, and run with it. If it is garbage, it will sit there and be ignored. The truth is that there is a lot of garbage in scientific journals, or at least a lot of science not worth looking at. Most articles even in the most prestigious journals garner only a few or no citations from other researchers in their lifetime. Moreover, the system can be easily gamed by con-men and women; for a scientific counterpart to Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, check out Hendrik Schon. The premiere journal Nature once let through a ludicrous article purporting to provide a basis for homeopathy via memory effects in water, where the dilution process carried out would have led to less than one active molecule in the allegedly effective end solution.
This said, it is unlikely that we will ever fully replace the journal system. Far too much of the cultural infrastructure of science depends upon the final publication. While superstring theory will advance far more quickly via the web than the journal evidence allows, superstring theorists still need published articles archived in journals to cement their ultimate reputation.
But the preprint servers are forcing change upon the power structure of the journal system. More journals are acknowledging the benefit of pre-publication posting on preprint servers, and a maverick band of biologists forced Cell to lower its costs and change its practices while launching their own competitive on line journal (PLOS Biology).
So, in response to Michael Tomasky, and in harmony with Digby, I say let the blogs roll on. Linux, Wikipedia, and arxiv.org offer ample proof by analogy that the older powers and large world are better served by doing so.