Weekly roundup

• Increased focus on tests means lest time for physical education in schools: read more
• There's no scientific evidence that special running shoes provide any benefit: read more
• Pork-filled Counter-Islamic Bomb Device: would it ruin a suicide bomber's day to be covered in pork (unclean) when they detonate their device?  read more
• Financial Reform: what's in it and how does it work?  read more

Dear Apple,

I got your iPhone 4 after wanting an iPhone for a long time.  It's nice.  I like the apps, the internets, and the camera.  However, I think you should call it an iPuter, because the phone part blows.

If I hold it with no case, the amazing AT&T bar thief takes all my bars.  No calls.

If I have the case on, but the network is congested, I get voicemail notifications several hours after the call (and the phone never rang).  Text messages come through in clumps when you have a spare moment.  Sometimes the phone has to be reset to be a phone (Hello, are you Windows?)

If I have the case on and the phone to my ear in my dining room and a plane flies over, the call dies. 

And although my phone does 100,000 more things than my Motorola RAZR on the Sprint network, I never dropped a call with the RAZR.  Ever.  I've dropped at least 10 calls in 1 month oh this shiny piece of industrial design. 

Really, it's sad.  And I hope it's AT&T's fault, because it's more fun to blame the phone company than someone who knows how to advertise cool.

Was this giving a fish or teaching to fish?

TreeHugger: "Circle of Blue writes, 'A technology once heralded as a simple solution to Africa's drinking water problem now stands as a broken, unused and poorly planned reminder of international water aid's latest misstep.'"

You may have read about the PlayPump a couple years ago, an innovative concept where kids playing on a playground merry-go-round would pump water for parched African villages. Sadly, it never worked as promised. Like so many clever concepts to help the developing world, this one lacked sufficient follow-through.

Read more...

John McCain: climate coward

NYTimes.com: "There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career."

We’re Gonna Be Sorry

Congress gave up on climate change legislation last week, and I think Tom Friedman's summary expresses my sentiments well.

NYTimes.com: "The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”"

Are conservatives allowed to ride bikes?

MinnPost - Mitch Berg

An entertaining read.

Post-vacation catch-all

• The call for government fiscal austerity sounds a lot like the Iraq War run-up, with about the same level of factual integrity.
• Lies and the lying liars who tell them, 50th edition.
• Our beaker is boiling - glacial melting is happening at a non-glacial pace, but we still dither on climate change policy.
• BP finally halts the massive gulf oil spill; get a good understanding of the spill with NRDC's excellent interactive graphic (hat tip, Treehugger)
• Minnesota Governor Pawlenty tries to manufacture another Franken-Coleman election myth. but Minnpost's Jay Weiner has the facts. (remember his disappearing ballots riff in 2009?).
• Have a kid?  I'm sure you have many memories of when you found out you were pregnant, but did you save your pee test in a remembrance bag?  Ugh.
• Look for a nonprofit site to get your health information if you like accuracy and full disclosure.  Here's a list of certified sites that have been reviewed by the Health On the Net Foundation.
• Be skeptical of what you hear, because your brain likes facts that reinforce your beliefs, rather than developing beliefs based on facts.
• Speaking of myths, here are a few kitchen myths (hat tip to Lifehacker)
• Baking soda is poor at absorbing odors (that orange box in the fridge was a waste!)
• Alcohol boils off when used in cooking

Tom Emmer is an idiot

His first idea for transforming Minnesota government is the completely politically safe proposal to cut legislator pay and per diems. 

First of all, this will make no difference in the budget.  Even a 10% cut (steep by any standard) would save maybe $1 million in a budget of over $15 billion (0.1%).

Emmer thinks that the salary and benefits for legislators create "career politicians," a vague term that seems to imply he would prefer laws to come from amateurs rather than professionals. 

Not to mention, I doubt there are many legislators in it for the pay.

Legislators make $35,000 a year for "part-time" work that includes three months of full time labor (January-March) and two months of 18-hour days (April-May) followed by district meetings, fundraising, and campaign work. 

I'll be waiting to hear his next amazing proposal for transforming government with bated breath.

NASA Releases Time-Lapse Video of Gulf Oil Spill : TreeHugger

TreeHugger

The most striking thing about this video to me is not the oil spill, which is horrific, but the dead zone in the Mississippi river delta from agricultural runoff. Farmland spills nutrients and chemicals into the Gulf like this every year. And the dead zone looks a lot bigger than the spill.

Is your iPhone killing Congolese children?

Op-Ed Columnist:

A fascinating column on the minerals that go into modern electronics and smartphones and how they cause civil strife in exporting nations (like blood diamonds).

Kristof talks about pressure building on manufacturers to ensure that their minerals are not coming from conflict areas, but this strikes me as insufficient. Much like the U.S. getting off Middle East oil will only encourage other countries to stick with them (lower prices!), action solely by U.S. manufacturers would be insufficient. Wouldn't sanctions organized at the U.N. level be more effective? We need to stop everyone from buying, not just American tech companies.

I'm not really familiar with the historical consensus on South Africa, but from what I remember divestment was a good part of the strategy for putting pressure on the South African government to end apartheid. In that case, perhaps what Kristof suggests is enough. But I'm not convinced.

Spongebob sells Snickers

Study: Cartoon characters attract kids to junk food - CNN.com: "In the study, which is published this week in the journal Pediatrics, Roberto and her colleagues presented 40 children ages 4 to 6 with paired samples of graham crackers, gummy fruit snacks, and baby carrots. Each pair of sample foods was identical down to the clear packaging, except that one of the packages had a sticker of Shrek, Dora the Explorer, or Scooby Doo on it.

Between 50 percent and 55 percent of the children said that the food with the sticker on it tasted better than the same food in the plain package. (The percentage varied with each food.) And between 73 percent and 85 percent selected the food in the character packaging as the one they'd prefer to eat as a snack."

Rational parenting

Schneier on Security: "Here are the facts: About 61 children each year choke to death on food, or one in a million. Of them, 17 percent—or about 10—choke on franks. So now we are talking 1 in 6 million. This is still tragic; the death of any child is. But to call it 'high-risk' means we would have to call pretty much all of life 'high-risk.' Especially getting in a car! About 1,300 kids younger than 14 die each year as car passengers, compared with 10 a year from hot dogs."

Maybe the American Academy of Pediatrics is overreacting in its call for large-type warning labels on the foods that kids most commonly choke on...

