1. Emergency planting of endangered Contra Costa wallflower Sunday 21 March, Antioch Dunes
2. White Crown Sparrow habitat planting in GGP Saturday 20/birding with Josiah Clark 8 am
3. Some musings on the Central Subway boondoggle
4. SFUSD funds Environmental Futures Contest
5. Pacifica's secret waterfall on video
6. Ted Kipping potluck/slide show: Kamchatka, March 23
7. Urban Food Production March 27 at GFE
8. Revolution under our feet: 12,800 quadrillion (count 'em) organisms in top 8 cm of soil
9. Mad dogs and Englishmen: The power of language
10. Between XX and XY; Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes
11. President Obama asks for money for international family planning. Encourage him
12. Comeback America; Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility. We each owe $483,000
13. The 1960s' Coming Age of Leisure. What happened?
14. Scientific American: fundamentally altering the planet/breaking the growth habit
15. Inside the fertility-industrial complex: The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception
16. Disaster goes global: Lessons from a Peruvian volcanic eruption in 1600
Save the date: UCSF is changing its management plan for Mt Sutro. Come to hearing on March 24. Details in next newsletter
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1. We are having an emergency planting of our endangered Contra Costa wallflower at Antioch Dunes this Sunday, March 21 starting at 10 am.
Bring lunch, water bottle, layered clothing, sun protection, and knee pads if you like. We will supply tools and gloves and extra drinking water. I need to know how many people are coming so please send me an email: susan_euing@yahoo.com
Directions to Antioch Dunes NWR:
From the south: Get to 680 N and head towards Walnut Creek and Concord. In Concord, take Hwy 242 East towards Antioch. Hwy 242 will become Hwy 4. Go several miles east to reach Antioch and take the A Street/Lone Tree exit. At bottom of ramp, go L under freeway and proceed on A Street about a mile. Go R onto Wilbur Avenue. At first light, turn L onto Fulton Shipyard Road. Proceed down FS Rd. and cross the RR tracks. The refuge driveway is the second one on the R after the RR Tracks (see large brown sign for Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge.) The address is 501 Fulton Shipyard Road, Antioch, CA.
From the north: Get to 680 S towards Martinez then take Hwy 4 East. Follow directions above.
Susan Euing, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Alameda Point PH: (510) 521-9624
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2. White Crown Sparrow Habitat Ongoing Volunteer Programming (every 3rd Saturday)
Saturday, March 20
8am Bird Walk with Josiah Clark, 9am-12noon work party, maintaining new native site plantings
Meet in front of the Bison Paddock in Golden Gate Park
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3. Regarding Central Subway (from Name Withheld):
[boondoggle, noun
work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value
• a public project of questionable merit that typically involves political patronage and graft]
Is it possible that:
a. the Central Subway's real purpose is not so much to help the people of Chinatown as to address the transportation impacts of the SOMA densification, ie.increase in height limits soon to come?
b. the TransBay project (which has stretched from 550 feet to 800 then 1000 and now, 1200 feet) is the beachhead for super heights now slated for Mission Street, 2nd past 5th?
c. Hearst has become a San Francisco Real Estate Syndicate and that they expect to be rezoned from 550 feet to 800-1000-1200 feet, and that in exchange, the mission of the Chronicle is now to watch the back of those coordinating this redevelopment (Macris, The Michaels--both Cohen & Yarne--and the downtown developers)--and that all of this explains why the Hearst is subsidizing the Chron?
d. the Chron therefore manufacturing the news, at least as it pertains to development and planning?
e. the same could be said of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal for Van Ness when the Transit Assessment Project (TAP) says that an Express 49 would reduce transit time equally well? (when asked MTA why the mayor has not simply ordered the TAP recommendations on the Express 49 implemented--at no cost--they said that they did not know).
f. Express 49 might kill Van Ness BRT?
g. California Pacific Medical Center at Van Ness and Geary is really the beachhead for densification for Van Ness and Geary? 400 feet is now being discussed for Japantown and for Geary and Masonic as well.
This author supports densification--but in the appropriate place. Certain areas: barrier islands (Miami), land under sea-water or soon to be under sea-water (New Orleans and perhaps, Mission Bay), some soil conditions (such as liquefaction-able ground), and major seismic zones (San Francisco and much of Coastal California) may not be well suited for 1200 foot cantilevered buildings when structural engineers tell me that they may--or may not--stand, especially on SOMA's liquefaction-able ground.
Engineering is an empirical science. We learn by our mistakes and by trial and error.
Just remember, a building falls one-and-one-half times its height. This means TransBay could fall as far north as Union Square.
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Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
Michael Shermer, Scientific American Sept 2002
"Blessed be those of low expectations, for they shall not be disappointed."
Eugene V. Debs
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4. From Jim LeCuyer:
Hi Jake. Amid disasters a small good thing. The San Francisco Unified School District has offered to fund Environmental Futures Contest at the rate of $3000 a year on a permanent basis. This contest will encourage teachers to teach to the environment in all subjects (each year a different subject), not just Science but English, Math, History, Social Science and all subjects in the public schools, even P.E. The idea behind the contest is that teachers and students will plan classroom lessons or events on the environment and teach them in accord with the subject matter. A pilot program completed last year that encouraged English teachers to work environmentally in English was won by Barbara Brewer's Third Period Tenth Grade English Class at Washington High. Speakers on global warming came to the class, then the class discussed what they learned, and then each kid read articles and did research on the impact of global warming and wrote an essay, using MLA guidelines, and all within the context of English. The essays were terrific, and showed a lot of interest and effort beyond the ordinary. There will be a presentation of $1000 and an award ceremony with student Franchesca Finnigan reading from her essay at the SF School Board on 27 April. You are invited to come. Seven pm, Tuesday 27 April, SFUSD School Board meeting, featuring a brief Award ceremony honoring the students and teacher who won the Fall 2009 Environmental Futures Contest for Public Schools. 555 Franklin Street (On Franklin just north of Market and west of City Hall ).
If we could spread this idea around the US, we would conceivably help change the environmental attitudes of our culture, and improve and give deeper meaning to our schools. And if anyone would like to add funds, we would help facilitate this through SFUSD, which is the ultimate nonprofit. I'm trying to get the Board of Supervisors to kick in some matching funds, and could use some help there. If we could establish a $15,000 permanent yearly contest, we could include many subjects at many grade levels every year. A contest gets a lot of bang for the buck.
I send my grateful thanks to all those Jake Sigg aficionados who encouraged us and helped make this a reality. It took ten years of floundering effort to get this far. We owe much to former School Board Members Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar, and to new Superintendent Carlos Garcia, and to the SFUSD Director of Sustainability, Nik Kaestner. Jim LeCuyer. Director, Environmental Futures Contest for Public Schools. jimlecuyer@sbcglobal.net
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5. From Ian Butler, discoverer and protector of Pacifica's secret waterfall. You can see other items on his website, including a close-up of an endangered San Francisco gartersnake:
Here is a video I made of the Secret Waterfall in Pacifica. Perhaps your Nature News readers may like to see it?
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6. Ted Kipping pot luck/slide shows
4th Tuesday of the month at 7 pm at the San Francisco County Fair Bldg, 9th Av & Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park
Served by Muni bus lines #6, 43, 44, 66, 71, and the N-Judah Metro
*Please bring a dish and beverage to serve 8 people
Mar 23 Segrid Selle: Kamchatka: Land of ice and fire
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7.
URBAN FOOD PRODUCTION
Date: Saturday, March 27, 2010
Time: 10AM – 12:00 NOON
Location: Garden for the Environment, 7th Ave at Lawton Street, San Francisco
Cost: $15 - To pre-register, please call (415) 731-5627, or email info@gardenfortheenvironment.org
Date: Saturday, March 27, 2010
Time: 10AM – 12:00 NOON
Location: Garden for the Environment, 7th Ave at Lawton Street, San Francisco
Cost: $15 - To pre-register, please call (415) 731-5627, or email info@gardenfortheenvironment.org
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8. The revolution under our feet
Unnoticed by people of Britain, a transformation has been happening beneath their feet.
In just the top 8cm of dirt, soil scientists estimate there are 12.8 quadrillion (12,800 million million) living organisms, weighing 10m tonnes, and, incredibly, that the number of these invertebrates has increased by nearly 50% in a decade. At the same time, however, the diversity of life in the earth appears to have reduced.