Why don't women buy at Best Buy?

MinnPost: "when it comes to chains, there seems to be a weird gender split. While men go to Best Buy, women go to Target. Burger King is for men; Wendy's is for women. Wal-Mart refers to its generic customer as 'she.'"

Fascinating look at how businesses learn to cater to the opposite gender, and how it can pay off.

Context for terrorism

Schneier on Security: Fear in a Political Ad: "Yes, terrorists kill -- about as often as home appliances."

We've met the enemy and he is us

President Obama is addressing the nation about the oil spill on Tuesday.  I hope what he says will sound something like this.

Another food post: salt, snake oil and ketchup

Salt, from NY Times (via Minnpost):

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the industry is working overtly and behind the scenes to fend off these attacks, using a shifting set of tactics that have defeated similar efforts for 30 years, records and interviews show. Industry insiders call the strategy “delay and divert” and say companies have a powerful incentive to fight back: they crave salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.

Why can't the processed food companies cut back? 

Companies argued that foods already low in sugar and fat would not sell with less salt.

Read more for a description of a Cheez-It sans salt, and you may believe them.

On "Snake Oil", From Minnpost:

In essence, say [Forbes] reporters Matthew Herper and Rebecca Ruiz, these foods are “masquerading as drugs”:

The world's biggest food companies are stuffing ostensibly beneficial bacteria, omega-3 fatty acids and other additives into packaged foods. They are funding clinical research in order to justify health claims — often deliberately vague — that blur the line between nutrition and medicine. The foods promise to boost immunity, protect your heart and digestive system or help you sleep. In some cases, like the ProBugs kefir, manufacturers aren't adding new ingredients but merely repackaging old foods with bold new health claims.

Finally, for those feeling proactive, a recipe to make your own ketchup, sans salt if you desire, and without high fructose corn syrup.

Banks renege on agreement to buy back bad loans

Banks got loan coverage from government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they went out offering subprime loans.  They signed agreements that they would buy the loans back if they failed to "meet certain standards relating to borrower incomes, job status or assets."

Just kidding!

Freddie also said that as of the end of March, 34 percent of its buyback requests had been outstanding for 90 days or more. Three months earlier, that figure was 30 percent. That increase suggests a greater reluctance among banks to respond to Freddie’s demands.

And who's left holding the bag as bank profits are rising?

taxpayers are the ones holding the bag when institutions try to avoid losses by refusing to buy back problem loans they have sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants that are wards of the state.

What your email address says about your computer skills

The inanity of page counts

When debating actual legislation, there's one sure-fire attack to levy at your opponents: "your legislation is longer than [insert complex sounding document]." A good recent example is the Facebook privacy policy, which was accused of being longer than the U.S. Constitution. This is a particularly inane comparison, because the trim 4,400 words in the U.S. Constitution make it the shortest of any country's.

The recent conversation over energy legislation is a good example, and I am ashamed to say that I've been guilty of it with regard to the House Waxman-Markey climate legislation. But here's a great refutation of that point, from a Grist chat with energy analyst Trevor Houser:

"Our litmus test for legislation that will fundamentally alter the behavior of the U.S. energy sector -- a $2.2 trillion part of the U.S. economy -- for the next 40 years is whether or not it can be kept under 100 pages?"

Sometimes wanting simple is just being simple. Brilliant.

Has education reform finally come?

This extensive piece in the NY Times Magazine discusses the federal Race to the Top education funding that provides cash in exchange for schools coupling teacher compensation and tenure with student performance. 

My gut reaction is that this is a good thing, that there should be an element of accountability for performance for teachers.  But at the same time, there are many factors out of a teacher's control. 

The article does discuss a fascinating anecdote, where a charter school and a public school in Harlem share the same building, but the charter school's very different style (and performance-linked pay for teachers) is getting much better results:

A building on 118th Street is one reason that the parents who are Perkins’s constituents know that charters can work. On one side there’s the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there’s a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria.

On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work — and typically performing at or above grade level. Their progress in a variety of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.m., ends at 4:30 to 5:30 and begins in August. The teachers have three periods for lesson preparation, and they must be available by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a car service home if they stay late into the evening to work with students. There are special instruction sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in “Yale 2026” for one kindergarten class I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $18,378 per student per year...

Although the city’s records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.

But while the public side spends more, it produces less...

To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.
Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students...

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size.”

Is tying teacher compensation to performance the answer?  Or does it require a much more comprehensive effort (note the much longer hours of the charter school teachers, among other requirements)?  In reality, the charter teachers probably get paid less per hour.  It'd be interesting to know if their job satisfaction is better...

Combo update: high MPG in trains, taxes and economic growth get along, discipline beats IQ

Freight trains have doubled fuel efficiency since 1980
Cars are the big news in fuel economy because of the recent increase in CAFE standards, but it's trains that really scoop the efficiency scores.  One ton of freight ( on a train moves 480 miles per gallon.  For comparison, and Honda Accord would have to get 320 MPG to match it).  That's probably why liberals love commuter rail, beneficiary of $9.3 billion in stimulus dollars.

High taxes don't cause growth, but they don't kill it either
A nice chart by Paul Krugman exploding the conservative-spread myth that high taxes and growth aren't good bedfellows.  Also note that the federal debt wasn't rising back then, either.

Hard work trumps natural ability
In the long run, it's hard work that matters, not innate IQ (and IQ can be increased through study).  A study of students found that "Students who were more self-disciplined and were able to delay gratification performed better than their peers who had higher IQs."  In other words, keep at it.

Red pens make you see more errors?

MinnPost: This is an example of an interesting hypothesis and good reporting.

"But, as a study [PDF] published online in the European Journal of Social Psychology earlier this month reports, “people using red pens to correct essays marked more errors and awarded lower grades than people using blue pens.”"

Fascinating, but the article also includes the study limitations.

The current study has limitations, of course. The study did not control for the volunteers’ age, level of education or other possibly confounding factors. And none of the volunteers were experienced teachers.

In other words, it was true for this set of volunteers, but may not have a significant impact on people who grade for a living.

The Oil Spill: Obama failing at his 9/11

Op-Ed Columnist: "President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction."

It's time to transition to a clean energy economy and Obama couldn't have asked for a better rhetorical tool. If only there were pending legislation he could champion...

Senator tries to fight banks on ATM fees

Sen. Tom Harkin:

"The national average per ATM transaction is $2.50...on average, the real cost of processing a transaction today is only 36 cents or less."

Why should we care? First, because ATMs are like slots to the casino, they're a serious money generator disproportionate to their customer value.

But second, because it punishes folks who don't withdraw a lot at one time:

Some people may think that $2.00 is not much, but here is the other unfair thing about it. The average person going to an ATM machine takes out on average $20.00 or $50.00 to get them through a day or two, and they are charged $2.50 for accessing that money. Yet someone else may withdraw $500.00, and they pay the same $2.50. The burden falls more heavily on low-income and moderate-income people. That is grossly unfair.

Sen. Harkin has an amendment to the The Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (financial reform bill), but he faces uphill slogging.

Shoot your Senator a note and tell them you're tired of being Bank of America's hot nickel slot machine.

Libertarians and the real world

If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.

From a nice blog post by Paul Krugman about the inanity of self-regulation by oil companies like BP.

Go figure: bees and neurotoxins don't mix

Results are in from a pesticide ban in Italy, and it turns out that the mysterious colony collapse disorder that was decimating honeybee populations was the disorienting result of neurotoxins in "nicotine-based neonicotinoids" pesticides. 

Yet another example of the unintended consequences of a chemical policy that assumes things are safe. 

The new climate bill - American Power Act

A new climate bill was introduced in the Senate yesterday and it establishes a much-improved cap-and-trade program compared to the House version. It still has some gaping holes (see links for descriptions of the 2 billion tons of carbon offsets) but it's a reasonable framework.

Click around for a comprehensive review and some commentary on the bill from the author himself, Sen. John Kerry.

Taxes at lowest level since 1950

When we are running deficits and taxes are at historic lows, we have a revenue problem.  It's time to pay the bills.

Understanding the Gulf oil spill

Here's a very thorough analysis of the causes of the leak and explosion at the oil platform, by one of the gubernatorial candidates in Texas (with a fair amount of experience in the field).  A very well-reasoned assessment of the oil leak causes.

Ditching pesticides to kill mosquitos more effectively

The U.S. used a lot of the pesticide DDT to rid itself of malaria-carrying mosquitoes before the chemical was largely banned and the DDT is still one of the more effective chemicals to attack mosquitoes.  And yet, as Mexico has discovered, landscaping can be more effective than DDT (to which bugs can develop resistance).

According to Yale 360, Mexico once used DDT and other insecticides to fight Malaria, even spraying it inside people's homes (though pesticide-soaked wallpaper seems to be slightly safer...). As much as 70,000 tons of DDT was used between 1957 and 1999 in the effort to prevent malaria. However, in 1998, Oaxaca introduced methods of clearing vegetation along waterways and it showed effective - so effective that the number of malaria cases dropped from 17,500 to 254 in two years, and Mexico incorporated the more eco-friendly methods.

By 2008, Mexico had ditched insecticides including DDT in all its anti-malaria efforts and the number of deaths from malaria reported during that year was a whopping zero. 

Just a lesson that what seems easiest often isn't, and that chemicals are not the be-all, end-all of preventing pests or disease.

Combo update: excess of corporate power, psychiatry gets medicated, political assassinations, and the Herbicide Merry-Go-Round

Though I wish I had time for in-depth analysis, I'll have to resort to a quick summary of some interesting stories:

Eight Words That Could Save Our Country - a constitutional amendment proposed to limit the power and legal rights of corporations, reserving those rights for people.  This essay offers arguments about the benefits of limiting corporate rights and the rather tawdry legal history of the debate.

Psychiatry gets medicated - a fascinating look at how mental health therapy has shifted the couch to the back seat, and drugs to the front, despite little medical evidence that drugs are more effective.  Given that there's money to be made in drugs and not couch time, don't count me surprised. 

One thing the story leaves out is whether therapy also makes a patient more resilient to other types of related mental health problems, versus a drug that may only address one.

Political assassinations - not only is it awful that President Obama has authorized the killing of an American citizen without due process (as a terrorist), it seems that this tactic has a rather poor history of making us safer.

The Herbicide Merry-Go-Round continues - much like the problems with overusing antibiotics causing disease resistance, overuse of herbicides on agricultural land creates super weeds.  Only this time, it's happening with "Roundup Ready" genetically modified crops.  These super crops were bred to be resistance to a particularly effective weed killer, so you could spray your mutant crops with impunity. It was so effective that everyone is doing it:

Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

Unfortunately, the overzealous use of Roundup Ready crops and Roundup herbicide has created resistant super weeds, scarcely 10 years after the genetically modified crops were introduced.  Hello, agribusiness!  You're already making antibiotics less useful by giving them to pigs.  Maybe that should have been a hint.

How to be an immigrant in Arizona

Arizona recently passed an illegal immigration law, summarized by the Economist:

Illegal immigration is a federal crime. Mr Pearce’s law, however, would also make it a state crime and would require the police, as opposed to federal agents, to make arrests and check the immigration status of individuals who look suspicious to them. Citizens who think their cops are not vigilant enough would be encouraged to sue their cities or counties, and no city or county may remain a “sanctuary” where this law is not enforced.

I think this image sums up the law even more succintly:

Drill, baby, drill

Need I note that when a wind turbine fails, it creates a much smaller mess?

The dangers of putting your data in the cloud

This post is for CM.

Google has email and documents.  With them, your emails, documents, and spreadsheets are safely stored on their servers.  Better than having them on just one computer, have the hard drive die, and *POOF*  Right?

Perhaps not.  If your cloud-stored email is over 6 months old, did you know that the government can read it without a warrant?  This email is held to a lower standard by a 1986 law, that only "requires the authorities to make a probable-cause showing to a judge."  In a recent court case, the government was planning to assert it had that same right for recent emails, as well, but they decided they did not need them for their investigation. 

It's not just the issue of warrants, either, but of notification.  If the government wants to read your personal papers, they get a warrant, and you get to see it (and know they've taken them) because they bust down your door.  But if they want to read your email, they serve the warrant to your host (e.g. Google) and you'll never know they were there.  The FBI found this a very useful tactic when pursuing a couple spammers, getting access to their documents on Google Docs.

So cloud computing simplifies data backup and access to files, but it makes surveillance and government access to your data somewhat easier, as well.

Cool things I learned so far today

Gmail adds drag and drop file attachments.  w00t!

Lifehacker covers ways to skip to the menu on a DVD.  Can we finally be better off than when we had VCRs?