The most likely reason for both the increase in numbers and the decrease in types is the rise of annual temperatures and rainfall over the decade of the study, leading to warmer, wetter summers, said (the study leader). The theory is that the warmer, wetter soil encourages most of the bugs to breed faster or for longer, but that more marginal species have been unable to adapt to the new conditions. They are less certain about whether the changes are a threat or a boon. "If you look at the soil, most of it comes out of the back end of the animals. The question is whether we have lost resilience in the soil. Is diversity important for the soil to bounce back after multiple pressures?"
Although the study looked at only the top 8cm of soil, the results were likely to cover most active life underground, said (the researcher). "In fairness, it's where most of them are: they know where all the carbon and nutrients are concentrated."
The decrease in the variety of species found was much smaller--11%--and the scientists warn that further research is needed to be sure of the trends. Biodiversity helps the soil to cope with future threats from pollution and climate change, and is a "pool from which future novel applications and products can be derived", notes the report.
Guardian Weekly 12.03.10
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9.
Mad dogs and Englishmen
From Guardian Weekly February 3, 199_ (Gulf War)
We have They have
Army, Navy and Air Force A war machine
Reporting guidelines Censorship
Press briefings Propaganda
We They
Take out Destroy
Suppress Destroy
Eliminate Kill
Neutralise or decapitate Kill
Dig in Cower in their foxholes
We launch They launch
First strikes Sneak missile attacks
Pre-emptively Without provocation
Our men are… Their men are…
Boys Troops
Lads Hordes
Our boys are… Theirs are…
Professional Brainwashed
Lion-hearts Paper tigers
Cautious Cowardly
Confident Desperate
Heroes Cornered
Dare-devils Cannon fodder
Young knights of the skies Bastards of Baghdad
Loyal Blindly obedient
Desert rats Mad dogs
Resolute Ruthless
Brave Fanatical
Our boys are motivated by Their boys are motivated by
An old-fashioned sense of duty Fear of Saddam
Our boys Their boys
Fly into the jaws of hell Cower in concrete bunkers
Our ships are… Iraq ships are…
An armada A navy
Israeli non-retaliation is Iraq non-retaliation is
An act of great statesmanship Blundering/Cowardly
Our missiles are… Their missiles are…
Like Luke Skywalker zapping Ageing duds (rhymes with Scuds)
Darth Vader
Our missiles cause… Their missiles cause…
Collateral damage Civilian casualties
We… They…
Precision bomb Fire wildly at anything in the skies
Our PoWs are… Their PoWs are…
Gallant boys Overgrown schoolchildren
George Bush is… Saddam Hussein is…
At peace with himself Demented
Resolute Defiant
Statesmanlike An evil tyrant
Assured A crackpot monster
Our planes… Their planes…
Suffer a high rate of attrition Are shot out of the sky
Fail to return from missions Are zapped
(Guardian editor’s note: All the expressions above have been used by the British press in covering the war so far.)
They say that in the end truth will triumph, but it's a lie. Anton Chekhov
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10. Between XX and XY; Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes, by Gerald N Callahan, PhD
Combining passion with current scientific information, Callahan, an immunologist/pathologist at Colorado State University, explains why our conception of two sexes is more a social than a biological construct. He argues that there are no simple, foolproof ways to determine sex. For example chromosomal structure, XX for females and XY for males, is not fully predictive because of various genetic disorders that can play a larger role. Similarly, genitalia can be quite varied and represent a continuum of difference rather than two discrete points. Callahan does a good job of exploring intersex individuals, who are neither male nor female, and argues that they need to be accepted for what they are and not viewed as defective. Further, he provides provocative evidence that surgical gender reconstruction is often unsuccessful. Although Callahan attempts to make the case that some non-Western societies have a less bipolar view of gender, his abbreviated presentation is not very convincing. He is, however, persuasive that better understanding of and respect for sex and gender variability would be far healthier for the 65,000-plus intersex people born each year and society in general.