Guns That Look Like Toys

Baltimore Police Department:

I'll just throw this out there and see if anyone bites. Is there any legitimate reason that someone would want a gun colored to look like a toy? Channeling your inner Hello Kitty (Ak-47)?

Ugh.


Hat tip to Schneier

Combo update: trash, tax breaks, assassination, internets, ok go, and hexane free food

Should the U.S. Burn or Bury its Trash?
A fascinating debate about the best strategy for our garbage.  I highly recommend the response by Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, who notes that incinerators aren't just lousy environmental choices, but are more expensive and provide fewer jobs than waste diversion like recycling.

Why are the Feds Giving Away $900 Billion in Tax Breaks a Year?
A good question.  David Morris asks why we should use the tax system for so many programs, where these tax breaks skew toward the wealthy.  For example, is it better to own a home if you are wealthy?  The mortgage interest deduction implies that it is. 

He notes that a quick fix would be making all tax credits and deductions refundable, so that they have equal benefit for all citizens.

President Authorizes Assassination of American Citizen
No, it's not President Bush, but Obama.  This U.S. citizen has clearly gotten involved in anti-American activities, but does that strip him of his constitutional rights to face his accusers and have a jury of his peers? 

How to Teach Kids about the Internet
Is a blog/diary private if its on the internet?  What information and ideas are wise to share online?  Kids don't see the internet as adults do, and teaching them about the risks is no easy task.

Raquel Kusunoki, a sixth-grade teacher at Spangler, recently asked Mr. Jenkins, now an educational technology specialist for the school district, to teach Common Sense classes to her students. The class listened as Mr. Jenkins read a story about a girl who got annoyed when her parents quizzed her about details from her online journal.

Mr. Jenkins asked the class if there is a difference between a private diary on paper and a public online diary. But the class could not agree.

Ok Go (the treadmill music video guys) are back.  And better.
See the new video and also a nice "making of" story at Wired.  Amazing.  Not to mention, also a cool song.

Does Your Veggie Burger Come with Neurotoxins?
A rather disturbing report about how best selling supermarket veggie burgers are often made using a petroleum byproduct, hexane. 

The good news?  You can avoid it, but it requires some label reading:

For hexane free food, instead look for Boca Burgers "Made with organic soy"; Helen's Kitchen; Morningstar "Made with organic"; Superburgers by Turtle Island; Tofurky and Wildwood.

Note: I don't think we should have to shop around for "hexane free food."   Read more at Mother Jones, and see the Cornucopia Institute report.

Quotes from George Will, born again nuclear enthusiast

In his most recent column, George Will seems to have discovered how nuclear power can save America.  Here's what else he's had to say about nuclear power:

August 30, 2004 (Charleston Daily Mail): "Often, an underpaid guard and a chain-link fence are the only security at the more than 130 nuclear reactors and other facilities using highly enriched uranium in 40 countries."



April 21, 2002 (Cleveland Plain Dealer): "the failure to solve the problem of waste disposal is one reason why no nuclear power generating plant has been built in a quarter of a century."

Other things George should keep in mind:

• Unlike wind and solar, nuclear fuel is not free.  Uranium and plutonium will be more expensive once we stop getting free government fuel from dismantled arms.  
• Based on capital costs alone, wind power is the same cost or less than new nuclear power plants.  And did I mention wind is free?
• If he's so concerned about energy sprawl, why doesn't he worry about the fact that coal mines, natural gas fields, and uranium mines are "sprawled" all over the place, as are the rail and pipelines to bring them to power plants.  With wind and solar, you don't need fuel infrastructure, just power plants. 

Stick to heckling Democrats, Mr Will.

Exurban sprawl hits the wall of gas prices

StarTribune.com: "New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory."

Cheap energy made living on the urban fringe, if not desirable, but as gas prices rise, home values fall. The worst for a lot of folks is that now that they want to move closer in, their home values have fallen too much to make it possible. Ugh.

Apple iWork Pages problem

Apologies to my regular readers, but I have a rather intractable computer problem and I'm hoping that by posting to the internet, I may find some help.

The Pages Problem
Here's the deal.  I use iWork's Pages document program for most of my reports at work.  In the past couple months, I routinely have a problem crop up where I can no longer switch objects (images, tables, text boxes) from floating to inline.  A secondary symptom is that I can no longer drag and drop items off the Dock.

Things I've tried:

• Trashing the Pages preference files
• Trashing the Dock preference files
• Killing the Dock in Terminal: killall -Dock
• Repairing disk permissions
• Screaming, pounding my desk, searching Apple's support forums

A workaround
I can reliably solve the problem temporarily by logging out of my account.  The problem seems to crop up at random some time after I've been using Pages.

System Setup
OS X 10.6.3
Pages 4.0.3
MacBook Pro (late 2006)

Signs your anti-terrorism program has flaws

Schneier on Security: The Effectiveness of Air Marshals: "Air marshals are being arrested faster than air marshals are making arrests."

Can't add anything to that.

Dear Conservatives,

I don't believe that you hate poor people, the environment, or think that every big business should be able to do whatever it wants. No, I actually agree with the first part of this quote.

NYTimes.com: "On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle — smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their mirror image, wanting bigger government as a goal in itself."

But that's not true. As a liberal, it's true I don't believe in the simple (or simplistic) principle of small government. But I don't have a goal of large government. Government simply needs to be as big as is necessary to ensure equal opportunity in education, universal health care, a secure retirement, a clean environment, and economic justice (among other things) for all its citizens.

Government doesn't need to be small, it needs to be effective.

Thanks,
-Moldy

P.S. Plus, that free market you like is really a creature of government.

Up Next: Financial Reform

Health care is a done deal and the immediate economic crisis has past (with years of recovery to come).  Next up for Obama and Congress is financial reform, which can be summed up as "how do we keep this from happening again."

The Plan
First, a look at the Obama administration's recommended financial regulation plan:

1. Giving regulators more monitoring authority (like the Consumer Product Safety Commission for toys).  "If your mortgage is a choking hazard, the government will issue a warning or a recall."
2. Financial firms must reduce their debt and hold more capital in reserve.  "If things go bad, there will be more money around to plug holes on the leaking ship."
3. Government can seize collapsing firms.  "If it's a total SNAFU, we'll just take them over."

Obama has also endorsed two other ideas.  First is the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prohibit banks from trading for their own profit, as opposed to on behalf of their clients.  Second is a bank tax, which would help recover the cost of the last bailout and help prepare for the next.

The Problems
However, there's a fair amount of criticism (same article) that these new rules will fall short.  On #2, the administration (and Senate) is being fairly loose about actual numbers.  So it's not clear if debt-to-capital ratios will be clear enough, e.g. "do I have to have a 20% down payment or a 1% down payment?"

And #3 is also problematic if left to regulators, since the folks in charge of the financial system for this crisis clearly used too little of their authority.

The Volcker Rule has also drawn a lot of flak for being insufficient or misdirected (check out the great chart explanation).

The weakness and vagueness of the Obama plan is the heart of Paul Krugman's criticism (did I mention he's a Nobel-winning economist?):

The Dodd [Senate] bill is similar to my concern that it’s too Hellenistic and not sufficiently Roman: it sets up a system that will work fine if we have first-rate regulators, but doesn’t seem robust to the mediocrity that is all too likely to prevail, sooner or later. [emphasis mine]

Without good regulation, what will happen is what just happened.  In good times (the 90s), investment banks make obscene profits.  In bad times, investment banks get bailed out by the government.  This concept is called lemon socialism, and it basically means that you privatize profits and socialize risk.

The History
Before we get to the proposed fixes, the history is really relevant.  Before the Great Depression, the banking sector had a panic every decade.  Banks speculated with deposits, and people lost everything.  Boo.

The Roosevelt administration responded to the Depression forcefully, and its new regulations (the Glass-Steagall Act) created a fairly inflexible system of rules to keep banks boring.

1. All deposits were insured (FDIC).  Bank runs stopped.
2. Banks must be boring - no more speculating with deposits or underwriting securities. 

The rules worked and the financial sector was stable for 50 years.  But in the 1980s, the rules left banks with a competition problem.  Banks (with savings deposits) had competition from mutual funds.  And businesses started borrowing money in the bond market instead of from banks. 

Since banks couldn't expand their business portfolio to compete (until the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall), "shadow banks" (Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, etc) rose up to fill the void.  They had none of the rules about reserve capital or speculation that regular banks did, so they made fabulous profits on borrowed money throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.  And then the financial crisis hit and they went broke.  Ooops! 

Because government regulations hadn't kept pace, the government was forced to bail out these financial buccaneers to keep the entire credit market from collapsing (this actually is a big deal, since many companies make payroll by borrowing for very short terms, like overnight).  When the shadow banks fell, nobody wanted to lend, and this was locking up the economy.

So, will the Obama Plan fix everything?  Probably not.

Fixing the Obama Plan 
Krugman describes the fix pretty well:

"So what the legislation needs are explicit rules, rules that would force action even by regulators who don’t especially want to do their jobs. There should, for example, be a preset maximum level of allowable leverage — the financial reform that has already passed the House sets this at 15 to 1, and the Senate should follow suit. There should be hard rules determining when regulators have to seize a troubled financial firm. There should be no-exception rules requiring that complex financial derivatives be traded transparently. "

Canada, for example, has a very large banking sector but with very strict limits (a debt-to-capital ratio of 20:1, whereas the shadow banks in the U.S. were at 30:1 on the eve of the financial crisis).  And Canadian banks have weathered the downturn much better than their American counterparts.


The flexible parts of the Obama plan don't have to be discarded.  As pointed out in the first article on the Obama plan, discretion can be important.  An illustration is the "Schumer box," a requirement for all credit cards offers requiring the company to display the interest rate and annual fee prominently.  Card companies quickly learned to hide their fees in a variety of ways that did not require disclosure in the Schumer box.  Regulators must have the authority to be similarly nimble.

The Politics

Ultimately, financial regulation is a political issue and the position of the major players if fairly predictable:

Well, how about John Boehner, the House minority leader? Recently Mr. Boehner gave a talk to bankers in which he encouraged them to balk efforts by Congress to impose stricter regulation. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves,” he urged — where by “taking advantage” he meant imposing some conditions on the industry in return for government backing.

Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, promptly had “Little Punk Staffer” buttons made up and distributed to Congressional aides. 

These punk staffers may be the only thing standing between the taxpayer and another boondoggle of a bailout.  Time to get a button.

It's not about who has the kids

Grist: Last week there was a silly article I ran across discussing the environmental benefits of being childless. I think this this response strikes the right chord. Humans are social and tribal creatures, and we need children. Only in a fragmented society like the U.S. could we end up having a discussion of the cost of children.

"Only if we view ourselves as isolated consumers do we end up thinking that having a child or not is a competing choice, as if the question is, 'Who's getting the most for their money?' If we think of ourselves as parts of a human ecosystem -- a community -- such a question seems silly, akin to asking which is better, a tree or a meadow. The choice of whether to have a child or not is obviously significant for the person in question, but real communities should be able to incorporate, and benefit from, everyone, whatever their choices."

The cost of things

The first two are Bush tax cuts, the third is the Iraq War.  The last is the recently passed health care reform act.  Guess which one has "deficit hawks" worried...

A greener future with no kids?

I saw a post on Grist touting a new concept, GINKs (green-inclined without kids).  The implication is that every new person is a carbon-emission-creating burden on the planet. 


Good for GINKs, but I prefer to raise a voter to counterbalance birthers, climategaters, etc.  They aren't forgoing children.

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief | Magazine

Wired:Magazine:

"Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. “I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission,” he says. “And no one saw me take it.” His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. “After that,” he says, “I was hooked.”"

A fascinating tale of a high-tech thief who was finally rounded up by a couple Winnepeg cops. Reminds me of Catch Me If You Can.

The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools

Psychology Today: A fascinating article on the dangers of teaching kids math by rote, without the context for using it.

In an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.[2] They taught multiplication, but none of them knew that multiplication is used to find the area of a rectangle. Their most common guess was that you add the length and the width to get the area. Their excuse for not knowing was that they did not need to teach about areas of rectangles; that came later in the curriculum. But the fact that they couldn't figure out that multiplication is used to find the area was evidence to Kenschaft that they didn't really know what multiplication is or what it is for. She also found that although the teachers knew and taught the algorithm for multiplying one two-digit number by another, none of them could explain why that algorithm works.

The article also describes an earlier experiment with teaching math, where a school deliberately did not give children much math instruction before grade 6. The lesson? Less is more.