Reviews
"Callahan does a good job of exploring intersex individuals, who are neither male nor female, and argues that they need to be accepted for what they are and not viewed as defective." —Publishers Weekly
"Immunologist Callahan takes a fascinating look at the biology and human experience of intersexuality, a state in between male and female." —Discover Magazine
"There are lots of interesting nuggets here—for example, Callahan's description of biological sex as a spectrum, not a binary system." —doubleX
"This book takes readers through an alphabet of gender and gender variations. Callahan shows readers that rather than either/or scenarios, there have always been variations; his book shatters our society's take on pink and blue." —Advocate.com
"This is a fascinating, easily understandable journey into why we are born male or female and examines our age-old obsession with sex." —Fort Collins Coloradoan
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11/ From Population Connection:
President Obama recently released the details of his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2011, and after reviewing the numbers, we’re thrilled to report that the President has called for nearly $716 million in funding for international family planning. This is a $67 million increase from the FY 2010 enacted level, and a $252 million increase from the last Bush-era budget in 2008.
This is a major step towards restoring the United States to a position of leadership in international family planning, and it proves that this President really does understand how vitally important that leadership is. We aren’t there yet, but this new increase puts us much closer to our ultimate goal--$1 billion, enough to meet the United States’ fair share of global unmet need for family planning.
In this economic climate, such a significant increase is courageous and underscores the President’s deep commitment to this issue. It is also likely to draw fire from our opponents, who refuse to acknowledge the benefits of real investment in family planning.
We know that the President will have to fight to get this spending level enacted, and we need to let him know that we are with him. Please take a moment and tell President Obama “Thank You” for his support.
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LTE, Science News
...Science and technology have bettered the lives of millions, and the future remains bright as long as human imagination thrives. A troubling trend, though, is that no new farmland is being created, and neither is air or open space.
The question is not whether science can continue to pull off miracles. And it's not whether human population will continue to grow. The real question is at what point will science not deliver enough to stop humans from crowding themselves and every living thing off our planet?
If we don't seek an equilibrium, Mother Nature will enforce one. If we don't stop the population from growing, not even science will be able to save us. Why isn't this a component of our foreign policy?
Barry Demchak, La Jolla, California
"Buy real estate. God's not making any more of it." - Tony Soprano
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"There is always an applied side to thinking deeply. In any society there are many complicated issues that unfortunately get simplified to the point where short-sightedness wins...Science teaches us to think more broadly than that. If we really had wise leaders, they would take the long-term perspective seriously precisely because we are so prone to ignore it. They should listen to scientists and philosophers much more than economists who tend to be interested in what happens in the next annual quartile."
Animal ecologist Hanna Kokko of University of Helsinki in 9 September Current Biology
(If we really had wise leaders, they would take the long-term perspective seriously? No they wouldn't. If they did they would be voted out of office at the next election, if not recalled before that. In fact, they probably wouldn't even have been elected in the first place. Mr Kokko, like many academics, don't understand people or politics. JS)
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12.
We’ve wasted our favorite crisis.
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Comeback America; Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility, by David M Walker
(Following are some hastily-scribbled notes from Terry Gross interview of David Walker on Fresh Air. David Walker is now CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Fund, and was head of the Government Accountability Office under both Bill Clinton and Geo W Bush. Both the President and the Prime Minister of China asked for an audience with Walker, but George W refused to talk to him!!)
Some points by Walker:
W was the biggest spender in our history; he doubled our debt, and it could double again at current rate.
Very few tax cuts pay for themselves, and they don't stimulate.
The govt has made $50 trillion in unfunded promises. (That's trillions.)
There is not a dime in the Social Security fund. And it is not counted as a liability!! All the $ that we have been paying into the fund has been spent, and in place of it there is an IOU. The fund has been paying out more than it's taking in. 2010 is the year when it is officially out of money.
(JS: And who will pay the IOU? They were either unborn or too young to vote when all this was happening. Should we feel sorry for them? Of course, but bear in mind that we [including me] were only too happy to ignore the problem. We love to have our congressional representative bring money and projects into our district, don't we? Both conservatives and liberals love pork equally.
In 1988 there was publicity about the state of the Social Security trust fund; it was on the front pages for awhile, but died away. It couldn't have died without our complicity.
Proposals for paying down the ensuing debt are predicated on a thriving economy, which isn't going to happen. The economic glory days are over. There is only one way the debt can be "paid"--inflation. My expectation is that in coming years we will purposely inflate as much as we can get by with. That is why you should protect yourself with something tangible: property, precious metals, &c.
Following is an excerpted article from the Wall Street Journal.)
Warning: The Deficits Are Coming!