"In sum, Benezet showed that kids who received just one year of arithmetic, in sixth grade, performed at least as well on standard calculations and much better on story problems than kids who had received several years of arithmetic training."

Crazy.

Energy Star Wars

Green Inc. Blog

Does this count as an air purifier? It does under Energy Star, and that's the kind of problem the program is having right now.

College to Save Money by Switching Email Font

Slashdot: "The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic."

Republicans and anti-health care LAW tactics

The bill passed and the Party of No lost. But they've already sworn they will repeal the law, and state-based Republicans (legislators, attorneys generals) are threatening to sue on the basis that the health care bill somehow violates the 10th Amendment (powers not reserved for the feds reside with the states).

Unfortunately, the Republicans have uphill sledding in the repeal and legal world.

• On repealing, Republicans have to either take over the House and get 60 seats in the Senate (mathematically impossible, I'm told) OR wait until 2013 and get control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.  Good luck with that.
• On the legal appeals, Republicans are working against legal precedent when it comes to mandatory taxes, because the government already collects direct taxes (taxes such as Social Security and unemployment already exist).
• Republicans are also going to have trouble with the insurance mandate itself, which can be seen as part of the broad reaching "interstate commerce" regulatory powers of the federal government.  And given that most insurance companies operate across state lines, good luck with that.

A nice quote from a story by Eric Black on the legal challenge:

Lucinda Jesson of Hamline Law School, said...“I would be surprised if it was taken seriously by the courts.”

The one thing I found worrying in Black's piece is that the federal government has been using the interstate commerce clause in some ways that seem like overreaching.  In California, for example, the Supreme Court struck down a medical marijuana law even though the law required it to be marijuana grown in California and not crossing state lines.  Even someone who grew there own, the Court said, could be subject to federal drug laws. 

The other interesting issue, he notes, is that states have become largely dependent on federal aid for many areas of spending (transportation, health care, etc) and that state discretion has largely vanished because the courts give broad latitude to the federal government to tie strings to its aid.  (Example // you want federal highway money, raise the legal drinking age...)  In an era of state dependence, the 10th amendment becomes almost meaningless.

I think that the health care bill is a very good thing for society, and I'm glad it's likely to stand against the legal challenges.  But it's interesting to consider how important states rights are in this era...

The Story of Bottled Water

Why pay 2000 times more for water?

Health care reform passes

The House passed the Senate version of health care reform last night 219-212, with every single Republican voting against the measure.  The Senate bill goes to Obama's desk for his signature (a guarantee) and we finally join the ranks of every other industrialized country in providing health care for nearly every citizen.

Here's what's in the bill.

The process isn't completely played out yet, because the House also passed a reconciliation bill that adds a few improvements to the Senate's health care bill.  This reconciliation will have to be approved by the Senate, and then (if amended) go back to the House before hitting Obama's desk.  This bill includes:

• A smaller price tag
• More generous subsidies to low-income Americans
• A new 3.8 percent tax on unearned income (things like interest, dividends and royalties)
• A higher Medicare tax for families making more than $250,000 (and individuals with incomes over $200,000).
• The "Cadillac tax" on very good health insurance plans would have a higher cutoff and be implemented later (2018). 
• Closes the Medicare prescription drug donut hole
• Several provisions to reduce Medicare fraud and waste

You can also see a 7-page summary of the reconciliation bill here.

Supreme Court and the 2nd Amendment

The Supremes will soon be ruling on a Chicago ban on handguns, but this thoughtful and thorough piece on the issue notes that the big legal test is yet to come:

But the ultimate showdown over gun control in America will be waged in a future legal case not yet on the high court's radar, analysts say. At issue in that case: Are Second Amendment rights as fundamental as freedom of speech and religion, or will gun rights be subject to lesser constitutional protection?

For example, in the 2008 case striking down the DC handgun ban, Justice Scalia noted:

The majority justices addressed this issue briefly in the Washington decision. "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia.

"Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms," Justice Scalia said. (For Monitor coverage of the Washington decision, click here.)

What may make the difference is how state judges have decided on gun control laws

In assessing the constitutionality of gun-control laws, Mr. Henigan said, state judges have placed significant weight on the government's interest in regulating firearms as a means to protect public safety. The Supreme Court should adopt the same rationale, he said.

It will certainly be an interesting time.

Why Digital Rights Management (copyright protection) Doesn’t Work

The Brads: "Why DRM Doesn’t Work", a sister post to "Why People Pirate Movies" earlier this month.

Click through to see the full size image

You know you are a liberal when...

...a smackdown from Sen. Harry Reid to Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gets your blood moving:

As you know, the vast majority of bills developed through reconciliation were passed by Republican Congresses and signed into law by Republican Presidents – including President Bush’s massive, budget-busting tax breaks for multi-millionaires. Given this history, one might conclude that Republicans believe a majority vote is sufficient to increase the deficit and benefit the super-rich, but not to reduce the deficit and benefit the middle class. Alternatively, perhaps Republicans believe a majority vote is appropriate only when Republicans are in the majority. Either way, we disagree.

Thanks to Paul Krugman for the link and for passing along the summary: reconcile this!

We Dwell in Darkness

Well, we'd be better off if we did.

I bet the International Dark Sky Association will like this.

Antibiotics are for people, not healthy cows

And if we don't stop using them on healthy animals, we will keep developing diseases for which we have no treatment.

There is a bill in Congress to fix this, but it's stalled in this committee.  If you see your Rep. in this list, time to make a phone call.

I've written on this subject several times since 2006, so get your fill here.

Taxing the bad beats subsidizing the good

Grist:

In a recent study using food subsidies and taxes to encourage healthier food purchases, researchers at SUNY learned something interesting:

• If you use subsidies to make healthy food cheaper, people buy more healthy food, but they use the savings to buy junk food.
• On the other hand, if you tax junk food, people buy healthy food instead.

The funny thing is, this was a psychology study, but an economist could have told you this would happen. When you lower the price of a good (healthy food), it creates an "income effect." People have more money and they will allocate it according to what goods will maximize their happiness. Since they can already afford more healthy food, it's not hard to imagine that the savings from cheaper health food goes to junk.

By solely taxing junk food, however, you don't have an income effect, but instead a substitution effect. People shift from junk food to healthy food because they can get more (and more happiness) per dollar that way.

The same concept applies to energy policy, and is why making renewable energy cheap (with tax credits) will not be sufficient to shift people away from dirty energy (coal, natural gas, fuel oil, etc). Instead, we need ways to increase the price of bad things, such as a carbon tax.

And there's another dilemma. Do you impose a carbon tax or price ALONE which will shift people away from dirty energy AND encourage conservation, or do you give the revenues back? A cap-and-dividend policy, for example, is much more politically palatable because most people get a bigger dividend than they will expend in higher energy consumption, but it also means there's only an incentive to shift consumption to clean energy, and not to reduce it.

If journalism were like health care

A satirical look by Nicholas Kristof
.

Two columns on the deficit

I'm not a deficit hawk, only a structural deficit hawk.  I only care about deficits when idiot policy makers make them permanent by cutting revenue without spending (Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty is a big winner here). 

So here are a couple interesting columns on deficits and their political causes:

• Paul Krugman notes that Republicans have tried for years to run the federal fiscal ship aground so that they could "drown government in a bathtub."  Well, the ship ran aground, are they cutting government?  Nope, defending Medicare.  And opposing cost controls for the health care bill.  And a climate bill that would reduce the deficit.  Read more 
• Stephen Cohen discusses how the state of American infrastructure is a clear indication we are under-taxed.  Roads, bridges, schools, they need cash to operate smoothly.  Read more 
• .

Why People Pirate Movies

Dealing with Climate Change Deniers at the Office

Presidential Approval Tracker (back to 1945!)

This is what makes the web great:
The Gallup Presidential Approval Tracker shows approval ratings back to 1945 and lets you compare presidents over the same time frame in their terms. Who knew that the first George Bush was so popular?

And who knew that Obama really is the second coming of Reagan? (at least by this metric)

Knowledge is power, but is it happiness?

Oh, all the games I could have won...

Conservatives say stupid things about snow; media dutifully reports that they say them | Grist

Grist: "snow disproves climate change...This is obviously something that only extremely ill-informed (or stupid) people would say."

But if you're a media reporter, you apparently can't point that out (unless you're a satirist). It's killing reasonable political discourse, and it's just downright sad that you can get away with it.

Demand Question Time

America can benefit from an "unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives." In the same room, talking to each other. If you think this is a good idea, too, check out Demand Question Time.

How Coca-Cola fought for our right to be obese

MinnPost: "How Coca-Cola fought for our right to be obese"

1. Fund studies attempting to debunk soda pop/fat link
2. Give money to low-income advocacy groups, since low-income folks drink more pop and are disproportionately impacted by concepts like a sugared drink tax (unless they cut back, of course)
3. Profit!

Primary study linking autism to vaccines has been retracted

The myth of the vaccine-autism connection has been dealt a severe blow, thanks to actions by the British medical Journal, The Lancet. Although the study authors had already retracted the original 1998 findings by 2004, the journal has published a full-blown retraction of the original study, excoriating the unethical practices of the doctor who led the "research."

A nice examination of the filibuster issue in the Senate

MinnPost:

I think I agree with Black that the filibuster should simply be dumped. When the parties had moderates, it could work. But right now, it's a barrier to basic governance.

How Google has changed everything

Four recommendations for Obama, from a liberal

MinnPost - The cries and whispers of liberals:

• "Don't get totally preoccuped with health care. Go after strong financial system reforms.
• Embrace real populism
• Don't tolerate the filibuster
• "Be less like JFK and more like LBJ."

Turn Down the Heat When You're Out

Some folks I've talked to were under the impression that turning the heat down when you leave doesn't net much energy savings because the house has to warm back up. This guy's got the scoop on why lowering the temperature nets you more savings despite having to warm/cool the house again.

Ask Pablo: Turn Down The Heat! : TreeHugger: "Dear Pablo: I have heard that using a programmable thermostat to lower the temperature while you are out saves energy but isn't the same amount of energy used to bring the temperature back up when you come home?

The short answer is no. Because the rate of heat transfer through an insulated (or uninsulated for that matter) floor, ceiling, or wall is dependent on the temperature difference between the inside and outside air, less energy is lost to the outside when the inside air is cooler."

Bees like a varied diet

I wrote a fair amount about colony collapse disorder and bees when it first hit the news last year. Research has continued and one big finding is that species diversity (of pollinating plants) is crucial to bee health. The more varied the diet, the more robust the bee, and the more able to resist pathogens.

TreeHugger: "Apparently bees' immune systems are healthier when they are fed pollen from a wider variety of plants than when they eat only one thing."

So in addition to not whacking bees with neurotoxins, it may be better to let bees sample a lot of different pollen sources, not just eat what they get on the road.

What Democrats Stand For

This was an anonymous note from a Capitol Hill staffer in response to the victory of Scott Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat, narrowing the Democratic margin to 59-41 in the Senate.

Talking Points Memo: "The worst is that I can't help but feel like the main emotion people in the [Democratic] caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done...This is my life and I simply can't answer the fundamental question: "what do Democrats stand for?""

I'm so angry at this note I can't express it. Citizens did not elect Democrats to look for excuses, we wanted things done. And if it's hard to figure out what those things are, then let me remind you why we are Democrats.

We are Democrats because we believe:
1) Everyone should have an opportunity in life.
Thus, we support free public education, universal health insurance, and all of the other crucial building blocks for equal opportunity.

2) Everyone should pay their fair share
Rich folks get rich because the "socialist" government enforces rules that make markets work, builds the infrastructure crucial for market operation. That's why rich folks - who have received greater benefit - should pay more. Warren Buffet should not, as he does, pay a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. He should pay more.

3) The process must be fair
We use government to ensure opportunity and fair shares because it's the only institution that is created by and for the people. We elect it and we don't have to own stock to have a vote.

When we elect a lot of Democrats (like 59 of them in the Senate), it means there's a mandate to create opportunity and fairness by enacting health care reform, disciplining financial "innovators", and transforming America to clean energy to save the planet and our economy.

So dry your tears, get off your ass (pardon the pun) and deliver. You've got 11 months.

Post-Partisanship Epic Fail?

FiveThirtyEight: "the Democrats, from the White House on downward, have gotten a remarkably poor return on the investment of their political capital. The failures are more tactical than strategic."

In response to some Democrats who suggest that the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts changes things, I say, "yes."

We know that a Democrat who runs a shitty campaign in a Blue state will lose. We know that Republicans will absolutely, universally oppose anything that gives you any bit of political victory. We know that we don't need the minority party to come along when we have policy that is popular with the public.