The former head of the Government Accountability Office is on a crusade to alert taxpayers to their true obligations.
By John Fund, WSJ.com, 4 September 2009
David Walker sounds like a modern-day Paul Revere as he warns about the country's perilous future. "We suffer from a fiscal cancer," he tells a meeting of the National Taxpayers Union, the nation's oldest anti-tax lobby. "Our off-balance sheet obligations associated with Social Security and Medicare put us in a $56 trillion financial hole—and that's before the recession was officially declared last year. America now owes more than Americans are worth—and the gap is growing!"
His audience sits in rapt attention. A few years ago these antitax activists would have been polite but a tad restless listening to the former head of the Government Accountability Office, the nation's auditor-in-chief. Higher taxes is what hikes their blood pressure the most, but the profligate spending of the Bush and Obama administrations has put them in a mood to listen to this green-eyeshade Cassandra.
...Mr. Walker, a 57-year-old accountant, didn't set out to be a fiscal truth-teller. He rose to be a partner and global managing director of Arthur Anderson, before being named assistant secretary of labor for pensions and benefits during the Reagan administration. Under the first President Bush, he served as a trustee for Social Security and Medicare, an experience that convinced him both programs are looming train wrecks that could bankrupt the country. In 1998 he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to head the GAO, where he spent the next decade issuing reports trying to stem waste, fraud and abuse in government.
Despite many successes, he was able to make only limited progress in reforming Washington's tangled bookkeeping. When he arrived he was told the Pentagon was nearly a decade away from having a clean audit, or clear evidence that its financial statements were accurate. When he left in 2008, he was told the Pentagon was still a decade away from that goal. "If the federal government was a private corporation, its stock would plummet and shareholders would bring in new management and directors," he said as he retired from the GAO.
...His group calls itself strictly nonpartisan and nonideological, and that seems to limit how tough and specific it can be. Last year, it released a documentary "I.O.U.S.A.," that followed Mr. Walker as he toured the country on his fiscal "wake up" tour. The solutions the film proposes for the debt crisis are either glib or gray: The country should save more, reduce oil consumption, hold politicians accountable and get more value from health-care spending. But in its diagnosis of the problem the film scores a bull's-eye.
...Mr. Walker's own speeches are vivid and clear. "We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit," he tells one group. "We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease."
Mr. Walker (Peter G Peterson Foundation) identifies the disease as having a basic cause: "Washington is totally out of touch and out of control," he sighs. "There is political courage there, but there is far more political careerism and people dodging real solutions." He identifies entrenched incumbency as a real obstacle to change. "Members of Congress ensure they have gerrymandered seats where they pick the voters rather than the voters picking them and then they pass out money to special interests who then make sure they have so much money that no one can easily challenge them," he laments. He believes gerrymandering should be curbed and term limits imposed if for no other reason than to inject some new blood into the system. On campaign finance, he supports a narrow constitutional amendment that would bar congressional candidates from accepting contributions from people who can't vote for them: "If people can't vote in a district not their own, should we allow them to spend unlimited money on behalf of someone across the country? (Emphases mine.)
Medicare is a much bigger challenge (than Social Security), exacerbated by the addition of a drug entitlement component in 2003, pushed through a Republican Congress by the Bush administration. "The true costs of that were hidden from both Congress and the people," Mr. Walker says sternly. "The real liability is some $8 trillion."
That brings us to the issue of taxes. Wouldn't any "grand bargain" involve significant tax increases that would only hurt the ability of the economy to grow? "Taxes are going up, for reasons of math, demographics and the fact that elements of the population that want more government are more politically active," he insists. "The key will be to have tax reform that simplifies the system and keeps marginal rates as low as possible. The longer people resist addressing both sides of the fiscal equation the deeper the hole will get."
I steer towards the fiscal direction of the Obama administration. He says his stimulus bill was sold as something it wasn't: "A number of people had agendas other than stimulus, and they shaped the package."
As for health care, Mr. Walker says he had hopes for comprehensive health-care reform earlier this year and met with most of the major players to fashion a compromise. "President Obama got the sequence wrong by advocating expanding coverage before we've proven our ability to control costs," he says. "If we don't get our fiscal house in order, but create new obligations we'll have a Thelma and Louise moment where we go over the cliff." Mr. Walker's preferred solution is a plan that combines universal coverage for all Americans with an overall limit on the federal government's annual health expenditures. His description reminds me of the unicorn—a marvelous creature we all wish existed but is not likely to ever be seen on this earth.
...Despite an occasional detour into support for government intervention, Mr. Walker remains the Jeffersonian he grew up as in his native Virginia. "I view the Constitution with deep respect," he told me. "My ancestors and those of my wife fought and died in the Revolution, and I care a lot about returning us to the principles of the Founding Fathers."
He notes that today the role of the federal government has grown such that last year less than 40% of it related to the key roles the Founders envisioned for it: defense, foreign policy, the courts and other basic functions. "What happened to the Founders' intent that all roles not expressly reserved to the federal government belong to the states, and ultimately the people?" he asks. "I'm pleased the recent town halls show people are waking up and realizing it's time to pay attention to first principles."
...Mr. Walker, a 57-year-old accountant, didn't set out to be a fiscal truth-teller. He rose to be a partner and global managing director of Arthur Anderson, before being named assistant secretary of labor for pensions and benefits during the Reagan administration. Under the first President Bush, he served as a trustee for Social Security and Medicare, an experience that convinced him both programs are looming train wrecks that could bankrupt the country. In 1998 he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to head the GAO, where he spent the next decade issuing reports trying to stem waste, fraud and abuse in government.
Despite many successes, he was able to make only limited progress in reforming Washington's tangled bookkeeping. When he arrived he was told the Pentagon was nearly a decade away from having a clean audit, or clear evidence that its financial statements were accurate. When he left in 2008, he was told the Pentagon was still a decade away from that goal. "If the federal government was a private corporation, its stock would plummet and shareholders would bring in new management and directors," he said as he retired from the GAO.
...His group calls itself strictly nonpartisan and nonideological, and that seems to limit how tough and specific it can be. Last year, it released a documentary "I.O.U.S.A.," that followed Mr. Walker as he toured the country on his fiscal "wake up" tour. The solutions the film proposes for the debt crisis are either glib or gray: The country should save more, reduce oil consumption, hold politicians accountable and get more value from health-care spending. But in its diagnosis of the problem the film scores a bull's-eye.
...Mr. Walker's own speeches are vivid and clear. "We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit," he tells one group. "We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease."
Mr. Walker (Peter G Peterson Foundation) identifies the disease as having a basic cause: "Washington is totally out of touch and out of control," he sighs. "There is political courage there, but there is far more political careerism and people dodging real solutions." He identifies entrenched incumbency as a real obstacle to change. "Members of Congress ensure they have gerrymandered seats where they pick the voters rather than the voters picking them and then they pass out money to special interests who then make sure they have so much money that no one can easily challenge them," he laments. He believes gerrymandering should be curbed and term limits imposed if for no other reason than to inject some new blood into the system. On campaign finance, he supports a narrow constitutional amendment that would bar congressional candidates from accepting contributions from people who can't vote for them: "If people can't vote in a district not their own, should we allow them to spend unlimited money on behalf of someone across the country? (Emphases mine.)
Medicare is a much bigger challenge (than Social Security), exacerbated by the addition of a drug entitlement component in 2003, pushed through a Republican Congress by the Bush administration. "The true costs of that were hidden from both Congress and the people," Mr. Walker says sternly. "The real liability is some $8 trillion."
That brings us to the issue of taxes. Wouldn't any "grand bargain" involve significant tax increases that would only hurt the ability of the economy to grow? "Taxes are going up, for reasons of math, demographics and the fact that elements of the population that want more government are more politically active," he insists. "The key will be to have tax reform that simplifies the system and keeps marginal rates as low as possible. The longer people resist addressing both sides of the fiscal equation the deeper the hole will get."
I steer towards the fiscal direction of the Obama administration. He says his stimulus bill was sold as something it wasn't: "A number of people had agendas other than stimulus, and they shaped the package."
As for health care, Mr. Walker says he had hopes for comprehensive health-care reform earlier this year and met with most of the major players to fashion a compromise. "President Obama got the sequence wrong by advocating expanding coverage before we've proven our ability to control costs," he says. "If we don't get our fiscal house in order, but create new obligations we'll have a Thelma and Louise moment where we go over the cliff." Mr. Walker's preferred solution is a plan that combines universal coverage for all Americans with an overall limit on the federal government's annual health expenditures. His description reminds me of the unicorn—a marvelous creature we all wish existed but is not likely to ever be seen on this earth.