It's time to run right at those fuckers.

Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate - New York News - Runnin' Scared

New York News - Runnin' Scared: "The lesson, as always, is that when Democrats win, they lose, and when they lose, they are obliterated."

This is great satire, and an indictment of Democrats for refusing to ram some good policy through when they own Congress and the White House. As Jon Stewart said, Democrats have a larger majority in Congress than Republicans have had since 1923. If Bush got stuff done, then Dems damn well better do it.

Socialism is awful

Found by friend CM in an online forum:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by socialist electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the socialist clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the socialist radio to one  of the FCC regulated channels to hear what the socialist National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using socialist satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of socialist US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the socialist drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as kept accurate by the socialist National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my socialist National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and get out to work on the socialist roads build by the socialist local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the socialist Environmental Protection Agency, using socialist legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.  On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the socialist US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the socialist public school. If I get lost, I can use my socialist GPS navigation technology developed by the United States Department of Defense and made available to the public in 1996 by President Bill Clinton who issued a policy directive declaring socialist GPS to be a dual use military civilian system to be managed as a national socialist asset.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the socialist workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the socialist USDA, I drive my socialist NHTSA car back home on the socialist DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the socialist state and local building codes and socialist fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the socialist local police department.

I then get on my computer and use the socialist Internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and browse the socialist World Wide Web using my graphical web browser, both made possible by Al Gore’s socialist High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. I then post on freerepublic.com <http://freerepublic.com>  and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

Do we need Flintstone's vitamins?

MinnPost: "But is there any truth to that widely held prescription for health? Does the typical American really need vitamin and mineral supplements?"

I always took my vitamins as a kid and for a while as an adult, believing that it was a key part of having a healthy diet. But I've been coming across more discussion recently that the jury is out on regular use of multivitamins as general dietary supplements.

The issue is a big one, of course, because if there aren't significant health effects, then people are paying for an expensive placebo.

In some ways, I like giving up vitamins, because it makes me feel more responsible for getting proper nutrition from the food I eat.

A Democratic Exodus, or a Little Media Spin?

The two high-profile retirement announcements of CT Senator Dodd and ND Senator Dorgan have got the Washington media establishment all aflutter about a Democratic exodus. But the Washington Monthly is one of the few media outlets providing context:

The Washington Monthly: "Quick quiz: which party has more Senate retirements so far this campaign cycle, Democrats or Republicans? Follow-up question: which party has more House retirements so far this campaign cycle, Democrats or Republicans?"

ANSWER
Senate: 6 Rs, 2 Ds
House: 14 Rs, 10 Ds

Who has an exodus?

Summary of NPR coverage of new airport security restrictions

• There are some new rules, but nobody knows what they are, and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano actually said they are "designed to be unpredictable."
  
• Women sometimes have to throw away cosmetics, which they didn't have to do before
• Women subject to pat down searches that would have "found explosives in my bra"
• Israeli passengers are sanguine, because they always have had tight restrictions

Questions they might have missed:

1. What are the new rules?
2. No, really.  What are the rules?  
3. Isn't transparency important so that airline passengers can prepare (and avoid having play-doh confiscated)?
4. Isn't transparency important so that policies are enforced consistently across all airports? 
   
5. How do the new rules ensure that another "underwear bomber" would not be able to bring explosives on a plane?  (since it seems that nothing has changed in certain international airports and many terrorists have not come from the 14 countries targeted)

Let's try asking some tougher questions, eh?

Common Disinfectants Create Mutant Superbugs

TreeHugger: "While it is important that hospitals be virtually bacteria-free, at home it's important to clean regularly, but 'not the chair you sit in every day or the telephone or the doorknobs if you're a reasonably healthy person,' according to Fleming."

Climate change in 2 photos (update: or not)

Update 12:50pm: Reader rick notes that this comparison is unfair. From the original article on iceboating:

The Toronto Harbour Commission, a five-man committee set up by the city and federal government in 1911, was tasked with modernizing the harbour to accommodate the largest commercial ships. Among the wide array of improvements undertaken, the Western Gap, the narrow western entrance to the harbour long unpopular with larger ships because it was difficult to keep dredged to an adequate depth, was altered. A new channel was dredged just to the south (and the old gap was filled in). As a result of the shifting currents caused by these changes, along with the increasing necessity for grain-storage ships to shift from slip to slip in the winter months, ice no longer formed as regularly or as thickly as before.

TreeHugger: "Two local blogs show two very different views of people using Toronto's waterfront"

Early 1900s: iceboating
Early 2000s: swimming

Cool chart: health care spending v. life expectancy

FiveThirtyEight: Chart

Finding airport security that works

Schneier on Security:

"Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers."

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

EDITED TO ADD (12/26): Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks."

Read the original article for more on how the TSA response to this failed terrorist attack would do little to prevent THE SAME EXACT THING.

More inconvenience for honest passengers with no additional security. Stupid.

The Odds of Airborne Terror

FiveThirtyEight:

"Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning."

Why I read Paul Krugman's blog

He's a Nobel prize winning economist, excellent writer, and defender of all things progressive.  But really, you should read his NY Times blog because he embeds Monty Python video clips into his posts.

New research: Sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup alter human metabolism, digestion

Grist: "Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks [high fructose corn syrup] can damage human metabolism and is fueling the obesity crisis."

A soda a day = 10 lbs fat per year

Don’t watch NYC’s new anti-soda video on a full stomach:

Can we believe the published results of studies sponsored by drug companies?

MinnPost: In a meta-study of drug company studies on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), this was what an independent researcher found:

"[The analysis] found all the studies that had ever been published where one NSAID was compared to another. In every single trial, the sponsoring company’s drug was either equivalent to, or better than, the drug it was compared to: All the drugs were better than all the other drugs. Such a result is plainly impossible." [emphasis mine]

O, ye of little faith. Drug companies clearly hail from Lake Wobegon, where all the drugs are above average.

Can we believe the published results of studies sponsored by drug companies?

MinnPost: In a meta-study of drug company studies on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), this was what an independent researcher found:

"[The analysis] found all the studies that had ever been published where one NSAID was compared to another. In every single trial, the sponsoring company’s drug was either equivalent to, or better than, the drug it was compared to: All the drugs were better than all the other drugs. Such a result is plainly impossible." [emphasis mine]

O, ye of little faith. Drug companies clearly hail from Lake Wobegon, where all the drugs are above average.