...Despite an occasional detour into support for government intervention, Mr. Walker remains the Jeffersonian he grew up as in his native Virginia. "I view the Constitution with deep respect," he told me. "My ancestors and those of my wife fought and died in the Revolution, and I care a lot about returning us to the principles of the Founding Fathers."
He notes that today the role of the federal government has grown such that last year less than 40% of it related to the key roles the Founders envisioned for it: defense, foreign policy, the courts and other basic functions. "What happened to the Founders' intent that all roles not expressly reserved to the federal government belong to the states, and ultimately the people?" he asks. "I'm pleased the recent town halls show people are waking up and realizing it's time to pay attention to first principles."
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13. Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly
Why are holidays so short?
Back in the 1960s all talk of the future was of the coming Age of Leisure, with production of goods and other repetitive tasks carried out efficiently using modern technology, thereby reducing working hours and leaving us with loads of free time to relax, pursue pastimes and develop artistic and cultural activities.
So what happened? An unholy alliance of insatiable consumer greed for unnecessary goods together with a rampant market economy has trapped us on the treadmill and forced us to work ever longer hours. So much for the Age of Leisure!
If we reverted to a 1960s standard of living, using current technology and equitably distributed, we could all have much longer holidays...and be a lot happier too. Felix Ansell, Bradford, UK
The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars...is sure to be noticed. Soren Kierkegaard
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14.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE: Living On a New Earth
Humankind has fundamentally altered the planet. But new thinking and new actions can prevent us from destroying ourselves
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE: Breaking the Growth Habit
Society can safeguard its future only by switching from reckless economic growth to smart maintenance of wealth and resources
"So bleak is the picture...that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century."
- Philip Shabecoff, American environmental journalist
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15.
15.
Inside the fertility-industrial complex
Washington Post, 31 March 2006
The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception, by Debora L Spar, reviewed by David Plotz
Infertility in America has become a string of titillating anecdotes, one long episode of Oprah: “The surrogate took our baby”; “Our baby has three mothers”; “I used my dead son’s frozen sperm to make a grandchild”, “My ex-wife stole our IVF embryos”. Heartwarming, heartbreaking – these stories are all heart. We are so busy emoting that we never stop to think what on earth is going on here?
Fortunately the very sharp-eyed, clear-headed and unsentimental Debora L Spar is not so easily distracted by these inconceivable tales. She has recognized what no one involved in infertility wants to acknowledge (or wants their customers to know): that it is a business. In fact it is more than a business: It is an industry and its product is babies.
The Baby Business is as smart and sensible a book as you could hope to find about such a charged subject. Its principal point is that making babies these days does not always involve the old-fashioned method. There are 8 million infertile women in the United States alone, and they are spending about $3bn a year to try to help themselves conceive. There is not a market for babies—propriety restrains all but the most desperate from actually buying children—but there is a market for everything else: sperm ($275 a vial), eggs (up to $50,000 apiece), nine months’ use of a womb ($20,000), the creation of an embryo ($12,000 per cycle).
The fertility-industrial complex is a stunning array of businesses—practically a microcosm of the entire global economy. It includes the manufacturing of fertility hormones, harvesting of renewable natural resources (sperm and egg collection), international trade (foreign adoptions), expert services (IVF and other hi-tech medicine), and even rental real estate (surrogate mothers) and long-term storage (embryo banks).
What is perhaps most interesting about The Baby Business is what it is not obsessed with. Unlike almost every writer who touches the subject, Spar doesn’t fixate on ethics…Fertility treatments are troubling not because they could lead to a genetic elite or clone armies or other horrors, but because people are getting ripped off.
…The second major problem with the fertility market is that no one who works in it wants to acknowledge it exists. The brokers who recruit egg donors and surrogates tend to portray themselves and the women they recruit as good Samaritans. Fertility doctors duck behind the shield of Hippocrates. They deny that what they are doing is commercial; they insist that they are just trying to help their suffering patients, and don’t point out that each of these new techniques makes them a fortune. This pretence of noncommercial activity makes infertility very opaque for customers: they don’t know whether they ought to be paying what they are paying, or if they are getting a good service, because the usual market checks—information, competition, transparency—are absent.
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Nancy Dunn:
While I carefully tiptoe around the immigration question for the moment, I'd like to say that I share your interest in the fertility industry. A few years ago, when I was a newly arrived resident of Connecticut, the state legislature passed a law (then signed by Gov. Jodi Rell) to oblige insurance policies to cover fertility treatments. I was appalled: that obliges all the people who pay for the insurance to subsidize this high cost of producing excess human beings for couples they don't know and who might not even stay together for the length of time it takes to raise any resulting children. Fertility treatments produce human beings very expensively. And medically expensive babies and children at a higher rate, too, if I understand the statistics correctly. Neonatal medical expenses for the premature babies that result from fertility treatments (a higher than normal rate of multiple births result from fertility treatments) is an astronomical cost that is (ahem) born by all the policyholders. Some of those babies with congenital conditions need expensive medical care for years, if not for the rest of their lives. It seemed to me a scandalously wrongheaded public policy in a time when limiting population growth would seem to be the rational policy, and I've meant for years to dissect the process of how that decision was made to find out how such very narrow special interests could have thrust their expenses on the mass of the insurance-premium-paying public. So, in my state, at least, the fertility industry does not concern only very rich people.
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16. Disaster Goes Global
The eruption in 1600 of a seemingly quiet volcano in Peru changed global climate and triggered famine as far away as Russia
...Through a chance meeting on an airplane, (the researcher) Verosub found that the Peruvian volcano Huaynaputina may have triggered substantial social upheaval as well. While he chatted with a seatmate about his research on the effects of volcanic eruptions, a fellow seated in the row behind--Chester Dunning, a historian specializing in Russian history--overheard the conversation and introduced himself.
Verosub asked "So, did anything interesting happen in Russia in 1601?" "Oh, yeah. That was a terribly cold time in Russia." That cold spell was just the beginning of the nation's woes, Dunning continued...another agricultural failure the following year led to widespread starvation in both 1602 and 1603.
This lengthy famine--Russia's worst, says Dunning--claimed the lives of an estimated 2 million people, or about one-third of the population, and more than 100,000 died in Moscow alone. Government inability to alleviate both the calamity and the subsequent unrest eventually led to the overthrow of Czar Boris Godunov, a defining event in Russian history.
...Is the situation any better today? Would modern technology and an increased global interconnectedness enable 21st century humans to better survive an immense, Earth-chilling eruption? Surprisingly, the answer to both questions may be no.
In the past, Verosub notes, most of a society's foodstuffs were grown locally and in wide variety, so not every crop required the full growing season to mature. Therefore, any event that shortened a region's growing season didn't necessarily doom the entire harvest. Staples that formed the bulk of the diet were, for the most part, homegrown.
Today, on the other hand, most large-scale agricultural production focuses on a single crop that's chosen to take full advantage of a region's climate in order to realize maximum output--a severe disadvantage if the growing season is significantly trimmed by, say, a volcanic eruption.
Not only were pre-industrial farming practices possibly more resilient to total agricultural failure, people then "were used to living on the margin. Everybody knew hunger...and the idea that you should plan for a bad year was ingrained in these societies", Dunning said.
Today, by comparison, the world's surplus food supply would last only about 90 days, a number that's steadily dropping as population increases. Additional pressure on food, water and other resources in some nations, such as China, stem from a rapidly increasing standard of living and the resulting changes in dietary preferences.
Humans are consuming an ever-increasing fraction of the biological productivity at the base of Earth's food chain, in some regions almost two-thirds of the biomass that would be available if humans weren't clearing forests, farming or otherwise occupying the land. Rising population, plus the shift in some areas to divert agricultural production to produce inedible commodities such as ethanol, has led many to suggest a modern-day food crisis is at hand.
Excerpt from Science News 30 Aug 08
(A while back I printed an LTE to The Economist from a writer who raised the possibility of volcanoes and solar output canceling in the short term the effects of human-generated warming activities. I expect Murphy's Law to show up in next few years in order to give skeptics another reason to deny the problem. Far-fetched? Remember, God is a Republican.)
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“Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?” Friedrich Nietzsche
